What's the Solution to Gridlocked EV Chargers? (sacbee.com) 426
"Some of the most convenient fast-charging stations — mostly those located off major highways — have become gridlocked, especially on busy weekends," complains the opinion editor for California's Tribune newspaper in San Luis, Obispo.
Drivers are reporting waits of half an hour or more — sometimes much more. One driver who posted on Reddit waited three hours to charge in Kettleman City on Thanksgiving weekend, turning a five-and-a-half-hour trip into a 10-and-a-half-hour ordeal... Look, it's one thing to spend 30 or 40 minutes charging a battery, which is a given when you take an EV on a road trip. But having to wait in a long line just to get to an open charging bay? What's happening now is "potentially a nightmare for drivers as more EVs hit the road," described GreenBiz transportation writer Vartan Badalian [after a March visit to New York State]...
Badalian, the transportation writer, has an idea on how to deal with gridlock. "As you approach a full charging location, your EV (of any make) connects to the charging location and enters itself into a virtual queue, with entry to the queue dependent upon close geographical proximity. Drivers then park in an available normal parking spot, and only when prompted, proceed to plug in and charge. If a driver attempted to charge before their turn, the chargers would simply not communicate with the vehicle..."
If only that would work. Unfortunately, plug-in chargers have a tough enough time fulfilling their basic task of delivering electricity. Here's how bad it is: A survey of non-Tesla chargers conducted in the Bay Area in 2022 found that 27% of chargers were not working. This would be a good time to point out that Tesla superchargers have a much better performance record than other types of chargers, and that Tesla is opening "select" supercharger stations to other types of vehicles. Also, efforts are being made to increase the reliability of public chargers; the U.S. Department of Transportation just awarded $149 million in grants for the repair and replacement of broken chargers. The biggest share, $64 million, is going to California. In other words, hope is on the horizon. For now, though, we seem to be relying on a haphazard honor system.
How hard would it be to use some orange cones to designate a "waiting lane"? That way drivers pulling in could get an immediate read on how long they might have to wait... Also, limit drivers to an 80% charge, and require them to drive away within, say, five minutes after the charger has stopped. That might be hard to enforce, but peer pressure can be a powerful incentive. The point is, somebody has to step up and make charging stations more driver-friendly, and the obvious choice is whoever is in charge of the chargers.
Badalian, the transportation writer, has an idea on how to deal with gridlock. "As you approach a full charging location, your EV (of any make) connects to the charging location and enters itself into a virtual queue, with entry to the queue dependent upon close geographical proximity. Drivers then park in an available normal parking spot, and only when prompted, proceed to plug in and charge. If a driver attempted to charge before their turn, the chargers would simply not communicate with the vehicle..."
If only that would work. Unfortunately, plug-in chargers have a tough enough time fulfilling their basic task of delivering electricity. Here's how bad it is: A survey of non-Tesla chargers conducted in the Bay Area in 2022 found that 27% of chargers were not working. This would be a good time to point out that Tesla superchargers have a much better performance record than other types of chargers, and that Tesla is opening "select" supercharger stations to other types of vehicles. Also, efforts are being made to increase the reliability of public chargers; the U.S. Department of Transportation just awarded $149 million in grants for the repair and replacement of broken chargers. The biggest share, $64 million, is going to California. In other words, hope is on the horizon. For now, though, we seem to be relying on a haphazard honor system.
How hard would it be to use some orange cones to designate a "waiting lane"? That way drivers pulling in could get an immediate read on how long they might have to wait... Also, limit drivers to an 80% charge, and require them to drive away within, say, five minutes after the charger has stopped. That might be hard to enforce, but peer pressure can be a powerful incentive. The point is, somebody has to step up and make charging stations more driver-friendly, and the obvious choice is whoever is in charge of the chargers.
If only someone could have seen this coming... (Score:5, Insightful)
The possible solutions are obvious: Either make charging so quick that it only takes few minutes to fill a battery, or make public charging so expensive that people will either avoid doing it at all or pay so much that this finances more and more charging stations until the demand is met.
Re:If only someone could have seen this coming... (Score:4, Insightful)
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The other obvious solution would be to drive a gasoline powered vehicle, spend 5 minutes at one of the 6 gas stations within 1/2 mile of the exit, and be happily on your way.
Or carry a big Honda generator in the trunk with 5-10g of fuel -- charge wherever you want. :-)
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Sure, just pull over, plug in, start the generator and wait 12 hours. And enjoy the fumes the entire trip.
Re:If only someone could have seen this coming... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:If only someone could have seen this coming... (Score:5, Insightful)
The other obvious solution would be to drive a gasoline powered vehicle, spend 5 minutes at one of the 6 gas stations within 1/2 mile of the exit, and be happily on your way.
That's only more convenient if your use case for a vehicle involves frequent long distance trips. However, if your use case is the average workday commute and you have a place to charge at home, an EV wins on convenience because you'll never have to stop at a gas station and will start every day with a full "tank".
If you really need the best of both worlds, this is why plug-in hybrids are a thing.
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Yeah we use public chargers as a matter of necessity (as opposed to, there's a free one where I happen to be parked anyway) maybe twice a year? The other 360 days of the year I never have to worry about making a special trip somewhere to fill up my battery because it's always full whenever I need it to be.
Re:If only someone could have seen this coming... (Score:4, Insightful)
That describes pretty close to 100% of the EV owners I know, leave home with a "full tank" every day and never have to worry about when you next need to fill up and how much it's costing you. The one or two times a year they need to drive long distances, plan ahead for where and when to charge, typically a lunch stop where the car recharges while you're eating.
The main thing though is the incredible convenience of always having a full tank every day.
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Re:If only someone could have seen this coming... (Score:5, Informative)
Not during the 1980s. You could only buy gas on even or odd days (based on your license plate) and you could only buy a limited amount of gasoline too. And the line to get gasoline was over an hour long. Some folks ran out of gasoline waiting in line and we would help push them into the station.
The EV problem will resolve itself. Indeed, this crunch is happening because of the explosion in sales of EV's over the last year. We are over 3 years ahead of sales projections made in 2018 now.
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Re:If only someone could have seen this coming... (Score:4, Insightful)
One party is trying to solve this issue, one is actively obstructing it. It's hard to make progress when half the political system is in denial of reality.
Re:If only someone could have seen this coming... (Score:5, Interesting)
Or, raise the money from the groups responsible for the problems of climate change. i.e. tax the gas makers so much they pay for the solution.
That's actually part of the problem. Most non-Tesla charging stations in the US are owned by Electrify America. [wikipedia.org] They were created as punishment for Volkswagen's "Dieselgate" scandal. [wikipedia.org] Volkswagen therefore put forth the minimum amount of effort required to fulfill the agreement, and now we are stuck with 27% of the chargers broken at any given time.
Re:If only someone could have seen this coming... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm simply saying tax their 10s of billions in *profits* and have the gov distribute that with grants to others implementing the chargers and other infrastructure.
Also obviously not really politically viable, but to me it's the most straight forward way.
Re: If only someone could have seen this coming... (Score:4, Interesting)
When we first went after tobacco, we levied a tax on every pack of cigarettes. Everyone seemed to understand that if you want to do harm reduction, taxing tobacco companies profits is not the smart way. You have to tax the actual externality. The problem is that unlike tobacco, there is no contingent of the population that's not addicted to oil m Everyone is addicted to oil, and so nobody wants to actually quit or reduce it.
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"Volkswagen therefore put forth the minimum amount of effort required to fulfill the agreement..."
Like literally anyone or any company would do. the idea of "minimum" means nothing here.
Also, VW did more than the "minimum", they changed their strategic direction to emphasize BEVs that those charging stations would support. Also, that settlement cost VW a great deal of money.
"...now we are stuck with 27% of the chargers broken at any given time."
Who is "we"? You feel burdened by some conspiracy to screw y
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tax the gas makers so much they pay for the solution.
Which will just get passed on to the consumers. Then that will get passed on in the form of increased costs of damn near everything, because our economy still runs on fossil fuels. Also, it will just end up heavily benefiting the other political party, because high gas prices are more likely to motivate someone to change their vote rather than to consider the purchase of an EV.
And I say this as someone who has an EV in his household.
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Taxes on corporations or raising personal income taxes. I'll take the former.
We don't have time for organic growth. We would have had more time if we'd been told the truth about fossil fuels 50 years ago when Big Oil *knew* the likely catastrophic results we're seeing.
Re:If only someone could have seen this coming... (Score:5, Insightful)
If we'd started getting off fossil fuels 40 years ago, we could have moved slower and more cost effectively. Instead now we have to move fast which is requisitely expensive.
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Entirely agree the tech available 40 years ago wasn't able to do grid scale. The point is having that 40 years of research at our disposal. Which we don't.
Good, Fast, Cheap - pick two. 40 years to build a system is far cheaper than doing it in 15...while the same people who lied about fossil fuels have also spent that 40 years fueling distrust of gov't and science. And now we have to also rebuild multiple
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Not true... PV and battery revolution.. (Score:3)
climat change is not the only driver behind EV:
1. pollution - EVs pollute much less
2. there has been revolution on PV panels and batteries (cell phones) in recent years and based on these in more and more regions EVs are better than gas vehicles
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So in short more chargers are needed and when planning deployment they should take
Re:If only someone could have seen this coming... (Score:4, Insightful)
There are too many 50kW chargers out there, they really should be 120kW or better.
More like too many 150kW chargers, really should be 250kw or better. But that's not the only problem. The max rate is for when the car is empty. But in basically-empty (with preconditioned) situations, there are too many occurrences of the "250kW" superchargers starting charging at 120-150kW and dropping from there. I'm not sure if it's a result of the charging equipment already being too warm from high usage, or the supercharger's batteries insufficiently full from high usage, but this can slow charging times considerably and cold weather that might affect the charger itself doesn't explain all of it. Tesla seems to have done a really good job of having enough physical charging stations to keep the lines low in all but the most exceptional circumstances (like this ice storm) but they aren't keeping up with being able to push out power at the max rate. The new 800v architecture (cars and chargers both) will help. I wonder if in the future there will be direct-feed from a power substation that just transformed down to 800v with a full-wave bridge and a 'capacitor' to make it DC, so no storage just slurp straight out of the grid.
Secondly the Tesla chargers are quite expensive to use, but that does mean they have the income to do repairs promptly and roll out new charging stations in areas when demand is seen.
No, superchargers are only expensive compared to free chargers, or to use for general charging. For road-trip charging it's still much cheaper than gasoline. But yes Tesla did themselves a big favor by not having supercharging be an afterthought to their business model, and being in a position to centrally analyze usage and aggressively put in charging stations along road-trip routes, that were part of in-car navigation system from the start.
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"For road-trip charging it's still much cheaper than gasoline."
But it's not. At $3/gallon, gasoline costs the equivalent of about $0.09/kWh, Superchargers cost much more than that. BEVs are more efficient in using that energy than ICE, but those numbers all vary over ranges. It is very easy to find a comparison where cost/mile is comparable for "road-trips".
Where I live, Tesla Superchargers cost twice as much as city CCS charging stations.
"Tesla did themselves a big favor by not having supercharging be a
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I do monthly trips to a customer about 450km away, 900km return trip. Last trip I spent about $35 on Tesla super charging and about half that on destinatio
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I did. It's why I don't have an EV.
The solution to EV issues is gas powered cars.
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It is obvious, and it's also happening.
Solid State batteries are saying something like 80% charge in 10-15 minutes. Filling up gas is still quicker, but you can easily imagine something like a gas station, but for EV chargers. It's in that time range of 'reasonable'. Heck, Gas stations themselves might even like this. 15 minutes is 10-15 mins is short enough to keep queues down, but long enough for you to be bored and buy a coffee or a quick snack.
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The possible solutions are obvious: Either make charging so quick that it only takes few minutes to fill a battery, or make public charging so expensive
The obvious solution is to install more chargers.
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I mean, it was not hard to predict that "long charging times" mean "long queues / wait times" at public chargers, and many have predicted this to happen.
The possible solutions are obvious: Either make charging so quick that it only takes few minutes to fill a battery, or make public charging so expensive that people will either avoid doing it at all or pay so much that this finances more and more charging stations until the demand is met.
In the short term this was definitely going to be (and will be) a problem. But I'm not sure it's a long term issue.
The cost of a gas station is significant, you need the land, a staffed business, and the cost of handling a ton of environmental issues due to the fuel storage. Therefore, the economics of gas station require them to be fairly well utilized.
By contrast, the cost of a charger is mostly just the original cost of the charger, maintenance, and a small amount of land. You need far less utilization o
Some stations do this already (Score:3)
ChargePoint has a new feature in some places called Waitlist.
http://www.chargepoint.com/wai... [chargepoint.com]
Other places (including some high-traffic Tesla SuperChargers) charge an idle fee if you remain connected after charging. I think this idle fee needs to be something significantly higher than the cost of area paid parking to prevent the idle fee from becoming simply a paid parking fee.
Good times (Score:3)
Re:Good times (Score:4, Interesting)
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Still true for some sites.
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Seems obvious to me (Score:2)
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Just add wait time to the cost function of your navigation system.
Why create a cost function? Just increase the actual cost when the chargers are busy! Same as Uber surge pricing.
Re: Seems obvious to me (Score:2)
WHAT??? (Score:2)
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It'll cure this, too. Like everything else, it isn't instantaneous.
Things like reservations and paying to reserve spots and more charger build-out will solve this.
Besides US gov't incentives, recently, petroleum giant BP announced that it would purchase around $100 million in Tesla EV charging hardware featuring the NACS connector for deployment within its growing BP Pulse EV charging network. BP also said it will invest up to $1 billion in EV charging across the US by 2030.
Texas-based gas station chain Buc
Re: WHAT??? (Score:2)
Not Capitalism, but free market DOES have a solution... home charging. Even if I had to charge every night, it's only 4-5hrs! I same a TON of time every month not having to go to a gas station and filling up.
These people bought an expensive car without thinking about what they need to do to take care of it. Don't pity their complaining, they can fix it themselves easily.
The issue here isn't EV, but shit poor financial decisions. The fast chargers aren't even good for your battery anyway!
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As EVs become more and more prevalent over the next 10 years, what happens to the people who live in situations with no off-street parking?
I've always seen that just hand waved away, without an actual solution proposed. It has to be solved, somehow, but no one seems to be interested in solving it. Are we just hoping fast charging becomes viable to the point where its like stopping for gas today?
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Pretending that vehicle production in the US is capitalistic is pretty laughable - ignorant, at the minimum.
This is actually the opposite of capitalism - it's a heavily subsidized and regulated economy. You might even be able to accurately say "planned economy" due to the fact that it's, well, orchestrated at the federal level with minimums and maximums for every little aspect of vehicle function.
This is what happens when EVs are heavily subsidized: it creates an economically artificial glut of EVs, with pe
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Meanwhile, the glut didn't occur organically, and the markets didn't fill the gap on chargers because it simply isn't profitable to run them: that's why the charge stations are subsidized by the companies that make the EVs.
Gas stations don't make much money selling gas, either. [nbcnews.com]
If people are queuing up for hours at charges, it's a missed business opportunity to sell them food, drinks, cigarettes and what not. Gas stations already figured this out, seems everything that's old is new again.
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If people are queuing up for hours at charges, it's a missed business opportunity to sell them food, drinks, cigarettes and what not.
You can only eat so many snacks and smoke so many cigarettes while you charge. Selling a bag of chips and a pack of smokes to someone on your property for 5 minutes is likely to be more lucrative than doing the same for people who are there for an hour.
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You sound a little out-of-touch to call a $60,000 EV "cheap". None of the 1% of EVs on the market are there because the market was just totally flooded with them and nobody wants them.
EVs are luxury items selling for luxury prices, same as trucks. Just with a lower bodycount.
The Obvious Solution is Already in the Works (Score:2)
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I call this the "break room microwave problem". 99% of the time, the microwave in an office break room isn't being used. However, between 11:30 and 12:30, there is a long cue, and people get frustrate
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"you could probably install 60 chargers for a similar cost as 6 gas pumps"
That seems highly unlikely, and yet it would need to be much more than that.
"Proved you can get a decent pull from the grid at a location the charging bays are relatively straight forward to install and maintain."
Which is a far greater problem than mere cost.
Re: The Obvious Solution is Already in the Works (Score:2)
You won't because most people won't use public chargers most of the time.
The solution is obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
More chargers
And, more maintenance for existing ones
Tesla is the only company that got it right. I never have a problem at a Tesla charger
It almost seems like the other chargers were installed in order to get a press release, then abandoned
Hot Swappable Batteries (Score:2)
More easily replaceable batteries and the means to do so seem like a no-brainer. It's been tested, not sure why it wasn't chosen except possibly to save money on the short-term at the cost of this situation coming up in the long-term.
Oh well. I guess we'll just have non-removable batteries with risky "fast-charge" like we do with phones.
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What if instead of paying for the battery as part of a new EV, you bought your EV with a subscription to a hot-swap network like you subscribe your cell phone to a cellular network. Instead of paying say $44k for an EV, it was $34k without you owning the battery, but you paid a base $100/month to be part of a battery network like gas stations where you could go to swap out a battery whenever you were low charge plus an extra fee based on the number of swaps you did per month (say $10/swap to pay for the ele
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This works until you swap your battery before a long trip and end up with a worn out one that can't hold enough charge to get you there.
It's not just the line-ups that put me off EVs... (Score:2)
...and I drive a PHEV which I don't charge away from home base. Have you seen some of the locations for charging? Like, a field in the middle of nowhere? Give me somewhere where I could shelter away from -40 degree winds or not have to walk half a mile to get a coffee and I may be more receptive but as it stands, PHEV is as far as I go. Something like this - https://www.hyundai.com/worldw... [hyundai.com]
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Trams, trains, buses (Score:2)
My car-free lifestyle isn't for everyone though.
Hurry? Not on my part. (Score:2)
Marketing BEVs as some matter of social urgency is hilariously effective at mitigating the idea buyers are CUSTOMERS to BE SERVED.
No BEV for me until I am fucking served everywhere equal to or better my gasser options because my money is at stake. It is incumbent on BEV evangelists to create a compelling environment such that people who do not personally need BEV choose to buy them without using AGW as an excuse.
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No BEV for me until I am fucking served everywhere equal to or better my gasser options because my money is at stake. It is incumbent on BEV evangelists to create a compelling environment such that people who do not personally need BEV choose to buy them without using AGW as an excuse.
This. And in addition, trying to force things on me against my will makes them my enemy, so not only am I unlikely to buy a BEV, but I'm also unlikely to be receptive to any other elements of their pretend to save the world agenda.
Because in the end objectively speaking government is a far bigger threat to my standard of living than climate change is.
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Government created your standard of living.
Orange cones ... (Score:2)
How hard would it be to use some orange cones to designate a "waiting lane"? That way drivers pulling in could get an immediate read on how long they might have to wait
While I'm completely in favour of the basic idea of giving people an idea how long they have to wait, you don't need orange cones for that. If Google Maps can tell you what the traffic load is then they can also post waiting times at charging stations and recommendations for when they aren't hopelessly congested so that you can plan for it. Also, there are those EV parking slots with chargers that are intended for people that actually want to charge their car, not for EV or ICE drivers who just want to park
Tesla Congestion Pricing (Score:2)
Tesla has recently begun implementing a Congestion Fee [tesla.com] system at some Superchargers, with substantially increased rates for charging above e.g. 80% battery capacity, precisely to address this problem. I suppose we'll find out over the next few months how effective it is.
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I would make the maximum charge depend on the length of the queue, but each car should get at least 5 minutes of charging which is about 60-70 miles worth.
Not a real issue, or at least not the actual issue (Score:5, Interesting)
EVs are different, I didn't realise until my wife bought one. I sort of like ICE vehicles and while I knew that we need zero CO2 solutions was making mental excuses to keep using my fuel gusslers.
After 12 months of ownership, EVs are just better, I don't need to go anywhere to refuel and I don't need to drop cars into dealers for servicing. This now bugs me with my other vehicles.
I regularly drive ~800km to visit family and this works, however I avoid peak times due to charging queues. Charging times are about equal to refuelling times and even then I don't need to stay with the vehicles while it fills. While on a trip with 2 cars recently a fill plus lunch was faster in the EV than the dinosaur as charge occurred in parallel with the meal while the dinosaur requires babysitting while filling so it was a serial process.
Most people charge at home 99% of the time, and many owners have home solar, so the business case for lots of chargers doesn't exist because most people won't use them most of the time. So the whole concept of a high cost "Service Station" for EVs is wrong.
Charging infrastructure can be distributed, lightweight and unmanned.
Dropping fast chargers near powerlines should be cheap and lots of them can be made available. Placing 2 charging places near each power pole would be cost effective and low impact and effectively resolve capacity issues.
of course, the aggravating factor.... (Score:2, Interesting)
...is that the people involved are self-righteous (and proven) "Prius Factor" wealthy, toxic, asshole people who are all certain that a) they are saving the environment so they're entitled to be as personally toxic as they want, b) their time is more important than everyone else's....
The answer is (Score:2)
An all-electric future will required 1000x charger (Score:2)
There have been a flurry of articles recently about the failed charging infrastructure in the USA during this recent cold snap. What's not being talked about is what will be required in the future. Some states are requiring and all-electric fleet starting in the 2030's to 2050's.
This means that we will require MASSIVE increases in the charging infrastructure. Some articles were discussing "Why doesn't this happen in Sweden?" and the answer is that most Tesla owners have charging at their own houses.
What
Wrong application, and too early on... (Score:2)
Quick charging requires "temperate" weather. Charging stations have to be reliable (no vandals, for example, yes... vandals). Stations, because even "fast" ones take longer than a fillup (in most cases), need to remember to take care of their patrons (possibly increased security, etc.), there will need to be more "avenues" of "success" when you reach an EV
Re: Wrong application, and too early on... (Score:2)
Nobody believes EV's are the "savior of the world." Nor is your scenario of mass hurricane evacuations realistic.
After hurricane Rita, Houston figured out that there is no sense in evacuating an entire city. That was gridlock where nobody got anywhere even before mass market EVs for a thing. Instead, the evacuations are for coastal areas where they are really necessary. Those evacuations are only for 20-30 miles at most, a distance any EV can travel, even with low charge to begin with.
Also worth noting that
EV ownership growing faster than charge network (Score:3)
It's pretty simple. EVs have gone from under 1% of new vehicle sales to ~9% in a period of ~7 years. Partly due to inconsistent charging standards (we went from Chademo, to CCS, now to NACS as the dominant standard for non-Tesla EVs), the buld-out of chargers has not happened as quickly as the vehicles are sold.
I would expect several years of charger supply not holding up to demand spikes. For now, I'd only buy an EV if you can charge at home and don't do a lot of road trips. If that's you, none of the issues in Chicago are relevant to you.
Poor reporting (Score:2)
The article is describing three issues:
- charging bays used as regular parking
- the number of broken chargers and the extra time required for an electric 'refill'
- the lack of a customer management (queuing) service
There is an additional problem: A lack of amenities at many charging stations. A pole and cable is adequate for the middle of town but on highways, inclusion of toilets, tables and vending machines (coffee and bottled beverages, sandwiches and snacks) will be a necessity. That all mea
Definitely need 80% max at peak times (Score:3)
Also, limit drivers to an 80% charge, and require them to drive away within, say, five minutes after the charger has stopped. That might be hard to enforce, but peer pressure can be a powerful incentive
Peer pressure won't solve this. Once all chargers are 'full', that charging location needs to automatically stop the charger at 80%. Some people are clueless as to how slow charging becomes above 80%, and some are just jerks that don't care about other people having to wait because they are more important than you.
The problem this year is UBER (Score:3)
It took me a while to get to the bottom of the cause of these charging issues reported around Chicago. Teslas have been around for over ten years now, and outside of California (where Tesla stupidly sold a LOT of cars with "free supercharging for life"), I've never had an issue with having to wait to use a charger. The vast majority of EV owners charge at home, and only use DC fast chargers when traveling longer distances. In this video [youtube.com], Kyle flew out there to figure out what was going on this year, and the problem turns out to be UBER.
There’s a huge number of new rideshare drivers that are renting EVs from UBER.
I wasn't aware of what these "rideshare rentals" were. Apparently, Uber (and Lyft, and others) are offering vehicles for rent to their drivers. I haven't looked into the financials of why someone would want to rent one of these vehicles instead of using a vehicle that they already own, but apparently the terms are enticing to a very large percentage of these people.
* Lyft Express Drive [lyft.com]
And these companies are providing incentives for using an EV instead of a combustion car.
* Uber expands Comfort Electric option to Chicago, 14 more cities [cbsnews.com]
* Lyft: Our goal is to achieve 100% electric vehicles across our platform by the end of 2030 [lyft.com]
So we're seeing a huge increase in new EV drivers who:
2. and therefore, don't know much at all about using an EV
3. definitely don't have an at-home charging solution, because they don't own an EV themselves
4. additionally, these people earn money by driving, so they need/want to charge quickly so they can go back to earning
Whereas most EV owners charge mainly at home and use superchargers for long trips, these people are using superchargers exclusively.
And it looks like Chicago isn't going to be the only city affected by these new rideshare policies: Tesla Superchargers are overwhelmed by new Uber drivers in NYC [electrek.co]
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Yep. No one drives EVs anymore, they're too popular.
Re: Carbon Neutral Gasoline (Score:2)
Yogi Berra is that you?
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very popular among the wear-the-nails goody-goody crowd here in Chicago area.
They learned with the subzero (Fahrenheit, below-18 C) weather, their range plummeted 40 percent and then batteries drained to zero waiting hours in the lines at the charging stations that still worked.... yeah, many charging stations stopped working for some reason. "Dead robots" the news calls them.
Yup, ICE is the way. We know how to make carbon neutral gasoline, diesel, kerosene. But there is more money in EV that cost $15
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Strange how none of the Nordic countries run into these problems.
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Or you're ignorant
https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]
The only difference from USA is they tell people not to drive when it gets that cold. Their EV get the same plummeting in range as USA cars do too.
Cold and EV don't mix.
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Cold and EV don't mix.
Actually, there's quite a few ingenious EV owners who have fitted diesel parking heaters to their EVs in cold climates. No range or heat issues, and the heaters consume very minimal amounts of fuel and burn cleanly. Ironic thing is, they're actually a product originally designed for ICE vehicles - to keep the bunk area of semi trucks comfortable without needing to idle the engine all night.
And the generic Chinese versions of diesel heaters that are just designed to heat the air inside the passenger compar
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We know how to make carbon neutral gasoline, diesel, kerosene.
Wait we do? Efficently and at scale to meet our demand?
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"They're federally required to internally subsidize EVs."
Stay stupid, buddy.
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Yep. No one drives EVs anymore, they're too popular.
What do you think going to happen in 2030 with all these 'no more ICE' mandates?
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George Olah had cheap a CO2 to methanol catalyst almost twenty years ago. Solar powered too.
His Nobel Prize was for something else.
People with resources don't actually want solutions. But, hey, his patent will be expired pretty soon so maybe they won't have a choice.
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People with resources don't actually want solutions.
I don't know about those people in general (though you're probably right), but at least half of Congress doesn't really want solutions, especially when they can complain about things and campaign on "wanting to solve" them. Dog actually catching the car doesn't help them. /cynical
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Looks like there is a plant operating in Iceland. https://www.carbonrecycling.is... [carbonrecycling.is]
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George Olah had cheap a CO2 to methanol catalyst almost twenty years ago. Solar powered too.
There are no magic hat rabbits to save the economics of synthetic fuels. It's always going to be cheaper to produce and distribute electricity through the existing grid. Just the fact that fuel has to show up at your local gas station delivered by tanker truck puts all liquid fuels at a huge disadvantage. The problem is that every single process to produce synthetic fuel requires some form of energy input, when you could instead just skip the rest of the steps and just sell the input energy directly in t
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It's also only a stopgap since it doesn't remove CO2 from circulation. Sometimes the most direct, isn't the quickest route. Having to build 2 national infrastructures in succession is expensive and politically harder. Distribution could probably be reused, but manufacture has to be rebuilt.
If it can be done it might be tailor made for some of
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The most direct route is simply to synthesize gasoline from surface sources of carbon. You can blend it with existing gasolines using existing infrastructure and don't need to wait until everyone in America can afford a Tesla.
This probably will end up happening to supply fuel for the edge cases who refuse or can't go EV, but, spoiler alert: you won't like what it's going to cost at the pump.
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This probably will end up happening to supply fuel for the edge cases who refuse or can't go EV, but, spoiler alert: you won't like what it's going to cost at the pump.
Most estimates I see are about double the current cost of fossil gas at scale. This should be perfectly doable for people who can afford nice things.
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I'm sure the same was said about internal combustion in the horse and buggy era.
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I have both a BEV and an ICEV. They both have their respective advantages and disadvantages yet the only time I drive my ICEV is when I think it needs a run as it has been sitting in the garage too long. I really should sell it but I have kept it for the nostalgia value.
Re:EVs are good for nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are worried about the grid going down then where do you think gas comes from? The gas stations use the grid to pump gas and a lot electricity is used in the process of refining gas.
If you are talking a long time without services I have the option to charge my BEV from my solar panels. My ICEV would be useless until power was on at the pumps and roads open to truck in the gas to the local gas stations.
Look, I get it Mr Anonymous Coward. You don't like change so play the kids game of "but what if".
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The electrical grid is not the limitation, gridlocked is only referring to the fact only a couple chargers exist to service thousands of cars leaving a ratio that’s too low on the charger side.
The term "gridlock" has nothing to do with the electrical grid (nor, of course, does it have anything to do with regular insufficient capacity like the article is talking about). Gridlock is a specific kind of traffic congestion that happens mostly in cities with a grid layout for streets (hence the term). Cars can't get through intersection A because it's blocked by cars who can't get through intersection B (which is one block down from intersection A). Intersection B is blocked by cars who can't through i