
The Throughput Problem: Recharging Electric Cars Requires the Patience of Job - RickJWagner
https://spectator.org/the-throughput-problem-recharging-electric-cars-requires-the-patience-of-job/
======
icegreentea2
Article misses out that in all but the smallest/tightest parking lots (which I
guess are more common in tighter downtown areas), gas stations typically have
additional parking already that could also be converted to charging stations.
Article also brings up the specter of extra carbon emissions for extra
charging infrastructure, but doesn't provide even a basic analysis.

There are certainly some logistical issues that electrical has to work out.
But this is straight up a fear piece. Yes, gas is transportable by hand if
required, but I bet most North American drivers (or at least urban ones which
this piece is targetting) just go with roadside assistance anyways, so the
charger will come to them.

And finally, with the potential of charging at home/work (which I know can't
include everyone... but I think can cover a reasonable percentage of people),
you don't NEED to charge up even to 80% all the time. Needing a full charge
all the time is a hold over of gas mentality and logistics.

The one bit that is reasonable here and noting that our current laws probably
need a tune up in recognition of the changing nature of driving.

~~~
james_pm
Treating charging like we treat fuelling is the problem. The reason we have
gas stations is because we have to store and dispense the fuel safely. We
don't have a safe, effective system to transport gasoline to all of our homes
and offices. Natural gas cars would be one option, with "pumps" at our homes
to fill up our cars, but gasoline is always going to be in underground tanks
at a filling station.

Electricity is easily and safely delivered to our homes and offices and
indeed, most EV owners probably do the majority of their charging at their own
homes.

The issue of EV charging is actually tied to the range of the cars. If you get
the range to where a car can be driven longer than the driver can safely drive
(say 16-18 hours) then the time spent charging is basically moot...you can
charge while the driver sleeps. Hotels become a logical spot for chargers.

~~~
brudgers
_most EV owners probably do the majority of their charging at their own homes_

Owning a house is pretty much a prerequisite of electric cars for personal use
in the US. 100 million Americans live in rental housing.
[https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/08/who-rents-their-home-
he...](https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/08/who-rents-their-home-heres-what-
the-data-says/566933/)

~~~
bryanlarsen
In cold areas, every rental unit's parking spot comes with a power outlet so
that you can plug in your car's block heater. So it's possible.

~~~
ashtonbaker
I've lived in all types of rental housing across Michigan, and have never seen
this. I don't think it covers even a small fraction of that 100 million.

~~~
bryanlarsen
I'm talking about places where -40 is common. And I'm not saying that many of
the 100 million have block heater plugs, I'm saying that they could -- the
cold places are a proof of viability.

------
adrianN
Most electric cars won't be charged at fast chargers most of the time. Because
unlike fossil cars you can refuel them pretty much anywhere where there is
electricity. At first this is only true for people with garages (or employers
with a garage), but eventually most parking spots will have a slow charger
installed. Since the typical car is parked for about 23h a day, charging time
becomes a non issue as soon as charger availability is good enough. Fast
charging is really only necessary for long roadtrips that exceed whatever
range the car has.

~~~
systemtest
As someone living in a very old and rustic street, I don't see my municipality
placing an aesthetically unpleasing charging point every 6 meters. We need
better solutions than what we have now. Induction charging, connection points
underneath the car, pantograph.

~~~
grecy
> _I don 't see my municipality placing an aesthetically unpleasing charging
> point every 6 meters._

I'm sure people used to say the same thing about fire hydrants, above ground
electricity poles and wires, and fibre hanging from utility poles.

I think you're underestimating what happens when there is a genuine need for a
thing.

~~~
salawat
I think you're underestimating the inertia of deploying beefier electrical
grids with even more charging points, and the nuances of billing and metering.

It isn't as easy as just making an outlet or inductive charger every 6m. That
infrastructure has to be owned, installed, upkept, maintained, and subsidized
by someone. Unless you think that all that power grid interfacing is just
going to be paid for by someone else.

The flippant optimism that things will all just happen and ignoring of the
potential for underlying complications beyond those immediately apparent is
incredibly grating to those who have to actually trouble themselves with
working through them. The idea of a single charging point per 6m doesn't even
account for the sudden logistic complexity where the entire extended family
all piles into the place and realizes that oops, we all have to charge here,
but the local node is already saturated most of the time by locals because the
engineers didn't foresee the need to provision for that type of surge in
demand.

In comparison, gasoline dispensing is a relatively straight forward affair
that doesn't put any excessive new loading on already heavily loaded
infrastructure systems responsible for running everything else in our lives in
the same way battery charging does.

Unlike software, settling for "good enough" isn't trivially solved by an OTA
update. Hell, software isn't always that great about that either once the
level of safety-criticality gets high-enough. The joke that is self-driving
system development aside.

~~~
grecy
I understand that it's going to be very difficult, and it's going to take
years, but that's no reason to not do it.

Gasoline dispensing is extremely complicated - what you really mean is that
the complexity is just hidden from you and has been optimized on for decades.

Next time you fill your car with ~15 gallons (60L), have a think about how
many gallons of diesel must have been burnt to get that gas you're pumping.
Have a think about all the machinery involved in making it, transporting it
and then you pumping it. Trucks, oil tankers, more trucks, pumps, etc.

Have a think about how differently we would think if we had to physically
carry our own 15 gallons of carcinogenic explosive liquid every time we wanted
to enable us to drive ~350 (550km) miles.

The system we have works very well, but it's terrible in every way.

~~~
salawat
I have put quite a lot of thought into that in fact It's a bit of a labor of
love to be quite honest. I call it Project Regression,and I've been spending
many of my adult years filling out my understandings of the technologies and
infrastructures that make modern life possible, why they were developed, why
in the order they were, and what would need to be retained and elucidated to a
human being to allow that development to be able to bootstrap from nothing
within a lifetime.

And yes, I get annoyed every time someone ends up trying to pull a piece of
that structure out without making clear they've thought through _all_ the
consequences. Something I'm not confident many do, but I've spent my life
doing, because I've not run into anyone else who could be bothered to.

My very existence as a thinking, contributing member of society is predicated
on the smooth operation of modern infrastructure, so I do get rather
aggressive when people start advocating for sweeping change without showing
that they've done all the work. Unrealistic expectations on the rate of
infrastructure upgrades and propogation gets us nowhere.

I've not even got a financial stake in any company in particular's outcome;
and I've been sitting through saga after saga of waste, moral grandstanding,
outright lies, negligent corporate behavior, and a complete bloody breakdown
in any semblance of sanity in the world as I recognize it.

I wish I had your optimism; or was still naive enough to be able to stoke the
fires of my own. This bloody year has just bloody obliterated it though.

Ya know. I'm sorry. Forget I said anything. I'm in a bit of a bad headspace at
the moment; and I just don't seem like I can keep things coherent enough to
meaningfully contribute anymore right now. Ended up rewriting this about 5
times, and still not able to articulate anything I'm really satisfied with.

~~~
grecy
Don't sweat it, and thanks for the reply.

I know exactly how you feel, and I think I've just 'given up' and gone the
other way. I try to accept that our lives will have to get less convenient,
and the economy will have to take a bit of a hit as we move to things that are
better for us, and better for the planet.

So we'll take a couple of steps backwards in order to take many forwards, and
I'm OK with that.

I've also spent a lot of time in Latin America and Africa, and I hope that
they can just go straight to the 'right' solutions because they are not so
entrenched as we are with what we already have.

Who knows though, right. Certainly nothing is perfect.

I hope you have a good day, I'd buy you a coffee/beer if I could.

------
lolc
Somehow this article misses the fact that electric cars are charged every day
when parked at home. In the typical scenario of a car used to get into the
city and back, it will not need to ever hook up anywhere in the city and will
not run out of charge for the day.

When the article in the end complains that it will waste so much time I just
wonder how the daily hookup at home compares to the weekly gas station visit.
I'd say it pretty much evens out.

~~~
Mirioron
Doesn't this assume that everyone owns a house? How do you propose to do this
in an apartment building? Sometimes you don't even have enough parking for an
apartment building and need to park elsewhere. That sounds to me like charging
would be rather difficult at home. We're also not talking about an
insignificant amount of people - 42% of Europeans live in an apartment. In
some countries it's over 60%.[0]

[0] [https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
explained/index.php...](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
explained/index.php/Housing_statistics#Type_of_dwelling)

~~~
lolc
Apartments often come with parking spaces. They will need to be fitted with
charging sockets but I don't see any difficulties beyond the small investment
this takes.

~~~
Mirioron
_Often_ , but not always. In my city most apartment buildings don't even have
enough normal parking spaces for the cars. People park in places like the
parking lots of supermarkets.

------
mikekchar
A gas station costs millions of dollars, an environmental impact assessment,
regular safety checks, staff to run it, etc, etc. A fast charging station
needs a machine. A gas station requires you to transport the gasoline to the
gas station. A fast charging station can be put practically anywhere in a city
now.

I don't even have a charger at home. I recharge at a fast charger every time.
Usually I go shopping, or do some programming or play a game. Not for
everybody perhaps, but seriously not as bad as portrayed by this article.

~~~
bluGill
The companies that build gas stations have processes in place to do all of the
above, so it is just a known cost of doing business. It is easy to schedule a
truck to get gas to your new station - you don't even need to own it.

One correction though, staff is optional. I've used a few unattended stations.
You need staff to sell the "junk" that most gas stations also sell, if it is
just gas pay at the pump just needs someone to fill the tanks and inspect
things once in a while.

A charger is actually harder. Processes are not in place (yet!) to roll them
out in mass (Tesla might be an exception?). The biggest problem though is fast
chargers need enough power that you need to ask the utility where you can put
your chargers. Many otherwise ideal places for a fast charger don't have
enough enough wires for the load a fast charger adds. If the wires don't
already exist you can expect to pay millions to get them there (hundred
thousand per mile is a quote someone I know got for a different load he wanted
to run)

------
mcherm
Someone please explain to me why we have built electric cars so that the
battery is fixed to the car and gets recharged rather than making the
batteries swappable for an instant "recharge".

Sure, it moves the cost of wear and tear on batteries to the car owner rather
than the fuel supplier, but since it seems it would makes such a big
difference in the user experience of electric car ownership can this really be
the whole explanation?

~~~
ajb
Actually for a while there vehicles _were_ designed to swap out the entire
motive unit as well as the energy supply. You could even use different motive
units for different purposes, such as long distance, larger loads, small
journey etc.

This technology was called the 'horse and carriage'.

:-)

But joking aside I do wonder whether exactly this would be practical with non-
living motive units. With modern tech it wouldn't be hard to control a
separate traction unit, with its own wheels, at the front of your vehicle, and
you could swap an electric one for a fossil fuel (or rented larger battery
one) for long journeys in exactly the same way. I guess it would just be hard
to design in such a way that it fulfilled all the things we expect from a
modern vehicle, such as high stability, low drag, maneuverability, etc.

~~~
Reason077
> _" With modern tech it wouldn't be hard to control a separate traction unit,
> with its own wheels, at the front of your vehicle"_

What you are describing is the tractor-trailer (aka semi-trailer) truck. It
would indeed make practical sense to swap tractor units when moving important
cargo over long distances where fast charging facilities are unavailable. It's
already done today with fossil-fuelled trucks for various reasons.

But for private automobiles, the advantages are very niche/narrow and wouldn't
be enough to outweigh the impracticalities and disadvantages that you mention.

------
taneq
Recharging doesn't require any patience at all if done correctly (ie.
overnight at home, or while you're stopping for a meal). Complaining that you
can't run your EV to empty then drop in to a gas station for 10 minutes to
refill it is like saying cars are useless because they can't eat the grass on
the side of the road.

This isn't an article, it's a hit piece.

------
neogodless
I personally think that EV charging infrastructure is not ready for mass
adoption of electric cars. (This is, migration from internal combustion
engines.)

But this article tries to seem "more than fair" without stopping to mention
the one great advantage of charging - that some can do so at home, every
night. So that should greatly reduce the infrastructure needs.

Peak charging in the public can and will be a problem, but I don't think the
scale can be quantified without factoring in home charging.

~~~
Mirioron
> _But this article tries to seem "more than fair" without stopping to mention
> the one great advantage of charging - that some can do so at home, every
> night. So that should greatly reduce the infrastructure needs._

I think _some_ is the operative word here. Looking at the EU: 41.9% of people
live in apartments.[0] In some of those countries it's over 60% even. I don't
think even all houses are appropriate to charge your EV.

I didn't think this was as much of a problem until this article. I never
considered the jerry can point. This does make me wonder if hybrids just make
more sense after all.

[0] [https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
explained/index.php...](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
explained/index.php/Housing_statistics#Type_of_dwelling)

~~~
swish_bob
Even the jerry-can point is bullshit. I already have a portable battery pack
in my garage for jump starting a car with a dead battery (because it's not
possible to get another car onto the drive to jump start one that way). The
tech to do the equivalent for a battery powered car is achievable, and I doubt
it'll be terribly long before the roadside assistance companies are fitting
the equivalent to a number of their vehicles.

~~~
Mirioron
I suppose that is an option. Perhaps a 2nd electric car could charge the first
one. That actually sounds like it should already be possible. Is it? I tried
googling but couldn't find an answer.

------
brentonator
1\. When the powers out, gas pumps are out too unless there are generators.
Even in Florida where this is expected after storms, we still have 95%+ of
stations offline during power outages.

2\. Typical fast charging times are < 20 minutes and you don't typically aim
for full. The first half of the battery charges in less than 15 minutes,
nearly matching a typical gas station stop on a road trip. You can get 75
miles of charge in just 5 minutes at peak with a Tesla.

3\. Most users charge at home or work keeping them topped up ready for up to
180 miles typical miles of driving that day as long as they return to base and
don't want to extend into the lower or higher reservations in the battery for
long term health.

~~~
ars
That works fine for daily trips. It fails for long trips (6+ hours).

Renting a car just for those trips simply costs too much, so your daily driver
also needs to be able to perform that task.

For me, I'd need at least 200 miles of range in 10 minutes. Long trips already
take too long, waiting longer than 10 minutes is a non-starter.

(And before you ask, I eat in the car. It's 10 minutes for bathroom, refuel,
and back on the road.)

The only way I could buy an electric car is if I had two cars.

~~~
greglindahl
There's always someone posting a comment like this in every EV thread -- I'm
hoping someday it will be a guy who pees in a bottle in order to minimize
stops.

~~~
ars
Bizarre comment. Have you ever taken a 6+ hour trip in a car?

If you don't control stops very carefully you can add hours to the already
long journey.

And for the record I think a hybrid with a 50 mile battery is the sweet spot:
Drive it electrically almost every day, but you can go farther if you need to.

------
neilwilson
Recharging electric cars requires plugging it in and walking away to do
something else instead.

Electric car fuelling is a parallel operation, not a serial one.

Rapid charging happens on the longer journeys that require it while you're
using the restroom, or grabbing a bite to eat or drink, or simply improving
your safety by having a snooze

And if you get an efficient electric car with a high miles/kWh rating - rather
than a status symbol electron guzzler - then there is less time required
anyway.

There's a mental paradigm shift required when you have an electric car to one
where you have a fully fuelled car every morning by default. Once you've made
that switch you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner.

~~~
ars
10 minutes. That's the longest I'm willing to wait at stops. Maybe 15 minutes
if I had to.

And stop no more often than every 3 hours.

So I'd need about 200 miles of range in 10 minutes of charging. Can they do
that?

~~~
neilwilson
The recommended safety advice is to stop every two hours or so and rest for
fifteen minutes each time. Otherwise you increase your chances of having an
accident due to fatigue.

The EU rules for driving HGV allow you to drive 2 hours, have a 15 minute
break, drive a further 2.5 hours and have a 30 minute break. Those are
enforced by law and tachographs

------
tfandango
I don't think EVs can be exact replacement of traditional vehicles in all
instances yet, for this very reason. But in many cases they fit a use case
perfectly. In my case I have 4 kids and a wife, and we have 2 cars. One is a
mini-van and fits everyone with room to spare. The other one only seats 5
(uncomfortably) but I only use it to drive myself to work. So my next car may
very well be an EV of some sort, but we cannot replace the mini-van with an EV
due to the range and requirement that we need to drive farther than that
(which means quick fueling at gas stations).

~~~
tetron
The Pacifica plug-in hybrid is a fantastic minivan that can go up to 30 miles
all electric before needing to engage the ICE, and in hybrid mode it still
gets significantly better milage than a conventional ICE minivan.

------
jonplackett
Isn’t this missing the point that you can put an EV charger ANYWHERE. There’s
no need to regularly deliver gas to it. You can have it in you home and charge
overnight. There’s no need to cluster them together.

------
julienb_sea
I think this article went a little too far and overstated the point.

I wouldn't be worried about charging my electric car in the city where I live.
That's a nonissue, just charge at home.

I'd be worried about going longer distances. You roll up to the supercharger
in the middle of nowhere, no ability to go anywhere else since you're out of
battery, and every charging slot is full. There's a line of tesla's to get a
spot. Sitting around in your car for a half hour as you wait for owners to
leave to even start charging. This would be a legitimate fear of mine.

------
viburnum
It’s true, cars are big and require a ton of energy. That’s not a huge problem
though, because with the correct land use policies you can pretty much replace
them with bikes.

------
steelframe
As somebody who has owned 3 different EVs (LEAF, Model X, and now I-PACE), I
find this article a bit hyperbolic. Okay, it's a rather poorly-researched
fluff piece that wouldn't pass muster in any of the subreddits I frequent. I'd
expect something with more substance here at HN.

That said, I no longer drive an EV when I do road trips over 150 miles. I
replaced one of my EVs with a plug-in hybrid (PHEV), so my household has one
BEV and one PHEV.

The reason for having plug-in capability in both cars is because the "full
tank every morning" part is amazing. The reason for having gas capability in
one car is because the convenience of using gasoline on longer road trips is
amazing. With a PHEV, you don't have to compromise in either case (around-town
or road trip).

Individual situations can be highly varying, and so for some people all-BEV
can work. In my family's case, we have one 150-mile trip that we do about 8
times a year where we can charge at the destination. The BEV can make that
trip direct in pretty much any weather conditions without a problem. There's
another trip we do to see family in another state that's 230 miles away, and
we can't charge at their house. Can't do that one comfortably in the BEV, so
we usually just take the PHEV for that one.

However with the BEV it's possible to do the 230-mile trip since there are
Electrify America (EA) rapid charging stations both along the way and at the
destination. Along the 150-mile trip there are in fact four EA locations, so
if something weird or unexpected happens with the distance driven or the
destination charging, there's no problem getting a quick charge at one of
those stations. In any case it's been working out to just an extra 30 minutes
of charging maybe 2 or 3 times a year, during which we can grab a bite to eat
or get some shopping done. Really no big deal at all.

All that said, I would never attempt to drive a Tesla on a trip where I'd need
to rapid charge frequently during times like spring break, the 4th of July,
Thanksgiving, or Christmas. You're beholden to a single proprietary rapid
charging infrastructure, and that's very likely to suffer "hot spots" that are
difficult to predict and that can ruin your day. The unpredictability, I would
imagine, is due to Tesla being a victim of its own success. Having more cars
on the road means that there ends up being more "tail-end" situations in the
population.

------
sam36
If you can afford a $40k+ car, you can afford one of those "clean" and quite
running honda generators...

~~~
brudgers
If Honda engineers were smart, they'd build a car with a built in generator.
They are smart. Hence the Prius.

~~~
hollerith
Except that the Prius is made by Toyota :)

------
systemtest
These are problems associated with personal car ownership, not EV's
themselves. In a utopia with fully autonomous affordable electric taxi cabs
this is not an issue, as they can charge by themselves in a cheap parking
field outside cities, combined with a large solar array.

------
ctdonath
Article fails to note that most EVs are charged at home most of the time.

------
ailideex
Just need to make the battery packs removable - then the car can be
"recharged" fully in less than 5 minutes.

------
mhb
It's a short term problem. Self-driving cars will drive themselves to a
charger.

~~~
bluGill
That doesn't do any good when I want to keep driving. Not a problem for 99% of
trips, but the rare cross country trip liquid fuel is a lot quicker to get
back going with.

~~~
arkitaip
Then you can rent a war, a perfectly viable solution for a problem people
might have one every few years.

~~~
bluGill
More like a couple times a year for me. It sound viable, but it really isn't
because the cost is so high - it is cheaper to have a (used) car that works
for everything than to spending $800 to rent a car for a week. I visit family
out of range of an electric car for many holidays - cheaper to buy a car just
for those trips and park it than rent a car for those trips!

I'm not against renting a car, but it is far too expensive in practice to do
for a regular vacation.

