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langfotoday at 6:07 AM5 repliesview on HN

Has the EV charging infrastructure kept pace with the EV adoption?


Replies

capitol_today at 7:13 AM

At least here in Norway it has, it seems like it's not very difficult to put some cables in the ground and install a big pre built metal box :)

Most gas stations have them and there is also a lot of street charging stations.

But it's still cheapest to charge at home.

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hdgvhicvtoday at 7:07 AM

Most people charge EVs at home most of the time.

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jillesvangurptoday at 7:50 AM

There are 50K public chargers in Denmark. 7K of which are fast chargers. There's no shortage of public chargers and more are deployed as demand is increasing. Also, Denmark is a small country. Most return trips inside the country would be doable on a single charge if you have one of the newer longer range vehicles. Copenhagen to Aarhus is only 300km or so. You could do that without charging in a new BMW. Mostly people charge at home or at one of those tens of thousands of roadside chargers in their neighborhood.

And of course Denmark pioneered a lot of wind technology. The country is running on cheap wind power at this point and you can get really favorable rates off peak hours.

IcePictoday at 7:37 AM

In Sweden it has. When I got my EV 4 years ago, the list of public EV charging locations was about the same as the amount of petrol stations, now its 3-4x as many. And as others have mentioned, having a wall charger of your own is of course the easiest and cheapest, but fearing long distance travels with EVs in Europe is not a thing, I think.

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jwrtoday at 7:11 AM

No. And it's not the number of charging stations, it's the general shittiness of those. You never know how much you will pay per kWh, there are apps, networks, roaming agreements, cards, getting through this mess and starting to charge is always a challenge and takes a significant time (sometimes comparable to charging time!). You also get gouged on pricing, companies clearly set it so that the cost of 100km is comparable to that of a gas-powered vehicle. And for some reason people think EVs can only charge by backing into a stall, never in a drive-through bay like gasoline vehicles.

I own an EV and enjoy it a lot. I would not even consider buying a gas vehicle again. But while charging at home is great, charging during a trip is annoying. This needs regulation.

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