There’s no serious dispute that one of the most significant obstacles to the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is the lack of suitable charging infrastructure to back them up, something of particular importance given the anxiety that many consumers feel about the range an EV can go without a charge and, for that matter, the amount of time that it takes to charge an EV.
Henry Grabar looks at this issue in the Atlantic:
Recently, I was chatting with a friend who drives an electric vehicle in New York City—and parks it at the curb. There are no curbside chargers in his neighborhood, so powering up requires dipping into a nearby garage for a few hours, or driving to a curb in a different neighborhood entirely. Full battery? Move that car or keep paying the charging company. Studying the charging landscape to save time, money, and energy has become “his whole personality,” he told me. As he sent me image after image of prices, charging maps, and street-parking setups, I could see he wasn’t totally kidding.
The reality, of course, is that (in the end) quite a few of the central planners “managing” the transition to EVs do not believe that cars of any type belong in cities, at least in large numbers. Urban residents, they believe, should be happy with public transport and their supposedly delightful “15-minute cities” (a topic for another time). For such planners, the difficulty faced in finding a charger is a feature not a bug, if not one they can admit to. Yet. Frogs in a pot and all that.
Grabar:
Surveys have repeatedly found that access to home charging is among the most influential factors determining whether someone will go electric. That access is easy enough for those who can plug their cars right into their wall, but one in three U.S. households does not have a private garage. They’re what the charging industry calls “garage orphans”—and charging options for their EVs will be limited for years to come. In other words, access to parking, already a struggle that brings out the worst in American drivers, is about to become an all-important factor in decarbonizing the American economy. Tens of millions of drivers will have to learn to share.
The broader war against cars is an attack on autonomy, and this attack is (to a lesser extent) reflected in the backup arrangements needed to make EVs work in an urban setting. That need to share is another reminder that the increasingly coerced switch to EVs involves pouring billions into a technology that, for many users, will offer an overall experience inferior to that which has preceded it, a malinvestment classic.
That may change over time (I wouldn’t discount humanity’s ability— if allowed to do so — to make EVs and their infrastructure more user-friendly); however, that’s not where things stand now. But the fact that using EVs will be a step back for so many helps explain why climate policy-makers are so keen to use law and regulation to squeeze out the competition. Henry Ford didn’t feel it necessary to call for a ban on horses.
It would be far better to subject EVs to the discipline of the marketplace for longer. While I would never support a prohibition on selling new internal-combustion engine cars, even those who do, ought, if they genuinely wish to see EVs improve more rapidly, to want the period of competition between the two technologies to continue for longer. Extending it, say, to 2050 will not, I suspect, make much difference to the climate or the effect of any changes in it.
Grabar concludes:
Public-charger installation, he says, “is not economically sustainable today. Utilization rates are not high enough, and reliability is a challenge.” Low usage of Flo’s curbside stations suggests that New York City drivers without dedicated parking are not ready to take the EV plunge.
To see how this plays out, just look at China, the world’s largest EV market, where 1.7 million public chargers have been installed, almost half of which are Level 3 [the “speediest” type of charger]. Each one is used, on average, just once a day. Most EV experts agree that infrastructure must precede EV adoption. But it’s going to be a very expensive change if we can’t get comfortable with the idea of a shared plug, a shared parking spot, and a little more attention to the practice of parking.