this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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What a bone-headed move. A gas station is not really set up to handle vehicles that might be there for 5x, 10x or maybe even 15x longer than a gasoline car takes to fill up. You'd be far better off, putting them in the parking lot of a local grocery store or movie theater or restaurant.
Some gas stations are also highway rest areas with restaurants and whatnot. The ones that aren't close to rest areas are in mixed used neighbourhoods, so possibly close to the customers' homes. If you take your car to the cinema in Germany, you're doing it wrong.
My nearest cinema in the UK is 90 minutes walk away.
There used to be two in my town. One closed back in the mid-90s and has been several pubs and clubs since, and the other closed long enough ago that there's still a faded poster for The Hunger Games outside. Nothing else has moved into this building, except presumably for the local spiceheads.
But I digress. Putting charging points at motorway service stations is a good idea. Such a good idea that it's already been done in just about all of them, and as electric vehicle use climbs, will presumably increase the number of charging points accordingly until there's one for every parking space. Putting them in a regular petrol station would be a shit idea. I assume when we finally drink the Earth dry of oil, these places will close and be another polluted husk on the apocalyptic hellscape called Britain. Cars will be charged from home by then, we'll have no use for them. As more of them close, it'll trigger a cascade of people who don't want to drive 10 miles to fill their car up, so will switch to electric.
Home and car parks will be the only place to charge in the future.
While it is a good idea to put them near the places you suggest, it not stupid to put them also at the gas stations. Here we already have gas station on highways with EV charging stations and they just take some parking places, usually a couple in the smaller stations and maybe up to a dozen in the biggest ones. It is a nice advantage to be able to have lunch while the car recharge.
As others have mentioned it's as well as not instead of.
However it's boneheaded to charge to 100% the vast majority of the time as it's often as slow to charge from 20 to 80% as it it from 80 to 100% on an ultra rapid charger as it massively slows down above 80.
I can charge twice from 10 to 80% with my car in about 40 minutes for a range of almost 500 miles vs. One 10 to 100% for a range of almost 320 miles in the same time.
I only fully charge at home and only if it makes sense for the journey I'm doing. It's not good for the long term health of the battery to repeatedly charge it to 100% all the time. Plus it's kind of a dick move to block fast and ultra chargers with the slow charge above 80%.
Then there's the cost, I don't want to spend 45 to 75p a kWh to charge on a public charger when I pay 9p at home on my ev tariff. If I do need to charge I only charge what I need, which can be as little as 5 minutes for about 60 miles.
Sure, not every car comes with 350kw support (or even 250kw) yet, but more will as people realise that charging speed is at least as important as range if you plan to travel in Europe.
What car has almost 500 miles of range at 80% state of charge?!
While new models get released all the time, the Lucid Air is known to have one of the longest EV ranges and it is around 510 miles from 100%.
A car would have a total range of around 625 miles at 100% if it is getting 500 miles at 80%.
Charge to 80% twice, if you read what I wrote, is almost 500 miles, and takes about as long to charge both of those times in total vs. charging just once to 100% on an ultra rapid charger.
maybe they need the parking lots, for people putting gasoline via canisters in their cars.