The difficult is not electricity prices; those can simply be tariff'd for overhead-slash-profit as all U.S. chargers do already. The difficulty is building out hundreds of chargers within a single city block's worth of the city's x,y grid. That level of power density is generally only seen in heavy industrial zones, and residential distribution grids can barely cope with air conditioners, much less with electric vehicles on top of that, before the prospect of upgrading every multifamily residential zone from low-density power to high-density power.

Napkin math time. Assuming that Shanghai has ~1% of China's 420 million vehicles, given that Shanghai has ~2% of China's population (~8 million) and assuming a car ownership rate of 0.5; then Shanghai can be estimated to have 4 million vehicles, while only having 0.8 million charging locations (as the article indicates). 20% certainly does exceed 0.2%, and they're ahead of the game with ~2 charging locations per EV today — but that also means that they've only converted ~10% of Shanghai's gasoline vehicle population and are only provisioned to support 20% conversion right now.

However, I think that China has a significant advantage versus the U.S. — they are primarily selling very small vehicles for intra-city use. So, their charger capacities can be significantly lower per vehicle than in the U.S., which reduces their difficulty of electric conversations probably by a full order of magnitude from ours.

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p_j_w 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I think that China has a significant advantage versus the U.S. — they are primarily selling very small vehicles for intra-city use

This does not match what I’ve seen in China at all. Nor does it match up with any data I’ve seen about the best selling cars in China. Do you have any data on this?

	▲	altairprime 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Nope, but I have a pile of napkins here covered in scribbles. Appreciate the correction.

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cyberax 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> However, I think that China has a significant advantage versus the U.S. — they are primarily selling very small vehicles for intra-city use

This doesn't really matter that much. The average car commute in the US is less than 40 miles per day. Even if we assume that everyone gets a fairly giant Model X, that's still around 12kWh of energy per day.

You can get that much power from a regular 120V wall plug within 8 hours.