The Problem with Electric Vehicles

Cars are an antiquate mode of transportation that are dangerous and inefficient. Something truly disruptive would be transportation systems where cars and trucks don't exist.

A world where all cars are EVs will need many changes from the world today, but we have decades to make those changes. Take the grid capacity problem. Household electricity usage has already increased by a ton throughout the history of electrification. The grid can adapt. It takes a long time to build out this sort of infrastructure, but we have that time. Grid capacity needs to increase by 20% over the next 30-50 years? Ok, and?

The article also can't seem to make up its mind about whether EVs are suitable for long distance travel. It talks about how highway charging stations will have to be much larger than gas stations because charging takes longer. Then a few points down, it says that range and recharging time are incompatible with charging while traveling. Which is it? If it's incompatible, then you don't need highway charging stations in the first place....

I have an electric car, a leaf. I also have solar power from Solar City.

I live in sunny MA, where in the winter we average 15kWh generated to the summer we average 50kWh. My commute is 60 miles per day which is around 6-8kW depending in traffic and weather.

Also, my local power is a mixture of nuclear and wind.

So. Can we please stop rolling coal burning power plants into the electric car equation as if it is universally applicable.

The car was affordable: $12k second hand. The solar was $0 down and half the national grid per kW. My commute is at the edge of viable for a first gen electric car (really looking forward to the 200mile range of 2nd gen).

I do the vast majority of my charging is at home. My only issue is that the current system (sic) takes DC power converts to to AC only rectify it back to DC in the car. There is still a need for charging stations, but for rare 100 mile journeys. Drive 80 miles charge for 20 minutes, drive 80 miles. 2nd gen it's 160 miles, charge for 40 minutes. We have family in Western MA, which is 150 miles away. With a 200 mile range we'd do it in a single charge and recharge at their house. The use of a charging station is really rare, not part of the routine of ownership, like it is with ICE.

We don't have the infrastructure? We don't need the infrastructure. You can run an electric car almost entirely from energy reclaimed from the environment around your house. It will even store it for you in those handy, replaceable lion batteries it has, solving some of renewable energies gnarlier problems.

Whilst I understand that electric cars don't work well for people who travel more than 100 miles without a 20 minute break, that number is about to shift to 200miles... and that is virtually nobody. The infrastructure problems are solved by local generation (either municipal renewables or home solar). The recharging problem, even at 100mile range isn't a problem, you just charge it at the end of your journey.

This reads a bit like something a staffer on one of those listicle sites got asked to churn out, the last three (listicle items 7 through 9) in particularly seem very weak.

There's no particular reason you can't install curbside chargers. It's just a matter of convincing the powers that be to allow it, and that is just a matter of EVs becoming common enough for there to be demand for it.