I live in semi-rural Quebec. I can either drive to a place about 5 minutes from my home and charge for a few dollars, takes about 5 hours. Park and rides also have charging stations so going to Montreal means I can charge during the work day. I only use my car like twice a week when I need to visit family or go to the office, so your mileage may vary.
The real solution for about 75% of people isn’t EV, it’s public transportation and proper bike infrastructure/bike shares/mixed use neighborhoods/density. That is especially true for people living in places dense enough to have apartments. An EV is nice, but it is a patch, not a fix. Not needing a car is the fix. Cities just can’t afford to have one car per 2-3 person.
Not needing a car would be ideal, but less likely for rural or semi-rural areas.
However
— if you have off street parking, we need to incent the owner/association to add chargers. Some of that will happen naturally as EV become more common, but that takes time
— the park-n-ride charger is a great start, but what if you could also top off at work, at groceries, at the shopping center, at theme parks: plug in everywhere you go? It could be slow charging, inexpensive, scalable, and not taking extra time beyond the primary reason you’re there: the goal could be to simply replace the charge used to get there
Oh some groceries have them. One even has a free setup. Just park there and recover like 5km worth of charge while doing groceries, but I forgot they exist because I don’t do my groceries in a car. Funny enough, the bicycle shop has a plug too. Government is paying part of the cost for home chargers but I just temporarily live in a friend’s basement so that’s not ideal for me.
I live in semi-rural Quebec. I can either drive to a place about 5 minutes from my home and charge for a few dollars, takes about 5 hours. Park and rides also have charging stations so going to Montreal means I can charge during the work day. I only use my car like twice a week when I need to visit family or go to the office, so your mileage may vary.
The real solution for about 75% of people isn’t EV, it’s public transportation and proper bike infrastructure/bike shares/mixed use neighborhoods/density. That is especially true for people living in places dense enough to have apartments. An EV is nice, but it is a patch, not a fix. Not needing a car is the fix. Cities just can’t afford to have one car per 2-3 person.
Not needing a car would be ideal, but less likely for rural or semi-rural areas.
However
— if you have off street parking, we need to incent the owner/association to add chargers. Some of that will happen naturally as EV become more common, but that takes time
— the park-n-ride charger is a great start, but what if you could also top off at work, at groceries, at the shopping center, at theme parks: plug in everywhere you go? It could be slow charging, inexpensive, scalable, and not taking extra time beyond the primary reason you’re there: the goal could be to simply replace the charge used to get there
Oh some groceries have them. One even has a free setup. Just park there and recover like 5km worth of charge while doing groceries, but I forgot they exist because I don’t do my groceries in a car. Funny enough, the bicycle shop has a plug too. Government is paying part of the cost for home chargers but I just temporarily live in a friend’s basement so that’s not ideal for me.