this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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For low travel areas slower charging and batteries make a lot more sense as the investment in ultra fast charging is not viable and I don’t see that changing
I think regulatory inertia Is always going to be a problem but if we are regularly adding charging stations it will get faster as power companies have an incentive to build them and you get staff trained up on them
Gas stations can still have single point failures for example if their underground tank gets contaminated or damaged and they don’t have a back up and electric doesn’t need to have single point failures you can run them in parallel with breakers able to isolate portions of the system and have redundant transformers
EV works best if most people charge at home/work and people only charge in public if they don’t have the ability to do it at home or they are on a long drive. So you don’t need to meet the same cars per hour as gas stations.
I don’t see a world where fast charging is as cheap as slower charging just due to increased losses and more expensive equipment so I believe having 10 500kw chargers would be a better investment than 6 1MW chargers even though technically the MW chargers have a larger throughput they are more expensive to produce/run and have more issues if for example 8 people arrive at once
Agree with everything (especially the 10 x 500kW > 6 x 1MW part), I'm not saying building out the infrastructure will not happen, I'm just saying that it will be difficult and what I see in real world is far from the ideal you're describing. On any longer travel I have to pass through low travel areas. Entering cities to charge is impractical because getting in and out can take 0.5-1h. The chargers are still unreliable so planning a longer route is not easy. I have to carefully check the chargers maps, looking at the distances between each charger and possible backups. 99% of people are not going to do this. Until a big. reliable network of fast chargers exists they will just stick to gasoline cars (or protest if you force them to switch). And building such networks is a slow and expensive.