I live in semi-rural Quebec. I can either drive to a place about 5 minutes from my home and charge for a few dollars, takes about 5 hours. Park and rides also have charging stations so going to Montreal means I can charge during the work day. I only use my car like twice a week when I need to visit family or go to the office, so your mileage may vary.
The real solution for about 75% of people isn’t EV, it’s public transportation and proper bike infrastructure/bike shares/mixed use neighborhoods/density. That is especially true for people living in places dense enough to have apartments. An EV is nice, but it is a patch, not a fix. Not needing a car is the fix. Cities just can’t afford to have one car per 2-3 person.
Not needing a car would be ideal, but less likely for rural or semi-rural areas.
However
— if you have off street parking, we need to incent the owner/association to add chargers. Some of that will happen naturally as EV become more common, but that takes time
— the park-n-ride charger is a great start, but what if you could also top off at work, at groceries, at the shopping center, at theme parks: plug in everywhere you go? It could be slow charging, inexpensive, scalable, and not taking extra time beyond the primary reason you’re there: the goal could be to simply replace the charge used to get there
Oh some groceries have them. One even has a free setup. Just park there and recover like 5km worth of charge while doing groceries, but I forgot they exist because I don’t do my groceries in a car. Funny enough, the bicycle shop has a plug too. Government is paying part of the cost for home chargers but I just temporarily live in a friend’s basement so that’s not ideal for me.
So that’s a great start but they need to be everywhere. It will never be enough to charge an EV, but if it’s ubiquitous enough, you can change your goal from charging to simply replacing that used by the errand
I live in semi-rural Quebec. I can either drive to a place about 5 minutes from my home and charge for a few dollars, takes about 5 hours. Park and rides also have charging stations so going to Montreal means I can charge during the work day. I only use my car like twice a week when I need to visit family or go to the office, so your mileage may vary.
The real solution for about 75% of people isn’t EV, it’s public transportation and proper bike infrastructure/bike shares/mixed use neighborhoods/density. That is especially true for people living in places dense enough to have apartments. An EV is nice, but it is a patch, not a fix. Not needing a car is the fix. Cities just can’t afford to have one car per 2-3 person.
Not needing a car would be ideal, but less likely for rural or semi-rural areas.
However
— if you have off street parking, we need to incent the owner/association to add chargers. Some of that will happen naturally as EV become more common, but that takes time
— the park-n-ride charger is a great start, but what if you could also top off at work, at groceries, at the shopping center, at theme parks: plug in everywhere you go? It could be slow charging, inexpensive, scalable, and not taking extra time beyond the primary reason you’re there: the goal could be to simply replace the charge used to get there
Oh some groceries have them. One even has a free setup. Just park there and recover like 5km worth of charge while doing groceries, but I forgot they exist because I don’t do my groceries in a car. Funny enough, the bicycle shop has a plug too. Government is paying part of the cost for home chargers but I just temporarily live in a friend’s basement so that’s not ideal for me.
So that’s a great start but they need to be everywhere. It will never be enough to charge an EV, but if it’s ubiquitous enough, you can change your goal from charging to simply replacing that used by the errand