Supercharger Situation in 3-5 Years?

[jhs_7645]

I have two thoughts with regards to charging infrastructure and the future:
1) I think it's naive to suggest that Tesla has not given this a tremendous amount of thought and has vastly more data to assist them in their decision making than anybody here.
2) I think if you we/Tesla/etc.. think long term (years, decades.. which. when you consider how long it took to build up gas distribution, is not really that long) battery capacity will increase significantly. As battery capacity increases, the need for chargers shifts from roadside chargers (between point a and point b) to location specific chargers. (charge when I arrive at the hotel after driving *all day* with my 700 mile battery). That is inevitable. Surely there is a chart somewhere with projections of the curves of # of cars on the road, avg. battery capacity, avg. miles driven per day, and the # of charging locations necessary to support that driving.

My prediction: Roadside charging stations will be laughed at as a stop-gap in less than 50 years.

 

[David_Cary]

Well there is the problem that in a lot of National Parks there isn't enough electrical infrastructure to support widespread charging in most areas of the park. It doesn't do any good to have a charging point at the ranger station when the campground is 3 miles away. Most campgrounds I've stayed in have very limited power, generally only at the toilets, enough for a few lights. The trailheads generally don't have any power at all. Given the National Park funding issues I can't imagine someplace like Glacier adding hundreds of level 2 chargers, and it's even less likely that the smaller Provincial and BLM camping areas would.

I also question the whole distributed destination charging vs centralized Supercharging paradigm for many vacation regions with widely distributed guest accomodations. A single Supercharger location with 8 - 12 bays could easily take the place of thousands of individual hotel, cabin, inn, etc. chargers since cars needing a charge simply drive to it and charge for 30-45 minutes. Destination chargers would have to be at every location where a car could be parked overnight even though most of them would be empty almost every night. For day trips it doesn't really work well at all. If you're parked at a ski area for 6 hours on a 30 amp charger at 20F, that's not a lot of miles. Then there's the question of why would all those landlords go to the expense of putting in a charger when it would likely only be used a few times during it's lifetime.

IMHO, if BEV's are going to really penetrate the market in a significant way it's got to be reasonable to drive pretty much anywhere an ICE could reasonably go. I realize that there are hundreds of people that have no problem charging for a couple of days on an 120V circuit to drive 200 miles, but I doubt that the vast majority of people would find that an attractive requirement.

Except that if every car was an EV, then every hotel would have a full parking lot attached to the chargers. That may take awhile. But if the BEV penetration is 10% in 10 years, then there will always be someone at each hotel who would like a charge. Here destination charging is clearly the way to go. I expect that a lot of us have seen in the past 3 years, empty charging stations become very crowded. So I don't think very many charging stations placed appropriately will get used a few times in their lifetime....

 

[lloyds]

Except that if every car was an EV, then every hotel would have a full parking lot attached to the chargers. That may take awhile. But if the BEV penetration is 10% in 10 years, then there will always be someone at each hotel who would like a charge. Here destination charging is clearly the way to go. I expect that a lot of us have seen in the past 3 years, empty charging stations become very crowded. So I don't think very many charging stations placed appropriately will get used a few times in their lifetime....

I agree I'm now seeing the stations more full even during mornings or afternoons. Wait time from 15-30 minutes.