Interesting point. My home charger is circa 20-22MPH. So to recharge after a 500+ miles journey would be, ~24 hours
So we'll need more "juice" supplied to houses in UK. I don't know if I can charge 2x cars both at 22MPH, (I don't know the correct maths). In UK we have 240V supply and single phase. I think 100AMP fuse is "normal". Would that allow 2x 22MPH chargers simultaneously? If not as soon as we have 2x EV we start to have a problem when both cars do 250+ mile journey-days.
3-Phase supply is possible here (e.g. some people use it for air source heatpumps) but IME is astronomically expensive to install because the Electricity supply company has a monopoly and just chooses to charge the earth (
ermmm ... poor choice of phrase, sorry!). Business users are more likely to have 3-phase supply, so maybe I can charge (more quickly) "at work" on my 500-mile journey days.
In the US 200A/240V service is common in most houses built in the last 50-60 years. The 240V is split at the panel into two 120V rails, but you can still tap the 240V for high power applications like electric cloths dryers, central heat/AC, and electric ovens. The HPWC is usually installed at 240V too.
However, most people who use a destination charger will be using one at a hotel and that is probably using the max settings for the HPWC which is 240V and 72A, which will charge at 52 mph. If someone needed 500 miles, that would take about 10 hours to recharge the car, and with 600 mile range, most people would only charge to 90% anyway.
There will also be a number of the lower power superchargers in every city which would be fine for someone who was going to leave the car parked for at least a few hours anyway.
At home after a long trip you might take a couple of days to recharge the car back to 90% if you need to leave the next morning for work, but the typical time charging your car day to day would be the same. If you had a 50 mile round trip commute, it would still take a little over 2 hours to recharge your car at night. You'd just be going from 490 -> 540 instead of 200 -> 250 or whatever your car is now.
But ...
it 500+ mile range, and home/destination charging, becomes the norm what will happen to Superchargers? Will we need as many stalls? Perhaps : many many more vehicles, so the existing infrastructure will be "enough" for the, by then much smaller percentage, that need to Supercharge during any given day.
But: what of the massive rollout by VW of trans-USA chargers? and European (i.e. government subsidised) plans to rollout faster-than-Supercharger infrastructure? Is that all going to be "too late" because, by then, [almost] no one will need it?
(Megacharging in 5 minutes, rather than Supercharging in 30 minutes, would be an improvement, but even fewer stalls needed then ..)
People without off-street parking will need to charge. Perhaps they will just get their re-charge from the "street" (there is talk here of fitting chargers into Street Lamps), but maybe it will suit some//many? of those to Super/Mega-charge on a regular basis, just like they currently refill their ICE?
Tesla does need to vastly expand the supercharger network now because there will be a lot more cars on the road soon. And those cars will still be on the road 10 years from now. They will still be using superchargers.
Tesla is installing the lower power superchargers in cities that will charge cars faster than a home charger, but slower than standard supercharging (I think the megachargers are going to be limited to the trucks, the "smaller" battery packs on the cars can't take that kind of current, how fast you can supercharge is limited by the number of cells in the pack and the size of those cells). At the moment the VW chargers are pretty much vapor-ware. It may happen, especially where governments pitch in, but I suspect it's going to be relatively patchy in the US where the politicians in most places will leave it up to the "free market".
When solid state batteries come along, the whole charging calculus may change, but in the meantime the fleet of li-ion battery cars is going to grow by at least an order of magnitude over where it is today. Worldwide it's estimated there are about 2 million EVs on the road as of the end of last year. The International Energy Agency estimates the world EV fleet will be between 9 and 20 million by 2020. I strongly doubt that any solid state cells will make it into production cars by 2020 and possibly not until 2025. I would guess the majority of new EVs will still have li-ion cells even in 2025. The market leaders like Tesla will be among the first to switch to solid state, but there will also be a lot of "also rans" who won't have the ability to switch early.
A lot of those cars will be in China, which pretty much makes charging their problem, but a big enough percentage will be in Europe and North America too. Those li-ion cars won't be disappearing from the roads right away. The resale value might plummet, but that just means poor people will start driving EVs and the better off will be driving newer cars.
I know with MOT in the UK, it tends to drive a lot of older cars off the road, but that isn't the case in the US. In places that get snow and the roads are salted, car bodies tend to rust out, but where salting the roads isn't needed or places where it isn't used, cars can last forever. I was driving a 24 year old car I bought new when I got my Model S. The average age of cars in the US is close to 12 years old which means 1/2 the cars on US roads are older than that. I have a friend who still drives a 1984 Camry, he could afford a new car, he makes good money, but he chooses to drive his old car.
The short range EVs don't have great resale value, you can pick up a used Leaf for dirt cheap, but longer range EVs will likely remain on the road and will still need long distance fast chargers. The old fast chargers will eventually be retired as the entire fleet had enough range that demand drops, but that's going to be a couple of decades, or there will be somebody who retrofits older EVs with new batteries as an aftermarket thing, which would obsolete long fast charging on the highway quicker.
