Buried deep in the article, what the clickbait headline alludes to: Car chargers are too complicated and expensive. We can make them simpler and cheaper while keeping them safe, which would let us build many more charging stations.
I must say I'm a little confused by their proposal: yes, the later stages of the power conversion in the charger provide the galvanic isolation, but they also provide a more essential role of voltage conversion and current regulation. Connecting a battery directly to a grid-connected rectifier is likely to get melty and or explodey pretty quick, as huge amounts of current will flow in either direction to try to equalise the almost certainly quite-unequal voltages.
Fast chargers work because they can regulate the current flowing into the battery and convert the grid voltage to allow that to happen. Batteries are charged by feeding them with a constant current until you reach a certain voltage near 100% charge, then letting the current drop to get to a complete charge (which is part of why 20% to 80% charges are much faster than complete charges). This is 100% not what you get if you just cut out the charge circuit completely, you instead get a blown fuse at best or a fire at worst. There may be cheaper options for the charge circuit if you don't need them to provide the isolation, but they don't really discuss that, they just talk as if the cost would go to zero.
(For slow charging, this circuit still exists, it's just in the car instead. But it's quite hard to fit something that can handle the power involved in fast charging into a car, which is why it's in the charger side instead).
They propose to address this with a buck regulator:
> [If] we are to get rid of galvanic isolation [there's still a ] need to prevent mismatches between the utility’s AC line voltage and that of the EV battery.
> The solution to this problem is a device called a buck regulator (or buck converter). A buck regulator is similar, functionally, to a step-down transformer, except that it handles DC current rather than AC. In the event that the utility’s AC voltage exceeds the battery voltage, the buck regulator operates like a transformer and steps it down. In comparison with an isolation link of the same power rating, a buck regulator would cost less than 10 percent and the power loss would be less than 20 percent.
What do you mean buried? The article says that at the end of the introduction section.
And it's pretty reasonable to explain how current chargers exist before suggesting the alternative. There are nicely labeled sections to help with skipping forward.
Where I live the electricity is primarily generated by fossil fuels. The light is weak for many months of the year, and wind power is apparently way too expensive if they remove the subsidies (weird!).
Wouldn’t gas cars just eliminate the middleman of fossil fuels -> power plant -> car? Like we did before EVs?
I would love nuclear power but it doesn’t appear to be happening
EVs emit less carbon even when powered by a fossil fuel dominated grid. The power plant is more efficient than your car, and often uses LNG rather than petrol or diesel, and there are still some renewables in almost any grid. In addition, air pollution close to where you live will be lower. In addition, the grid can be decarbonised over time and your car will become greener as it does.
Electric engines are 90-95 efficient in converting power to motion.
Even the very best experimental gasoline engines in Toyota's labs are around 30-35% efficient.
Even if all gasoline and diesel was used in massive generator units to produce electricity, EVs would still be better for the environment and the total gasoline/diesel usage would go down.
As of 2018, 94% of the US population lived in an area where charging an EV would emit less than a >50mpg car. In terms of electricity grid regions, an EV has lower emissions than a 50 mpg gasoline vehicle in 85% of them. [1] Yes, most of the US is still powered by fossil fuels, but ICE tailpipe emissions are very different than power plant emissions.
As for why switching to EVs is preferred to sticking with gas cars, aside from climate change, tailpipe emissions from ICE vehicles cause ∼200,000 early deaths to occur in the U.S. each year [2] (old data, but average MPG of vehicles in the US has barely changed, though particulate matter is better filtered, though there are more vehicles and annual vehicle miles traveled in the US has increased. Hard to pin an exact number without newer research, but without any doubt many thousands are dying from the pollution.)
As far as climate change goes, over a quarter comes from transportation in the US [3]. EVs alone won't take that to single numbers, but halving transportation emissions would still be significant progress.
As far as
> The light is weak for many months of the year, and wind power is apparently way too expensive if they remove the subsidies (weird!)
Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $7 trillion or 7.1 percent of global GDP in 2022 [4]. 70% of energy subsidies go towards fossil fuels (admittedly not the case in the US though.) [5] But subsidies aside, solar and wind is very price competitive with gas (and often far cheaper than coal) [6].
There's also $24.662 trillion in externalities for energy and transport (equivalent to 28.7% of global GDP) [7]. So sticking with ICE cars and fossil fuels is unlikely to be a smart decision from a financial perspective.
It would be nice if instead of the fast charging problem the focus would be shifted to standardized battery packs, that can be field replaced. I don't really want to own 50-100kwh battery. I just want to use the charge in it and happy to pay for that.
I remember reading an article somewhere which explained why this was an impractical issue. I forget the details, but I think issues like weight, ending up with a battery pack that doesn’t hold its charge well, etc. were all big concerns. Weight seems like it would be a huge problem given that the battery is the largest component of the EV drive train and it’s usually kept along the floor of the EV for weight distribution.
Realistically, this is a pipe dream. China has had a few that are trying this NIO being the most well known.
To me, it's not really viable. The 3 main problems are - The extra costs in a vehicle to allow swapping within say 5 minutes is non-trivial. The physical space required to house X number of batteries ready, X number swap ready is a lot at any moderate volume. Last, Batteries are not universal and now you're constricting either the design of all cars or you have to go to a specific swap station that houses your battery, related to the physical space. I would not accept a battery w/ less volume.
Time will tell if I'm wrong; NIO might do it, but I'm a naysayer for sure.
The main obstacle is battery swap is capex heavy, hence PRC might do it, but most other places, less likely. It's pretty easy to extrapolate PRC auto parking / self driving cars sneaking out during low congestion to hit their battery swap queue. But that is a fairly significant logistics / infra issue when most countries would be lucky to get sufficient fast charging piles in place. Battery volume is probably not an issue since batteries will be rentals for minimum XYZ capacity. And algo might eventually bid for price, i.e. discount rental for partial charge if it means your car go for a swap by itself a couple days earlier.
Would you do it if it was cheaper per kwh? Say you have an EV where any battery you get from the swap station is better than 90% degradation, and you pay $0.40 per kwh for the electricity in the battery- but you get the option to take a battery between 80% and 90% degradation, in which case you get the battery all filled up, but only pay $0.35 per kwh for the electricity in that battery.
Like Henry Ford tried on the Model T: The Model T was offered in three fuels: Gasoline, Electric, and Alcohol. It only took I think less than a year to make it Gasoline only.
Tesla tried battery swapping in 2015 and abandoned it due to a lack of customer interest (and also due to various problems that made the process less straightforward than you'd think). Both the Model S and Model X were designed from the outset to have swappable batteries.
The battery swap feature was implemented only to maximize California clean energy credits. Only enough infrastructure was built to claim the credits.
“In 2013, California revised its Zero Emissions Vehicle credit system so that long-range ZEVs that were able to charge 80% in under 15 minutes earned almost twice as many credits as those that didn’t. Overnight, Tesla’s 85 kWh Model S went from earning four credits per vehicle to seven. Moreover, to earn this dramatic increase in credits, Tesla needed to prove to CARB that such rapid refueling events were possible. By demonstrating battery swap on just one vehicle, Tesla nearly doubled the ZEV credits earned by its entire fleet even if none of them actually used the swap capability.”
Premature reject. It's working in China, it would work in trucking. "Tesla tried" doesn't mean jack. No car manufacturers want to do this because it means loosing a point of innovation. It has to be regulated to happen at scale. It won't happen but not because it can't work. After all... look at 12v car batteries
Well it's patented and Tesla doesn't own the patent. But that aside, you trade a different set of problems, specifically what happens if the pack that is put into your car is damaged and as a result of that damage catches fire when it is discharging? That isn't something that happens with gasoline.
I keep hoping flow batteries can overcome their issues as replacing depleted electrolyte with charged electrolyte is much more like 'refueling' in the current sense of the word.
Contaminants in fuel can cause damage to cars. I don't know if retailers tend to carry insurance for this but typically they are responsible, although proving it may not be easy. I imagine the risk would be quite rare and fairly well handled with insurance.
What's patented? Seems like a ridiculous patent if it entirely covered all practical manner of swapping batteries to recharge an EV.
A battery can weigh up to half a ton. Because of the weight, you want to keep it at a low position in the car. That is not easy to swap. By contrast consider that you charge your car. For a daily commute, the most practical is to charge it on your driveway or at the office. In my case that means I only have to consider public charging on vacations and longer weekend trips. Now this means my net travel speed is lower then. But I can adjust to that.
It is actually practical position for an automated swap. You drive to the position, the door on the ground open, the robot pulls the old battery and installs the new one, no hassle.
I absolutely do not want that unless there are guarantees around the condition of the batteries.
I can't imagine much worse than being on a road trip and quick swapping to a new battery that you discover, after driving away, has significantly degraded performance and range.
Now think about a field you know. Maybe laptops or phones.
Would a standardised battery block in laptops work? The same battery would work in a Frame.work, System76, MacBook air, MacBook pro, a Lenovo Thinkbook and whatever gaming monster there is from Asus.
Sounds stupid, right? It's just as stupid for cars.
And if laptops had battery swapping, would you swap your brand new battery, but empty, to a random one at a swapping station? Would you trust the people and systems that the battery hasn't been tampered with and is in good working order?
I am not sure it is the same. First of all the limitation in usage for a phone/laptop reduces the utility, but for a transportation device it is way worse. On phone/laptop you can use the main functions while charging, but tethered. On a car the main function is the only thing you cant use.
There does not have to have a single battery standard, could be s/m/l, like coincell, aaa, aa etc.
> Would you trust the people and systems that the battery hasn't been tampered with and is in good working order?
Do you trust random utilities/charger manufacture?
> new battery, but empty, to a random one at a swapping station.
Would you care if it is within regulated thresholds and you can get another one any time you want?
Yet standardization across manufacturers is a huge hurdle... Like every automaker has different battery designs, voltages, and cooling systems optimized for their vehicles. Plus, swapping stations require massive infrastructure investments and a steady supply of charged packs, which means even more logistics and costs.
is that infra more expensive than preparing for the holiday events when half the nation decides to relocate to somewhere else and they need on the go charging? Not just the charging stations, but grid usage etc.
The argument sounds kind of persuasive to a layman (even one that did a little bit of EE a while back), but my gut says there would be no need to write this article if there weren't regulations or other engineering traditions that decided galvanic isolation is necessary for safety.
I guess the difference is galvanic isolation is physically (i.e. passively) fail safe, while ground detection is an active safety measure? You can always put in two ground wires in the current system too...
Is there some way for the ground wire to have a signal in it even if it were broken (via EMF)? Can the chip fail in an unsafe way?
The system proposed in this piece could probably be safely implemented, but it would much more challenging to do than the author seems to indicate. There are a variety of failure modes that they ignore.
The author also glosses over a 20% power loss (to heating), which would cost money and bulk to dissipate.
I particularly dislike how this article tries to sweep the power loss issue under the rug: The first mention of loss says that the isolation link is "responsible for about 50 percent of the charger’s power loss". The second mention of loss says "the power loss would be less than 20 percent". They want you to think that those numbers are comparable, and that they've reduced loss from 50% to 20%.
We also require arc-fault breakers in the electrical code for new construction despite even their first-order effects being negative. We're drowning in over-regulation and the most prominent people pretending to care aren't going after the real problems.
Arc-fault protections are required primarily due to lobbying by receptacle and panel manufactures, not because they provide a real benefit. The number of people injured due to arc faults is vanishingly low, and a better solution to the majority of applications is to replace the NEMA 5-15 receptacle with almost literally any other (or at least improve upon the design). A more fitting comparison might be ground-fault circuit protections, which do very much have real benefits in all required situations without any drawbacks, while being very cheap to implement (effectively, a current clamp driving a relay).
On the other hand, feeding 7.2kV down a wire handled by very normal people in very normal (read: adverse; wet, humid, non-careful) conditions without any passive protections, relying on the portable (car) end to perform all of the shock safety is laughable at best. A bug in the car’s charging circuit (hardware, firmware, or software) and whoops, the chassis has 7200V to ground when the cable gets plugged in during a rainstorm.
Engineering safety regulations and guidelines are written in blood. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is either ignorant of the dangers involved, or narcissistic to the point of believing they are immune to danger.
Construction with decades old regulations and fast paced technology is a pretty different environment from electric vehicle development where regulators are (usually) actively trying to make things easier.
I can't help but wonder while reading the article: why didn't this win in the market? As the author mentioned, the tech was there with the prototypes they built over 20 years ago. Why did Tesla and every other electric car manufacturer decide to go in a different direction?
For context, US agriculture subsidies come principally in the form of Price Loss Coverage (PLC) and Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC). These programs pay subsidies to farmers based on price or revenue losses for covered commodities like corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton. Farmers choose between PLC, which pays based on national average prices, and ARC, which pays based on county or individual farm revenue.
ARC and PLC are projected to cost approximately $1.6 billion in 2025, which is more than triple their 2024 levels, but The American Relief Act of 2025 allocated $31 billion in ad hoc disaster aid to farmers. So maybe I was wrong about ARC/PLC being the principal method of subsidy?
> Under current law, USDA’s total outlays for 2025 are estimated at $231 billion. Outlays for
mandatory programs are $189.6 billion, 82.1 percent of total outlays.[0]
We passed legislation authorizing spending a few billion ($7.5B, 2021 Infrastructure and Jobs Act), and have deployed a portion of it. Most of the authorized $$$ has not yet been spent; it unlocks over the decade from 2021-2030. One fault of the bill is it depends on states actually doing the work to build these stations; the feds aren't doing it directly. If states drag their feet, stations don't get built.
The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) Discretionary Grant Program have made significant progress in expanding electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure across the United States.
As of July 2024, eight states had opened their first NEVI-funded stations, totaling 61 ports, and powered thousands of charging sessions.
Over the course of the Biden-Harris Administration, the number of publicly available EV chargers more than doubled. With approximately 1,000 new public chargers being added each week, there are over 200,000 publicly available charging ports.
It's irritating to see Joe Rogan's moronic talking points repeated uncritically in these hallowed halls. Truly, as Brandolini[0] observed, public discourse is flooded with misinformation faster than we can bail it out.
A big issue I see with this is that it would necessitate a new fast charging standard, which (due to the extra ground connection) could not be backwards compatible with any existing fast charging standard - rendering it useless for the 40 million electric cars already on the roads worldwide.
Right after we just changed charging standards here in the US. And from what I've heard the cost and time required to run service to a charging station far exceeds the cost of the charging station itself.
If you’re not being facetious, a unit of currency, minted out of metals of varying preciousness throughout the ages in the shape of a circle, usually imprinted with the monarch or head of state on one side and a symbol on the other.
If you’re being facetious, you’re probably aware that “coin-op” refers to any simply-operated payment terminal, as you’d find in a do-it-yourself car wash or parking meter (that doesn’t rely on some stupid phone app). In the past, you inserted the aforementioned coins into a slot, which it counted and provided you with some amount of time of use based on the amount you insert (coin op = coin operated). Nowadays, while there are still coin-op terminals (even in the western world!) they’re being replaced more and more by a pin-pad for processing credit- or debit-card transactions.
These are much preferable to having to use a website or an app, make an account, verify your account, add you personal information, add your vehicle and plate information, add your credit card information, etc. for each different network you’re trying to use, be it parking, car washing, or in this case, car charging. In the past (or present, for the majority of the population), you could drive up to a gas station, pay with some form of currency or card, and receive fuel. The parent was suggestion that maybe, people don’t want to have to deal with more complexity than that while charging their vehicles, especially when travelling to different cities/counties/countries, which are the most likely times they would need to use not-at-home charging (and also the most likely times they’d encounter a new network, and have to go through the rigamarole of new app/website, account, details, etc). By just putting a coin-op (or if you insist on pedantic precision, pin-pad-op) receptacle, someone can pull up, plug in, pay, and be on their way in 30 seconds or less.
Why reinvent the wheel and do anything else, which would take more effort in the best case scenario? If you insist on some godforsaken phone app, make that an option, but I imagine you’ll find most people won’t use it unless forced to.
L1 charging isn't really appropriate anywhere except at home or something like an airport parking lot where cars may be plugged in for a significant amount of time.. like 24h+. It's very slow.
It's 7 mph of charging. The average car is driving 60 minutes per day, and if there are chargers everywhere that's 161 miles per day of charge if it's plugged in when not driven.
That covers everything the existing system doesn't already.
EVSEs are more fragile, more prone to vandalism, so more costly to keep running.
240V could use the same wires and double available power, but existing portable chargers never draw more than 16A from 120V, so people can't screw it up.
You don’t really need two ground wires, CP has a diode with series resistance 2.74K to PE (ground) so it’s trivially possible for the EVSE to just send a push/pull waveform over CP and if it reads push but not pull (remember diode) then it knows it’s connected properly.
The return path for the pilot current will be over the PE contact, so it can also be detect and doubly verify that PE is low resistance, although ideally you’d want a much smaller series resistance.
If I understood the article correctly, the high safety comes from having two ground connections and stopping already if one of them is broken. Your way would mean that if PE breaks, and at the same time contact between some high voltage component and the chassis is made, electrocution is possible.
Readit News
Fast chargers work because they can regulate the current flowing into the battery and convert the grid voltage to allow that to happen. Batteries are charged by feeding them with a constant current until you reach a certain voltage near 100% charge, then letting the current drop to get to a complete charge (which is part of why 20% to 80% charges are much faster than complete charges). This is 100% not what you get if you just cut out the charge circuit completely, you instead get a blown fuse at best or a fire at worst. There may be cheaper options for the charge circuit if you don't need them to provide the isolation, but they don't really discuss that, they just talk as if the cost would go to zero.
(For slow charging, this circuit still exists, it's just in the car instead. But it's quite hard to fit something that can handle the power involved in fast charging into a car, which is why it's in the charger side instead).
> [If] we are to get rid of galvanic isolation [there's still a ] need to prevent mismatches between the utility’s AC line voltage and that of the EV battery.
> The solution to this problem is a device called a buck regulator (or buck converter). A buck regulator is similar, functionally, to a step-down transformer, except that it handles DC current rather than AC. In the event that the utility’s AC voltage exceeds the battery voltage, the buck regulator operates like a transformer and steps it down. In comparison with an isolation link of the same power rating, a buck regulator would cost less than 10 percent and the power loss would be less than 20 percent.
And it's pretty reasonable to explain how current chargers exist before suggesting the alternative. There are nicely labeled sections to help with skipping forward.
Wouldn’t gas cars just eliminate the middleman of fossil fuels -> power plant -> car? Like we did before EVs?
I would love nuclear power but it doesn’t appear to be happening
Even the very best experimental gasoline engines in Toyota's labs are around 30-35% efficient.
Even if all gasoline and diesel was used in massive generator units to produce electricity, EVs would still be better for the environment and the total gasoline/diesel usage would go down.
As of 2018, 94% of the US population lived in an area where charging an EV would emit less than a >50mpg car. In terms of electricity grid regions, an EV has lower emissions than a 50 mpg gasoline vehicle in 85% of them. [1] Yes, most of the US is still powered by fossil fuels, but ICE tailpipe emissions are very different than power plant emissions.
As for why switching to EVs is preferred to sticking with gas cars, aside from climate change, tailpipe emissions from ICE vehicles cause ∼200,000 early deaths to occur in the U.S. each year [2] (old data, but average MPG of vehicles in the US has barely changed, though particulate matter is better filtered, though there are more vehicles and annual vehicle miles traveled in the US has increased. Hard to pin an exact number without newer research, but without any doubt many thousands are dying from the pollution.)
As far as climate change goes, over a quarter comes from transportation in the US [3]. EVs alone won't take that to single numbers, but halving transportation emissions would still be significant progress.
As far as
> The light is weak for many months of the year, and wind power is apparently way too expensive if they remove the subsidies (weird!)
Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $7 trillion or 7.1 percent of global GDP in 2022 [4]. 70% of energy subsidies go towards fossil fuels (admittedly not the case in the US though.) [5] But subsidies aside, solar and wind is very price competitive with gas (and often far cheaper than coal) [6].
There's also $24.662 trillion in externalities for energy and transport (equivalent to 28.7% of global GDP) [7]. So sticking with ICE cars and fossil fuels is unlikely to be a smart decision from a financial perspective.
1. https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/2020-05/evs-clean...
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...
3. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...
4. https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...
5. https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-do-government-subsi...
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
7. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962...
https://hbr.org/2024/05/how-one-chinese-ev-company-made-batt...
To me, it's not really viable. The 3 main problems are - The extra costs in a vehicle to allow swapping within say 5 minutes is non-trivial. The physical space required to house X number of batteries ready, X number swap ready is a lot at any moderate volume. Last, Batteries are not universal and now you're constricting either the design of all cars or you have to go to a specific swap station that houses your battery, related to the physical space. I would not accept a battery w/ less volume.
Time will tell if I'm wrong; NIO might do it, but I'm a naysayer for sure.
The main obstacle is battery swap is capex heavy, hence PRC might do it, but most other places, less likely. It's pretty easy to extrapolate PRC auto parking / self driving cars sneaking out during low congestion to hit their battery swap queue. But that is a fairly significant logistics / infra issue when most countries would be lucky to get sufficient fast charging piles in place. Battery volume is probably not an issue since batteries will be rentals for minimum XYZ capacity. And algo might eventually bid for price, i.e. discount rental for partial charge if it means your car go for a swap by itself a couple days earlier.
“In 2013, California revised its Zero Emissions Vehicle credit system so that long-range ZEVs that were able to charge 80% in under 15 minutes earned almost twice as many credits as those that didn’t. Overnight, Tesla’s 85 kWh Model S went from earning four credits per vehicle to seven. Moreover, to earn this dramatic increase in credits, Tesla needed to prove to CARB that such rapid refueling events were possible. By demonstrating battery swap on just one vehicle, Tesla nearly doubled the ZEV credits earned by its entire fleet even if none of them actually used the swap capability.”
They sell a tiny amount of cars still, but hit 500k total production last year, which is not insignificant.
I keep hoping flow batteries can overcome their issues as replacing depleted electrolyte with charged electrolyte is much more like 'refueling' in the current sense of the word.
What's patented? Seems like a ridiculous patent if it entirely covered all practical manner of swapping batteries to recharge an EV.
At some point we are going to have to stop comparing gas and electric cars.
I can't imagine much worse than being on a road trip and quick swapping to a new battery that you discover, after driving away, has significantly degraded performance and range.
Would a standardised battery block in laptops work? The same battery would work in a Frame.work, System76, MacBook air, MacBook pro, a Lenovo Thinkbook and whatever gaming monster there is from Asus.
Sounds stupid, right? It's just as stupid for cars.
And if laptops had battery swapping, would you swap your brand new battery, but empty, to a random one at a swapping station? Would you trust the people and systems that the battery hasn't been tampered with and is in good working order?
There does not have to have a single battery standard, could be s/m/l, like coincell, aaa, aa etc.
> Would you trust the people and systems that the battery hasn't been tampered with and is in good working order?
Do you trust random utilities/charger manufacture?
> new battery, but empty, to a random one at a swapping station.
Would you care if it is within regulated thresholds and you can get another one any time you want?
Incredibly dangerous to put naked electrical connectors right next to something flammable that you can't even extinguish.
I guess the difference is galvanic isolation is physically (i.e. passively) fail safe, while ground detection is an active safety measure? You can always put in two ground wires in the current system too...
Is there some way for the ground wire to have a signal in it even if it were broken (via EMF)? Can the chip fail in an unsafe way?
The author also glosses over a 20% power loss (to heating), which would cost money and bulk to dissipate.
On the other hand, feeding 7.2kV down a wire handled by very normal people in very normal (read: adverse; wet, humid, non-careful) conditions without any passive protections, relying on the portable (car) end to perform all of the shock safety is laughable at best. A bug in the car’s charging circuit (hardware, firmware, or software) and whoops, the chassis has 7200V to ground when the cable gets plugged in during a rainstorm.
Engineering safety regulations and guidelines are written in blood. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is either ignorant of the dangers involved, or narcissistic to the point of believing they are immune to danger.
ARC and PLC are projected to cost approximately $1.6 billion in 2025, which is more than triple their 2024 levels, but The American Relief Act of 2025 allocated $31 billion in ad hoc disaster aid to farmers. So maybe I was wrong about ARC/PLC being the principal method of subsidy?
> Under current law, USDA’s total outlays for 2025 are estimated at $231 billion. Outlays for mandatory programs are $189.6 billion, 82.1 percent of total outlays.[0]
0. https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2025-usda...
As of July 2024, eight states had opened their first NEVI-funded stations, totaling 61 ports, and powered thousands of charging sessions.
Over the course of the Biden-Harris Administration, the number of publicly available EV chargers more than doubled. With approximately 1,000 new public chargers being added each week, there are over 200,000 publicly available charging ports.
It's irritating to see Joe Rogan's moronic talking points repeated uncritically in these hallowed halls. Truly, as Brandolini[0] observed, public discourse is flooded with misinformation faster than we can bail it out.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
Deleted Comment
1. Everywhere you go, you know there'll be somewhere to charge overnight.
2. It's the cheapest per installed spot, by far, allowing way more locations.
3. Renters can safely by an electric car and have home charging.
4. Coin-op 120V are far more robust than cables with valuable copper.
5. It de-incentivizes excessive parking.
If you’re being facetious, you’re probably aware that “coin-op” refers to any simply-operated payment terminal, as you’d find in a do-it-yourself car wash or parking meter (that doesn’t rely on some stupid phone app). In the past, you inserted the aforementioned coins into a slot, which it counted and provided you with some amount of time of use based on the amount you insert (coin op = coin operated). Nowadays, while there are still coin-op terminals (even in the western world!) they’re being replaced more and more by a pin-pad for processing credit- or debit-card transactions.
These are much preferable to having to use a website or an app, make an account, verify your account, add you personal information, add your vehicle and plate information, add your credit card information, etc. for each different network you’re trying to use, be it parking, car washing, or in this case, car charging. In the past (or present, for the majority of the population), you could drive up to a gas station, pay with some form of currency or card, and receive fuel. The parent was suggestion that maybe, people don’t want to have to deal with more complexity than that while charging their vehicles, especially when travelling to different cities/counties/countries, which are the most likely times they would need to use not-at-home charging (and also the most likely times they’d encounter a new network, and have to go through the rigamarole of new app/website, account, details, etc). By just putting a coin-op (or if you insist on pedantic precision, pin-pad-op) receptacle, someone can pull up, plug in, pay, and be on their way in 30 seconds or less.
Why reinvent the wheel and do anything else, which would take more effort in the best case scenario? If you insist on some godforsaken phone app, make that an option, but I imagine you’ll find most people won’t use it unless forced to.
That covers everything the existing system doesn't already.
And no need to invent new ways to charge people – paid parking is a solved problem. Just set out a section for EVs (and EVs only).
240V could use the same wires and double available power, but existing portable chargers never draw more than 16A from 120V, so people can't screw it up.
The return path for the pilot current will be over the PE contact, so it can also be detect and doubly verify that PE is low resistance, although ideally you’d want a much smaller series resistance.
Dead Comment