Charging an electric vehicle in the future increasingly looks like an experience somewhere between a truck stop and an airport lounge.
Most public chargers sit in parking lots, often three or four machines along the side of a hotel or grocery store. Drivers are exposed to the elements and, unless they need to go shopping, are basically stuck hanging out in their cars while filling their batteries.
But charging companies and automakers increasingly see a need for stations with amenities: restaurants, good bathrooms, comfortable furniture, and canopies that shield from the rain, snow and sun. After all, even the fastest chargers need a half-hour to top off your car so you’d better enjoy the stay. The additional convenience could entice would-be EV drivers to take the plunge, adding fuel to the electric transition.
I don’t think EV chargers need amenities, I think we need to put the chargers in the places people are going anyway.
It needs to look like a Starbucks or a McDonald’s. These idiot franchises on the highway should be adding EV chargers — it’s a captive audience.
This is literally an imagined problem. The current state of EV charging is that you spend maybe 20 minutes every 300 miles charging. It’s barely any longer than you already spend filling up with gas, grabbing a snack and using the bathroom.
takes me 3 minutes tops to fill up my gasoline car. barely any longer? maybe from the galactic scale.
It’s certainly longer and less convenient, but greatly offset by the fact I can almost always charge at home. Only on days where I drive more than a couple hundred miles (very rarely) do I need a charging station.
agreed. currently it really only makes sense to buy an ev if you can charge at home.
It takes you 3 minutes to fill up, grab a snack and use the bathroom?
Either if that is somehow true, and when you road trip you sprint around the gas station like a madman, that’s still adding around 15 minutes for every 4 hours of driving.
99% of the time, filling up a car with gas does not involve going to the bathroom or getting a snack.
The only time I do that is occasionally on road trips, and still, usually it’s just running in to use the bathroom, nowhere near 20 minutes.
It isn’t safe, but I know many people who do road trips that way. I’m pumping gas, make sure you are back in your seat when the pump turns off because I’ll leave without you. (I don’t think they ever left without someone, but if you were late they did find ways to punish you for it)
This is simply not true. Even at fast chargers I do not get the advertised charging rate in my vehicle. So many factors influence it (heat, other vehicles charging, my cars software, etc…). I am lucky and can charge at home, but I. Road trips, I’m taking 25-30 minutes to charge, which is an inconvenience at this current time.
