ahagge said:
Much as I dislike the gas station model, I think it's the only one that will work in the long term. Other thoughts? Is there a better way?
My thought is that the majority of charging will be done at home or workplaces. The only "need" for additional charging would be for long distances which then can be serviced by very high speed (DCQC) chargers strategically placed to allow coverage. Hmm... strangely this seems to be what Tesla is building out eh?
My reasoning is that for daily travel, any stopping is inconvenient and frankly most folks probably don't even want to be bothered with plugging in that often. As range isn't infinite long trips would require stops to re-fuel, these then need to be relatively fast - certainly not any longer than the stop would normally be for other things (i.e. highway rest ares with bathrooms and semi-quick food supplies).
To make all this work, range has to increase to more like 150-200 miles for "daily driving only" and in the 300+ mile range for long distance drivers (reasonable to travel 75mph for 4-5 hours between stops when pushing distance so that would be 300-375 miles).
Clearly the "distance driver" could service as a daily driver, but likely there could be a market for daily driver only range. Given the stats, one could have 150-200 mile range limit and satisfy 95%+ of drivers even with our natural desire for a buffer for the daily driver role (I don't know exact numbers, but I find it hard to imagine more than a small percentage of folks travel that far daily!)
So this layout would likely obsolete the 'randomly placed' chargers I've seen around here. No need for the one at the local restaurants, only larger banks of them on the highway rest stops (placed where they would get higher utilization in general and in existing rest areas). Easy to scale up these 'rest area' stations as needs grow too. Oh - and a cost per use/kwh would make the most sense in my opinion - enough to make it profitable for owners to desire to build out more.