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.
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.
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.
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.
Above ground electricity poles and wires are still ugly. In my opinion areas where the infrastructure is all buried are much more aesthetically pleasing and calming. It’s also safer. No risk of electrocution by downed lines or starting fires in windstorms.
Underground junction boxes can get water in them. In a previous apartment I lived at in one exploded about half a block away, blew the manhole cover off clear down the block (a few hundred feet) and lit on fire. There's still some risk. Maybe not as much, but weatherproofing is still hard.
We don't have fire hydrants (water is pumped from nearby canals / ditches) or above ground electricity / fiber / cable (as this is a first world country). We like to keep things looking nice and authentic.
Fire hydrants here in the UK are almost always under the road surface - that would actually probably be the logical place to install electrical charging outlets.
It turns out a good place for "on street" urban chargers is in lamp posts. They already have electrical connections and chargers can be retrofitted easily.
The last two streets I lived on in central Edinburgh only had lamp posts at one side but parking at both sides. Checking on Google Maps I reckon there is only enough lamp posts to charge 1 in 6 cars on the side of streets that do have them.
Good idea though - but I suspect other things will be required as well.
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.