vtsnowedin wrote:The cost of a charging station being much less then the EV itself I see no problem matching the number of charging stations to the number of EVs sold. There are already multiple installed at interstate rest areas most sitting unused at present.
Urban parking problems will remain as always difficult, but there is no reason charging stations can't become as ubiquitous as parking meters are now and technologies like self driving Uber cars (EV of course) may dramatically reduce demand for urban parking of all types.
That's not going to be the case when every car is an electric car, and they take hours to charge. There won't be any gas station like solution, unless the solid state lithium ion battery that is coming can charge far faster. As it stands now, without faster charging technology. Every car will need to charge almost every day. People with shorter traditional commutes won't need to, but they will still need to park somewhere. Simple parking will contend with metered charging spaces also, as the dynamic of risk/return on investing in those accelerates. When you don't need to charge you won't be able to simply park at a charging spot without paying something because they could be selling electricity.
What we are facing is the adoption of class centric ideas along with a new technology. In this case, it is the ideal of the rich middle class, probably white, person who has a big house and lots of space. We expect electric cars to recharge at the back of a spacious two or three car garage. But electric cars will have to be widely adopted. That means they will be driven by people who live in crowded places. Is every over subscribed house going to have cables running out to the street, one set for each car? Fancy mowing the lawn and getting around those. Apartment buildings already charge for parking, now they can for electricity, but most are too cheap to build that out. There will be demand for places to live where parking spots have charging, but there will also for bargain living places, where people find some other way to charge their cars. People will wind up paying a premium to charge where they live, if they live in an apartment. There will be incentives to view charging spots as somebody else's problem.
There will be a huge incentive to adopt the fleet model, over that of individual ownership. Perhaps we shouldn't care one way or the other, but if we want to preserve individual ownership, the involvement of rail would make sense. We could go for building lots near enough to where people live with charging capacity, to which self-driving cars could go when they are low on charge because they were near enough. The problem with that is I can't think of whose house we should sacrifice in order to have those. You know that people will rise up over the eradication of parks and green belts. Rail could take your car outside the city to get charged. You wouldn't have to think about which lot your car went to, just that it went into the system.