I wouldn't say every town, but at least every 100 miles (town or not).So im here in rural MO right now have a planned 110v charging in my cabin right now. 110v 3mph. I have planned it and do this often so no big beans for me. But is so not something regular folks need in their lives. To make road tripping work ou in this vast country we need a DCFC charger in every town with more than 1000 souls.
Yah! L1 & L2 is not going to cut it at all. The couple of L2 Charge point stations within 50 miles in any direction actually had a queue. 3-4 TSLA's, a Bolt and a local Leaf were jockeying for position all Saturday. As soon as the TSLA guys got in, they refused to move, even after one was fully charged.Yes and most of them on plug share are L1 and L2
We don't disagree much here. I was thinking of small towns, cuz I drive in them a lot. And they mostly don't have any L3 availability, which is bad for people who don't live in single family homes.Might be an OK location in small towns, more for the reason that there may not be anybody else putting in chargers there. Dealers often need them just to properly do sales and service of EVs (at least L2, anyway).
But as you said, I look at dealerships as more of a fall-back at best. Some have proposed dealerships as primary locations, simply because there's thousands of them, and they sell the cars anyway. But that doesn't make any more sense than dealers being gas stations. Primary road trip DCFC needs better placement than dealerships. Dealerships often need to lock down access to their lots after-hours, don't need to incur the expense of point-of-sale DCFC chargers (and sure don't need to give it away for free), need their chargers open for their own use, as well as the placement issues I noted above.
We just need more build-out from actual charging networks like EA, IMO.
Even for the people without a single family home, I think the right solution is L2 being installed where people live (apartments, condos). I know some won't have that and will need to DCFC, but frankly, I don't think people that don't have L2 available for 90% of their routine charging for good candidates for BEV at all. Full-time DCFC is a poor use of precious resources, and is bad for the batteries anyway.We don't disagree much here. I was thinking of small towns, cuz I drive in them a lot. And they mostly don't have any L3 availability, which is bad for people who don't live in single family homes.
If a dealership chooses to install DCFC, that's fine. But I don't see any good reason for Ford to pay for any of it. They actually make less profit on BEV than ICE sales, so it doesn't make sense for them to subsidize chargers like that.Also, yes, they are expensive. I'm thinking that Ford should pay at least half the cost of installing the DCFCs in a dealership. (I do think that the comparison of DCFC network to gas stations is a little strained, for a variety of reasons. They are different animals, with different capacities and needs.)
I get the desire to want more DCFC. And we definitely need it. I just don't agree that Ford should be installing chargers just because they sell a some BEVs. And because Tesla did it that way (they had little choice as the trailblazer a decade before the rest). Ford doing it would in effect subsidize their competition (since all but Tesla use CCS). And limiting them would be a terrible waste of resources. Better to promote EA, CP, EVgo and the others that are universal (minus Tesla).Finally, I agree philosophically that DCFC should probably not be done by car manufacturers over the long term, because of the tendency to make them proprietary, which is a bad deal.
Having said all of that, if Ford and Chevy would install two L3s in every dealership in the next six months, it would go a long way, very quickly, in filling some big holes in the current charging infrastructure. so, I guess, I'm arguing for stop-gap as well as fall back.
They should lobby their landlords to install much cheaper L2.But for those people in small towns who live in apartments, they need a DCFC close by to charge once per week. Or, at least, it would be nice...