And the fact that millions of people live in flats, condos, terraced houses with no private parking spots and they can't charge their cars overnight. Here in UK the vast majority of people I know live in places where it would be impossible to take out a charging cable at night, so the only option is...charging at work? But who will foot the bill for installing chargers at literally every single parking spot everywhere?
I have an expensive American electric car and use it in Europe.
Before buying it I was worried about all the things you mention.
Now that I have been using it for some time normal cars look crazy outdated to me. Going to some place(gas stations) just to fill the tank. Why? It should be in my home, like with my electric car.
Lots of European houses have natural gas installations on homes, so why can't we just plug our vehicles to that, like we do with electric.
In any western country there are electric cables everywhere since 100 years ago or so, and most are not used at night, so it is not a big deal.
Impossible to take a charging cable at night? In the UK?.
I routinely use my car in Spain and Portugal, with no significant problems.
The only problem is that we attract significant attention everywhere we go.
>>Impossible to take a charging cable at night? In the UK?.
I used to live in a terraced house, and sometime I would park right in front of my door and sometime I would have to park 100m away. In any case, if I ran a cable from my door to my car I'm sure it would get cut sooner or later, just like wing mirrors get broken every now and then. If you live in the 4th floor of a condo, how do you connect then? And I don't understand what you mean by natural gas. Cars that can run on gas use LPG, so you would need to liquify the gas coming for your cooker somehow.
Seems like battery swaps are the solution to this. Essentially the battery pack is designed to be easily removable and you just "lease" it in one way or another.
There's a lot of big challenges to this (weight of batteries, standardization, convenient swap stations, etc.) but I haven't heard of any better ideas at this point.
Houses there can cost half a million pounds and more. They are not cheap by any means. Yet the only parking is on the street - and sometimes you park in front of your door, sometimes down the street, you can't possibly run a cable down from your door. So what do you do? Does the city council install 50x chargers along the curb for everyone? Why would the residents agree for a bump in their council tax to do that? They are already driving cars, there's nothing wrong with them, why pay for this?
I'm not saying I'm against the idea of electric cars. I love them. But it's going to be super hard to do properly, because most people don't live in places with their own driveways and can't run cables from their homes.
