No, charging stations are not gas stations

Articles about EVs in the mainstream press invariably mention the need for more public charging infrastructure. ose with an anti-EV slant spin this grain of truth into an insurmountable obstacle, but even those that are neutral or positive-leaning o en assume that we’ll need astonishing numbers of public chargers.

In 2017, a USB auto analyst triggered howls of hilarity when he wrote that Tesla would need to add 30,000 Superchargers at a cost of $8 billion “to match the convenience of the US gas infrastructure.” ( e gentleman also predicted that Tesla would not make any pro t from its then-new Model 3.)

Incredibly, such uninformed views still pervade the press. To give just one example, a recent piece in the New York Times stated that “experts” say that public chargers will need to become as ubiquitous as gas stations are today. Respected news sources regularly make similar pronouncements.

I don’t know how these folks de ne “experts,” but I regularly interview CEOs of charging providers and EVSE manufacturers, and while everyone agrees that more (and more importantly, better) public charging is required, no one I’ve spoken to sees EV charging as analogous to the gas station experience.

As I’ve o en noted, people tend to see every new technology through the lens of the old, and that’s natural. Most of us have spent our lives making periodic stops at gas stations to ll up, and until you’ve owned an EV, it’s hard to understand that this model is history.

e US DOE estimates that 80% of charging takes place at home or at the workplace. Of course, this gure just tells us about current charging needs, and at this point most EV owners are a uent suburban dwellers. As EV adoption spreads, the need for public charging is likely to grow. We don’t know what percentage of refueling sessions will need to take place at public chargers in the electric future, but we do know that, for gas vehicles, it will always be 100%, whereas for EVs, it will be a fraction of that.

As EV owners know (but so many writers don’t), many EV drivers will never need to use a public charger. You can count your favorite pundit among that number. I o en visit public chargers as a journalistic duty, but I’ve never needed to use one, because I charge at home, and I don’t make long trips in my EV.

ere are two main use cases that require public charging. One is long-distance travel. e Great American Road Trip requires widespread access to fast, dependable charging, and while the necessary network is rapidly being built out, more will be needed. However, most drivers will need

By Charles Morris

to use highway charging only occasionally, and some not at all. Meaningful stats are hard to come by, but by most accounts, only about 5% of automobile trips in the US are for more than 30 miles.

e second situation that calls for public charging is the Plight of the Drivewayless. Millions of urban denizens lack driveways, or even assigned parking spaces, so they cannot install chargers at home. Workplace charging can serve some of these poor souls, but not all—city dwellers o en take public transport to work, and use their cars for shopping trips and weekend outings.

We’ve seen many proposed solutions for the Drivewayless, ranging from sensible to dubious to downright nutty. I don’t know what the urban charging landscape is going to look like, but I am con dent that it will not involve anything similar to a gas station. Some imagine that urban drivers will pay regular visits to charging hubs, where they’ll sit and wait to charge (an acquaintance of mine proposed that such hubs should feature stages for live music).

is isn’t going to happen. In our society, convenience is next to godliness, and a gadget that saves us the ve minutes it takes to check into a hotel, or the three seconds it takes to stick a credit card into a slot, is hailed as a breakthrough. Can anyone really believe that American consumers will sit and wait to charge for half an hour?

On the highway, waiting to charge is no great inconvenience, because the stations are on the way, and most human bodies need to make a pit stop every 200 miles or so anyway (some commercial drivers are required to do so). But driving to a “charging hub” and sitting around a couple of times a week? People won’t do it.

To get a realistic idea of what urban charging will look like, look at the few cities where EVs make up a large percentage of vehicles. In Oslo, Amsterdam and, increasingly, London, on-street parking areas and public garages are liberally provided with chargers. You park, you charge. No sci- gadgets needed, and no heavy li ing for utilities, as these areas already have electrical service for street lighting. On my last visit to Oslo, I saw lots of EVs charging, but I did not see anyone waiting around at a charging hub.

Cities need lots more on-street chargers, they need to be well-designed to t into streetscapes without clutter, and they need to be smart, so utilities can manage charging times to help stabilize the grid. ere are a lot of rich opportunities for innovative companies in the charging space, but turning gas stations into charging hubs is not one of them.