Elinda wrote:
For normal commuting purposes, I'd imagine folks would just charge them at home. They need to be on the thru-ways - and they're not. Maybe that's cuz the time needed to charge is longer than people want to sit at a travel plaza.
And that's really the point I was trying to get at. It's not really just about how many charging stations there are, but that once you actually drive an electric car for any length of time, you adjust your use of the car so as to not need to use them. I know several people who ran out and bought Leafs or Volts a few years back when both hit the market (I want to say 2009, might have been early 2010 though). In addition to the usual interest and excitement about an electric car, all of them initially were super interested in the idea that there would be charging stations all over town that they could use. They would talk about how they could locate charging stations in areas they were planning to go so as to charge whilst shopping, or at the movies, or out to dinner, etc. That rapidly changed to disappointment when they realized that while there were some charging stations out there, the odds of finding one right where you planned on going that day when you happened to be there and needed it were remarkably small.
Everyone I know who owns an electric car more or less assumes that they will never be able to find a charging station
when they need one. Doing otherwise will eventually result in your getting stranded with an uncharged electric car somewhere. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but counting on there being a charging station for you to use while away from home will eventually fail you. Yes, this was compounded early on by non-accessible charging stations showing up on the nav systems, but that's still not the whole problem. It's one thing to look at a map find an open charger and go there. It's a whole different thing to say "I'm going to be at this location from 11AM to 3PM tomorrow, and there's a charger a block away, so I'll count on parking there and getting a charge". You don't tend to go where the chargers are. You go where you need to go and hope there's a charger near there. But you're playing an odds game doing that. So since you can't ever be 100% certain that charging station right near where you'll be parked for a couple hours will be open, you must assume it wont be. Thus, you will always make sure you have enough charge on your car to get to where you're going and home without needing a charge.
End result is that any public charging infrastructure will, merely by the nature of the beast, be inefficiently applied to the market needs. There's kinda no way around that.