Where will ‘garage orphans’ charge electric cars?

Because people are talking about how it only takes a short time to recharge enough to offset one day's commute. That only works, though, if you charge every day. If you only charge weekly then you're stuck waiting to recover 200 miles' worth of charge at a time in preparation for the next week. If you're using a fast-charger near somewhere you need to be anyway for an hour or two every week, great. Otherwise that adds up to a lot of wasted time—and human time is the least renewable resource we have.

First, why I'm a special case. I live in Japan. Compared to Canada (and I assume most of the US), the charger situation here is amazing. We've done a fair few road trips now and it seems like no matter where we go, there is a fast charger within 2-5 km. At least 25% of the rest stops on the highway have them. A large percentage of "michi no eki" (Road station -- essentially farmers markets) have them -- to the point where the other day we were on a road trip and were very surprised to see a michi no eki that didn't didn't have one. Family Mart convenience store often has one (something like 1 in 10, I would guess). Aeon (big shopping mall) has one or two (and often 15-20 200V chargers) and every Nissan and Mitsubishi dealership has one.

This is really the future, I think. It costs millions to make a gas station. It costs thousands to put in a fast charger. You can put one anywhere because we already have the electrical infrastructure in place. I know several restaurants that have put them in.

At the moment, there is way more infrastructure than demand, so I very rarely have to wait. If, for some reason I do, then I drive 2km the road and charge there. It's hard to know if this will get better or worse as things scale up, but for the moment it's pretty good.

I'm also in a good situation in that I work from home. When I want to charge the car (a couple of times a week), I drive to the Family Mart, plug in, pick up a few groceries and then work for 30 minutes to an hour. They have a table (with power, even) for people to work at. It's air conditioned. It's so convenient, it's crazy.

However, it's the same thing when we travel. Our car only has a 30 kWh range, so we have to stop relatively frequently. But since there are chargers all over the place, we just stop and walk around. We often end up buying small things, or having a snack. We've seen so many amazing things since we got the EV because we're forced to stop and hang out in the small towns.

I think people are going to cash in on this. You are going to see small towns with parking lots with validated charging. People are going to drive by, stop, pick up a few things and carry on. Already the rest stops in Japan are absolutely geared for this: the have souvenir stores, restaurants and even things like clothing stores.

I think this is going to be a thing because compared to a gas station, it's cheap and it's also really nice. I thought I would dread charging the car. It's actually one of the best parts of my week. I get out and meet people. I slow down a bit. I get some shopping done.

Canada is kind of a difficult problem because it has 25x the land area and 1/4 the population of Japan. It's going to be tough. Also, they don't have any particular reason for someone to invest money in the infrastructure. Nissan and Mitsubishi are doubtlessly scared stiff of the time when Toyota and Honda enter the market. They want to own that charging infrastructure -- so they are going crazy right now. But I think it's actually inevitable, so if you have a fair amount of capital and are looking for a long term investment, I think this is a good one.

That's a break even period of only 15,000 miles. Unless your gas car will be tossed away in under 15,000 miles you are adding more CO2 to the air- and that's assuming you actually make 29 mpg, which is not likely on a car that is only 15k miles from EOL. Even if you don't touch the car for years, if you eventually sell the car the next owners are practically guaranteed to drive that many miles. The average American drives that far in 13 months.

Of course the money you spend on a new electric car might be better spent elsewhere, but in any state with a moderately clean grid, replacing a gas car with an electric car is a clear winning choice. Even on the very dirtiest grids in the US a Model 3 produces half as much CO2 as a gas car making 30 mpg- even slightly less than a Prius. The payback time is still only ~30k-35k miles, and in all likelihood owners will put several times that on the car.

[1]: https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/ev-e...

[2]: https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cl...