Just get rid of the charging stations. It’s ridiculous that EV owners should expect to charge their cars anywhere but at home or at work.
Just get rid of the charging stations. It’s ridiculous that EV owners should expect to charge their cars anywhere but at home or at work.
Why would it be ridiculous for EV owners to charge cars away from home or work? l’d say that it’s pretty necessary for long-distance trips.
EDIT:
Long distance power transmission is normally done with aluminum lines, rather than copper.
https://www.anixter.com/en_au/resources/literature/wire-wisdom/copper-vs-aluminum-conductors.html
Resistance is a function of the material’s conductivity and the cross-sectional area of a cable. If aluminum has 61% the conductivity of copper, then one needs 1÷0.61=1.63 times the cross-sectional area for an aluminum cable to have the same resistance. That’s a radius 1.63^0.5 = 1.28 times the radius of an equivalent copper cable.
So you only need an aluminum cable with a radius 28% larger to achieve the same overall resistance.
In the case of the EV charging cables, flexibility is at a premium, and increasing the radius decreases that. But my guess is that it’s probably within the range of acceptability to use a bulkier aluminum cable, if need be.
EDIT2: I was also going to suggest liquid-cooled cables, which electric arc furnaces use for their power busses. Apparently Tesla already tried using experimental liquid-cooled cables, a decade back:
https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-ends-its-thin-liquid-cooled-supercharger-wire-experiment-in-mountain-view-but-the-tech-lives-on/
That would have been liquid-cooled copper, but one could presumably also do liquid-cooled aluminum. That’s another option, if one wants to keep heat under control with higher resistance from a cable. Probably some extra cost for the cooling system, and there’s some extra waste of energy as conversion to heat that way, but I doubt that it’d make EV charging impractical, were that what was required to deal with people stealing copper.
Battery powered EVs should not be used for long-distance trips.
I mean…I agree with you that EVs are relatively-poorly-suited compared to ICEs for long distance trips, and if I had both a gasoline-powered and electricity-powered vehicle, I’d use the gasoline-powered one for a long-distance trip… but not everyone is going to own both. It’s hardly reasonable to say “well, people who own EVs just can’t travel long distances”.
Take a bus or a train. Public transit is of course the real solution. Transitioning from ICE personal vehicles to personal BEVs doesn’t really solve much and arguably creates more problems.