Comment Re:And how long does it take... (Score 1) 190
This is just PR for Elon Musk and Tesla. This is not the future. The plug-in EV is not the future of transportation.
I work for a major university system in California. Our job is to get scope 3 commuter emissions to zero by 2050. We finally had the real-life conversation about the viability of plug-in EVs being the savior to our conundrum and, boy, was everyone happy to say what they had researched and observed...
The first thing you have to realize as a workplace who wants to support plug-in EVs is that, in doing so, you are becoming a refueler-- a gas station. You're entering another business with costs, time demands, enforcement requirements, and drama.
Each of the campuses has 5-50+ EV chargers throughout their 5,000-40,000 parking stalls. They cost $5,000 -$9,000 on a good deal plus the cost of installation, power trenching, etc. Consider the cost of converting an entire parking system to being plug-in EV-compatible. Or even half the parking system and allowing only 4-hour charging ("top off"). And then there's the new electric substation. Oh, and plug in EVs aren't zero emissions. We're still on the hook for the power generation emissions that result from the electricity demand.
Finally, there's a major equity issues. The vast majority of EV buyers are rich and/or college-educated. Why? Well they have the disposable income with which to take advantage of temporary federal subsidies, but more importantly, they have garages in which to charge their EVs overnight. The low-income population by and large lives in apartments whose landlords are not even considering installing EV chargers.
And these Type 3 superchargers can only be worse. The faster you charge an EV, the more waste electricity. The more waste electricity, the more cost and the more emissions. It's great PR. It's really neat for a niche, nascent, and temporary market, but the future is in either hydrogen fuel cells or battery-swapping EVs.