Years ago, physicist Alvin Weinberg noted that humans almost always choose convenience, although this is obviously not an inviolable law. Many Japanese, for example, accept very long commutes in order to lower their housing costs. And yet, the recent turn towards remote working—initially inspired by the pandemic—is certainly evidence that convenience still has significant appeal.
Which is important because electric vehicles are much less convenient to operate than gasoline powered cars, something that advocates tend to downplay, saying things like ‘it takes forty minutes to charge a car, but it’s not a problem, you can go get a sandwich while it’s charging,’ or my favorite, ‘just drive to the mountains and leave the car to recharge while you go skiing.’ Perhaps dealers will turn away non-skiing buyers who want EVs.
Convenience is an intangible but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real, just as air is intangible thatnobody wants to go without. It is hard to quantify, although Clinton et.al. attempt this in their calculator of EV competitiveness, when they allow the user to input a cost for their time, which is then translated into a cost of vehicle operations. However, this is apparently related to the extra charging costs, but not assuming extra travel time to find a charging station. (See Table 3 in their paper.) Electrifying Transportation: Issues and Opportunities – CEEPR CEEPR (mit.edu)
Electric vehicle advocates downplay the shortcomings of battery powered cars, often by just waving away concerns like range anxiety. Typical is an article on EVBOX titled “Electric Car Range and five reasons why your range anxiety is unwarranted.” Electric car range and 5 reasons why your range anxiety is unwarranted (evbox.com)
The reasons given are illustrative of the poor logic behind these arguments. First, you don’t have to drive to a gas station, and many gas stations are installing chargers. Sort of contradictory, no? And you can charge while parked, which is also the second reason. It’s true, but you can’t always charge while parked and that assumes your trip is covered by the range of the vehicle, which many are not. Third, “charging stations are everywhere,” 1.3 million globally. Okay, that sounds like a lot but they’re not everywhere as many EV drivers have discovered to their chagrin. Fourth, “electric range is more than sufficient” which is a subjective judgement and overstates the range on many EVs. It also assumes that people don’t go more than the ‘average’ daily commute (see below). Finally, “electric car battery life is longer than you think,” which might be true but relevant to cost of battery replacement, not range anxiety.
This nonsense is the type of thing that discredits electric vehicle advocates and could backfire on them leaving angry consumers to push to eliminate bans on internal combustion engine vehicles. After all, the same article states that a survey found 79 percent of EV owners would buy another, but that still means 21% are dissatisfied enough to abandon the technology (for now), an estimate that is optimistic compared to other studies, such as Dua and Rubal. (Link below)
The number of charging stations needed remains an important issue and one which is not considered in detail by many proponents of EVs. They often point to the rapid increase in stations and/or incentives for installations without noting that the existing infrastructure is woefully inadequate in much of the country.
How many are needed? The IEA has suggested that an appropriate number is one charging port for every ten EV, but this is misleading, rather like saying the amount of rainfall in the U.S. is adequate, therefore, Death Valley is well watered.
Clinton et. Al. (link below) make the important calculation of charging points per road mileage, because that is a good analogue for density of coverage, as opposed to charging points per EV. The latter gives a sense of possible waiting time at a charging point, but not how easy it is to find one. There might be plenty of charging points compared to the number of EVs in a country, but if there isn’t one nearby, you don’t really care if there is no waiting time on average.
It’s also the fact that the simple data showing number of chargers is misleading. Only fast chargers (also called Level 3 or Direct Current Fast Chargers DCFC) are even remotely competitive with gasoline stations for convenience. As the table below shows, the rate of ‘refueling’ for a Level 2 charger, which is common as public chargers, is less than 1% of a gasoline pump. The IEA estimates that less than 20% of chargers globally are fast chargers. In the U.S., the number is more like one-third, half of which are Tesla superchargers which not necessarily available to non-Telsa drivers. And J. D. Power has said that one-fifth are non-functional (as of last year).
Charging time per mile of range
But circling back to the range issue, which is an important element of the number of fast-charging stations needed, this highlights another weakness in advocates’ arguments, such as the aforementioned EVBox author’s comment, “ the average American citizen drives 62 km (39 miles) a day.”
That’s kind of like suggesting someone farm Death Valley because the average U.S. rainfall is thirty inches. Not all drives are ‘average’ and while recharging overnight with a Level 2 charger might satisfy a driver’s ‘average’ needs, that’s like saying a toaster oven is big enough to cook the average meal, so ovens are unnecessary. As the figure below shows, ownership of full-sized ovens has been only slightly affected by the availability of toaster ovens and microwaves: many Americans sometimes cook turkeys and casseroles, even if the ‘average’ dish is much smaller. Similarly, many who only commute thirty miles a day (on average) often take much longer trips.
Market share by stove type
So, how many fast charging stations are needed? Government data shows that the U.S. has over 140,000 charging ports in over 53,000 charging stations, which doesn’t seem too bad compared to 115,000 gasoline stations (probably about 1 million fuel pumps). Granted that there are many places with more gasoline stations than ‘needed’ (there’s a spot near me with three stations within 100 meters), but the point is that you want to have access to a charging station pretty much everywhere, especially given the shorter range of most electric vehicles. And since many charging stations are at office buildings where a car is presumably parked at the charging point all day, not just until it’s charged, they are much less available than a gasoline station, where cars rarely spend more than a few minutes at a pump.
And again, on a long trip when the charge runs low, access to a Level 2 charger is not going to cut it. Adding six to eight hours to the travel time of a three hundred mile trip is the kind of thing that will turn off many potential buyers.
Certainly, it could be argued that the country needs less fast charging stations than gasoline stations, as gasoline station numbers are driven by competition not ‘need.’ On the other hand, as the table above showed, charging times for even a fast charger is one-ninth the speed of a gasoline pump, offsetting the potentially smaller number of stations needed. The implication is that the number of fast-charging stations needs to triple or quintuple before EV drivers can feel more comfortable about having ready access to them.
At the recent rate of adding 10,000 fast chargers per year, this implies that the availability will be roughly adequate in six to eight years. In the meantime, expect numerous horror stories like that of Youtuber Marques Brownlee, who described a case of charging problems in an article titled, “This is ruining electric cars”: “’There’s been versions of this before, where people are actually, genuinely mad, like “I don’t think the electric car thing is for me,” Brownlee remarked, adding that there are countless examples that keep bringing this to light.’”
If large numbers of consumers buy electric cars before the charging infrastructure is adequate, their disappointment (and anger at public money spent on subsidies) could create serious problems for the industry and the long-term adoption of the technology. It seems unlikely that electric vehicles will suffer the fate of the diesel Oldsmobile, which resulted in abandonment of the technology in the United States in the 1980s, but the Administration targets could prove wildly optimistic.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaellynch/2023/04/28/inconvenience-and-electric-vehicle-charging-points/