Typically, it takes around 10 hours to charge an electric vehicle. Even with fast-charging techniques, you’re still looking at a minimum of 30 minutes – and that’s if there’s an open spot at a charging station.
Spoiler alert: It won’t be possible or practical.
The real spoiler is that for easily 4/5 or more of people, it doesn’t even matter. Charging happens at home, overnight, or at work during the workday. Multi-hour charge times are irrelevant for these people. Super mega ultra fast charge to 400+ mile ranges are reserved for a minority of people that make regular, long road trips and for people that currently park on the street with zero access to regular charge infrastructure who would be WAY better-served by their city taking bikeped/public transit infrastructure seriously.
Mostly, tech like this exclusively has applications for commercial charge stations designed to be drop-in gas station replacements. We’d nearly all save a lot of money and get better service from not trying to replicate that kind of infrastructure in our future.
But then again, I’m the guy discouraging people from buying any vehicle, EV or otherwise, and instead drive whatever beater they already have right to their MPC meetings to demand better urban design.
Insert some dude who lives way out in the countryside replyguying me with “well actually I drive 700miles round trip every day and you can’t speak for me!” here.
I agree. But it is still nice to have fast charging when you need to fill up on the road. People who aren’t used to “filling up” at home overnight will think that fast charging is far more important than it actually is, but it is still a quality of life improvement to most electric car owners for the occasional long trip.
Environmentalists paying attention to battery tech have learned too well to not take these kinds of announcements seriously after years and years of no major changes.
