Canada’s most populous provinces are falling behind many U.S. states when it comes to building fast charging stations for electric vehicles, a CBC News analysis shows, raising questions about whether this country’s infrastructure is ready for a transition to cleaner energy.
While I see the emotional appeal, I don’t think that EVs are the future on any significant level. Most people only use their cars for routine trips between home, work, and a few popular places for shopping and entertainment. Two of the four are completely centralized and the other two are generally focused into notable clusters. This creates nothing but choke points for cars, and commute time data shows just how bad it is.
Toronto had an average commute time of 84 minutes of 2019. One way. I use transit between bus, subway, streetcar, then walk, and still manage under an hour despite going halfway across the city to work, with 5-10 minute wait times between each transfer. That time doubles the moment I had to use a shuttle bus because that has to go through one of the massive choke points in Toronto.
What we need is greater capacity, more extensive, more reliable, and more comfortable transit solutions so we can just stop making it take 10 minutes to go 3 blocks during rush hour. So people can go even long distances quickly and comfortably when their jobs require it.
EV charging points are important, but only in strategically placed locations like on highway rest stops, as if you still insist on using an EV for commuting, you can just charge at home overnight as 99% of drivers would use less than 10% of their car’s charge a day. It’s only for vacations that fast charging stations would actually be used.
Also we need to properly promote remote work. Commutes suck especially bad when you’re doing a job you know you could be doing from home instead of wasting 20% of the day just getting to the office.
That’s a rather large-city-dweller-centric view of what people use their cars for. Public transport certainly can and should be part of the solution, but it’s often impractical in lower-density areas.
Let’s see here, the last few times I took a car out of town . . . Well, we could have gotten the six boxes of books shipped, I suppose, but it would have cost more than just going and fetching them from 120km away. Family funeral on short notice—no option other than doing the ~400km-each-way drive. Medical emergency (mine)—400km-each-way drive again, since it wasn’t a life-threatening condition that would have caused them to find an ambulance right away, just something that could have blinded me in one eye. None of those things were recreational, and most of them weren’t really optional, either.
Some trips out of town are important, and you don’t always have the luxury of waiting for public long-distance transit that runs only a couple of times a week, or enough notice to prepare your vehicle in advance. We need private vehicles, and the infrastructure to keep them on the road. EVs may not be the future in Toronto so much, but Toronto is only one small part of the country.
Nobody is arguing for banning personal vehicle outright. We should just stop attempting to plan ultra-dense urban environments around the least space efficient transportation options. Many public transportation systems already operate a ‘park and ride’ system by which more remote users are able to park their vehicle at a distant hub and then ride public transportation into more dense areas.
Also, assuming that a future transportation system must look exactly like the one we have today - but bigger, is short sighted. If more people are needing to have a personal vehicle option in an infrequent manner, services to provide those vehicles will be required. Just because you personally can’t make it work tomorrow doesn’t mean that the goal of robust public transport in urban areas is infeasible.
The parents of the youtuber Technology Connections life on a farm, yet they own an EV, and apparently they never use charging stations as the range on a second hand one is more than good enough for regular trips despite going to an entire city over.
Modern EVs have a range starting at 400km nowadays, and I did say that highway rest stops should have charging stations. No matter how quickly you need to get somewhere, it can’t be so desperate that you can’t afford a half hour stop every three or four hours. And if it is, it sounds like something you probably shouldn’t be driving yourself for and instead be calling for an ambulance or helicopter.
In the end, my argument is that all this shit about not having enough fast charging stations is going about things backwards. Charging stations shouldn’t be concentrated in cities, but instead along the highway, as EV range is great enough that daily transit doesn’t require charging along the way, or even at the destination.
Bc has quite a few charging stations, all along the highways straight out of town too
This also gives the people who actually need to drive (contractors, etc.) an easier time because of reduced traffic.
EV is for sure the way to go for short trips if you’re not a fan of people and public transportation. I live in a relatively small suburb and public transportation is terrible. I’m not going to uber or take a cab anywhere. I will drive myself. With having an EV you charge it at home and/or work, and you plan your charges on a trip. It’s only a big deal if you are lobbying against electric, have no idea how it actually works, or a troll.
If you’re that worried about a vacation (it’s literally no big deal now and with charges being added daily it will be less of an issue) rent yourself a dinosaur burning vehicle for your trip. That’s always a better option anyways, keeps miles off yours and you don’t have to give a shit if something goes wrong, they’ll give you another. Door ding? Pffft. I have nice cars and I take a rental for vacation.
Try saying that when your commute involves spending an hour in rush hour going a single kilometer that a subway does in five minutes. Your situation isn’t an argument against public transit, but for making decent public transit. Of course you’re going to chose a car if there’s no good public transit where you live. But what if there’s a bus terminal five minute walk from where you live, or a subway station in ten minutes by bike with parking, and the rest of the trip takes half as long as it does by car, at a fraction of the yearly cost (gas, insurance, maintenance, licensing), and you can even sleep on the trip because you’re not the one driving. Not to mention never having to worry about finding parking near your destination if you’re not paying for a dedicated spot.
This is the reality for those of us who are able to use transit on a regular basis, and we only pay like 15 minutes a day from our wages for this service, not a week’s worth every month to own a car. It’s even better in the EU, like in Germany or Spain, since high speed rail means that you can go pretty much anywhere you want, even on vacation, without a car. And for cheap. One guy ran the numbers, and for 10% the cost of owning a car, he was able to get a yearly pass for both high speed rail and city transit in two different cities for the cost of owning and operating a car for a year.
I get it, I agree we need better public transportation. I don’t care how good or fast it is, I’m not going to use it. I won’t live in area where I would need to though. I don’t want to sit on a bus or subway with people I don’t know. I’ll pass. People are disgusting.
You are also people :)
Yup. I do also have good hygiene so the other humans I do come in contact don’t have to deal with someone that smells like a buffalo or have breath that smells like they took and shit and shoved it in their mouth.
I’m not against EVs, but let’s not forget that they are still expensive and inefficient car infrastructure. EVs won’t do anything about congestion on the 401, or suburban sprawl causing the housing crisis.
Cars will always exist, but what we really need is more public transportation. It’s a no brainer to have a high speed train from London to Quebec City. And electric bikes — yes biking in winter is fine, people all over the world do it, Canadians used to do it before cars took over. You just need good bike infrastructure and dedicated snow removal for bikes.
If EVs are a “key part” of Canada’s climate strategy, we are all seriously fucked.
Care to explain? They’re a massive environmental leap forward from ICE vehicles. Many places in Canada need transport just like personal vehicles, and transportation is a huge portion of Canada’s GHG emissions. So how else would we reduce that portion of our environmental footprint?
EVs are an environmental disaster because:
one, even a minor accident makes the vehicle unrepairable, because the battery packs can’t be tested to verify if they’ve been damaged
and
two, battery packs are worth up to 50% of an EVs’ price, so replacing them is cost-prohibitive, so EVs are written off after 8-10 yrs (because the batteries are old tech at that point and can cost upwards of $15k to replace).
A buddy of mine is working with provincial electricity authorities to create a ‘second use lifeline’ for car batteries. Even if a battery pack only has 70% of its capacity left, it can be stacked in a steel box with a dozen others, and used to balance demand on the grid - absorbing excess capacity minute-to-minute, and putting it back on the grid when demand is highest. They would continue to use the pack until it was down to about 45-50% of its capacity, then send it off for recycling. The only reason it hasn’t been rolled out anywhere is that the competition for used car batteries is fierce.
Why is it people always skip the second part of the article?
“Electric car batteries aren’t very difficult to get rid of because even if they’ve outlasted the usefulness for an electric car, they’re still worth quite a lot to someone,” says Jake Fisher, Consumer Reports’ senior director of auto testing.
The one thing advocates against EV’s conveniently ignore, is that batteries are unlikely to go straight to landfill.
The other thing is that batteries are rapidly evolving and even companies like CATL apparently have a battery which has greatly improved energy density… As time progresses, Electric cars will require fewer batteries In fact, technologies like Lithium Air batteries (under development), offer 5x greater density, and other technologies like Solid State Sulfide are also in development.
There’s so much work happening here. And it’s already proven on average that they’re already more environmentally friendly (and will soon be substantially more so).
8-10yrs? Why on earth would a functioning 500km range EV that’s 10yrs old be labelled as scrap-worthy?
Have you ever been in a car accident and dealt with an insurance company? Not worth the time effort or $ according to them, and I’m taking conventional vehicles.
That doesn’t seem relevant to my ask of clarity on the second point that doesn’t involve accidents.
Because the cost of replacing the batteries is more than the car is worth.
But there’s very low likelihood that a battery will need replacing within the first 20 years.
EV batteries, just like the battery in your phone or laptop degrade over time from use and charging. The internal chemistry changes and usually yields one of two results depending on a number of factors:
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The battery lifespan on a single charge becomes degraded. Sure maybe your EV had a 500km range when it was new, but over time, that decreases due to battery degradation. Thankfully, due to how many cells an EV battery has, the wear is more evenly distributed than in a phone or laptop, but EV’s still lose 1-5% of total range capacity per year on average. So after 10 years, your 500km range may be decreased by between 50-250 km. (https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/how-long-do-ev-batteries-last) shows that around 8.5% of 2013 tesla model 3’s owned by members of the site’s community have needed a battery pack replacement due to range issues
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Catastrophic failure chances increase as batteries age. This is due to several factors, but as age increases, battery temperatures trend higher for the same load, which can increase risk of failure. When an EV battery pack fails, it’s very not good. Lithium ion battery fires are self oxidizing, they feed their own fire. You can’t just spray it down 2ith water, it’ll reignite. You have to let the fire burn itself out, or (as has been used for some fires) dig a trench, fill the trench with water, and then drag the car into the trench.
All this is to say considering the above factors, at a certain point, every current EV will need a battery pack replacement. With our current technology, the battery pack can cost between $10k-25k. When a 2013 Model S costs 26k used, I don’t know that many people would want to spend $20k to replace the battery pack on it.
1-5% of total range capacity per year on average
That’s nowhere near how little degredation is actually seen in the data you yourself provided.
And you’re cherry-picking the worst car in the study to highlight (Tesla Model S).
You know, I did misinterpret the study data pretty hard. Hazards of rushing a comment I suppose.
Though, the same article I shared does highlight that the major EV manufacturers do warranty for 30-40% degregation within a 8-10 year period depending on the manufacturer, which even taking the best combination of those 2 values (30%/10 years) does mean that the manufacturers have decided that they could, in their worst case scenario lose up to 3% capacity per year before they’ll honour a warranty. So… take that how you will I suppose.
As for the cherry picking, I’ll admit that was disingenuous, but not intentional. Again, rushing research causes sloppy mistakes.
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The one thing that we haven’t seen yet is supply and demand for batteries and if that will pan out 10 years from now. That and tech advances.
The other issue is where they are. Two thousand chargers in Montreal do you no good if you’re on the Transcananda out near Longlac, Ont., in that area where there’s no cell phone coverage.
I don’t really know the area or charger quality, but there’s a 50kW Ivy station in Geraldton, a total of 38km away from Longlac, Ont.
I picked Longlac because there’s a long stretch of pretty-much-nothing to the east of it until Calstock (Geraldton’s to the west). Even if you’re driving an ICE vehicle, you want to keep an eye on your gas if you’re up that way. You’d need to be even more careful if you were driving an electric on a -36C January morning. Maybe one of the handful of campgrounds or tourist resorts along that stretch has a charger (if they don’t, they should get some put in, 'cause they’d probably make a killing).
There’s a few chargers in Hearst, ~250km to the east of Geraldton (210km east of Longlac). Most EVs can easily do 250km in -36° weather. That’s one of the longest stretches of major highway in Ont without a charger, but it’s certainly short enough for the average EV to do just fine even in harsh conditions.
Fair enough. The last time I looked into range figures was a few years ago when I was last in the market for a car, and I couldn’t get a lot of data on cold weather ranges (lower, yes, but by how much? No one wanted to say.)
The standard safe estimate is ~⅓ reduction when temps are around -25° to -30°, but it varies by car as to how much each degree affects that particular battery design.
You can use abetterrouteplanner.com and put in actual drives for different car models and in the settings you can set temperature, headwind, etc…
This is a bad analysis. Chargers per car is only one way to look at it. What about chargers per capita, chargers per road km, chargers person per land area, etc… oh? In all of those metrics Canadian provinces are leaders? You don’t say.
https://public.tableau.com/views/EVFastChargingPlugStandards/RegionrankingsforDCChargers
Wow, the table in that article really shows how far behind we are. 0.1 charging stations per 100 vehicles whereas the average is about 4 per 100 vehicles in the US
I work in this industry. The number of chargers is set to explode in the next 2 years.
In my city I’ve noticed a few locations in parking lots of big box stores that are being prepped for what looks like a bunch of charging stations.
We recently did a road trip with our plugin hybrid and there were more chargers in reality than showed up in the apps yet.
An equally important number is how many of the installed chargers are functional on any given day.
In my experience, there are a lot offline for days at a time.
We don’t only need to install more, we need to maintain them after install.
So, a few things…
Most homes that I’ve been in have electricity. If you have a wall socket, you have a car charger. You might not be doing 500km every day, but you’ll be charging.
Second, most underground parking spots can have a 15A, 20A, or 50A plugs installed. My office has underground parking, and every stall has a 120V 15A plug, included in the monthly cost of parking… PLUS it has 10 L2 chargers available, which aren’t available to the general public. This article probably only includes public infrastructure, but there is a metric fuckload of private infrastructure as well.
Last, I’ve done trips from Montreal to Havre St Pierre (via Lac St. Jean!) and on a different trip, to Gaspé. The charging network is already very, very good. Even places without cell coverage have MULTIPLE public overnight chargers – I was astounded that Saint Michael du Squatec had three publicly available chargers, plus a campground that will let you plug into a 50A socket for free. On both trips (which lasted a month each) I had to wait for a fast charger just two times. Once for 10 minutes, and another for about 30. I realize this will change as more electric cars hit the roads – but every company (The Electric Circuit, Chargepoint, Flo, major gas station brands) are all installing new infrastructure weekly.
My office has underground parking, and every stall has a 120V 15A plug
and how many spots in that underground parking lot? Just a hundred would be another 1500amp service just for that.
Maybe 100 in total? Doesn’t matter… It used to be a factory, and it’s now mixed use. They did a few modernization projects (lighting, replaced old power-hungry equipment), and reduced their average power draw by 1MW. And there aren’t that many electric cars, and they’re not all there are the same time. When I need to charge, I plug it in, but schedule the charge to start at 1am when demand drops off.
as someone owns an EV, some areas really have no chargers. I lived in Markham, ON, for the last 5 years and the only public fast charger at city hall is always down. Only other option is to sit at the YMCA parking lot.
There’s multiple at Markville Mall, one is East Markham at the Scotiabank on HWY48, a set of them at the Hyundai Canada head office that are open to the public, and two Tesla supercharger sites in addition to the two you mentioned. That’s just the DC Fast chargers, there’s more than a few level 2 chargers at grocery stores, civic centres, and shopping malls.
Only one I’ve noticed was the Tesla chargers at Markville Mall.
There are Flo network chargers near the mall entrance closest to the Tesla chargers. One 50kw ccs and a Chademo plus two level 2 chargers.
Get the Plushare app to find charger locations.
You’ve got a typo there. https://PlugShare.com/
Thanks, my day is not complete without at least one typo!
There is something wrong with the data.
It claims only 500 chargers for all of Quebec, but Montréal alone has 2053 chargers.
Use this source: https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_locations.html#/analyze?fuel=ELEC and filter it to DC Fast Chargers
And there’s only 185 charging locations in Quebec (with 529 ports, which is NOT how they should be counted).
