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WorldMaker 3 days ago

Battery tech is for general use. The median and mean usage of a car in the US is 40 miles per day. A 300 mile battery gets you a week's worth of driving between charges (~7.5 days). That's comparable to a median ICE car that gets 300 miles on a tank, with the subtle distinction of needing a 30-45 minute fast charge versus a 5-10 minute refill. But that's still a once a week "problem" with useful mitigations such as it is dangerous and illegal in most states (just poorly enforced in many as well) to leave a car unattended while refueling with gas, but electricity is far safer and multitasking is easier and more convenient while fast charging. (That fact that most fast chargers aren't interesting destinations with enough things walkably nearby is a different problem to solve, that the market should be rather good at solving eventually.)

But that's all still treating EV charging in the old world ICE model which everyone is familiar. When people are talking about wanting more chargers everywhere a car may be parked, like offices or transit stations and other parking structures, that isn't a need, that's a market opportunity unavailable to ICE. You can't put a gas pump in every parking space, but you sure can put an ordinary electric outlet. We can distribute the charging "problem" of a car far more easily than the current centralizing forces of gas logistics. It's an amenity that anyone who owns a parking lot or garage can offer to encourage walkability to nearby businesses and/or homes. It's a possible revenue source for other parking lots or garages that love low margin business models like electricity metering and/or think they have a captive enough audience to charge whatever margins they like, to make the bottom line grow.

We don't need those things to happen. We've driven gas engines for enough decades without that. We want those things to happen. We expect market forces to eventually deliver those things, as soon as the market better figures out what EV charging disrupts in parking lot planning and operations/maintenance. You can't expect your gas car to have more gas when you come back to it in a parking lot, but an EV can have a slightly higher charge almost anywhere it is parked for a while and that's a game changer that will slowly spread as the market finds the fun (and profit or marketing opportunity) in it.