San Francisco to Los Angeles: An Electric (Car) Avenue

Andrew Price on September 23, 2009 at 5:08 pm PDT

Want to take your fancy Tesla Roadster down California's beautiful Highway 101 but don't know where to charge it up along the way? You're in luck. We're starting to build that electric vehicle infrastructure. Five EV charging stations are being installed between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

From Wired.com:

SolarCity and Rabobank claim the 240-volt, 70-ampere stations unveiled today at five locations along Highway 101 provide the fastest recharge time available in a public setting, allowing EV drivers to charge up in one to three hours. The stations are located in retail areas, and Rabobank is letting people plug in and charge up at no cost.

There are lots of encouraging details buried in this story. First, while the stations are just designed for Teslas at the moment, they'll soon use a universal plug so they can charge any electric car. Second, one of the recharging stations (in Santa Maria) gets its electricity from a solar plant. Combining solar with EVs makes for virtually zero-impact driving. This proves that's an achievable goal. And as the technology advances, more and more charging stations can move to solar. And finally, according to Wired.com these stations cost $7,000 to $12,000 to install. Compare that to $500,000 for a Better Place battery exchange station or considerably more for a conventional gas station.

The obvious concern, of course, is that it still takes three hours to refuel your car. But that doesn't need to be the case forever. If the folks at MIT can make their super fast-charging batteries work all of a sudden you have a viable, convenient replacement for gas.

UPDATE: The price of electric cars themselves is also an issue. On that point, Fisker Automotive just snatched up half a billion dollars in government loans, most of which will go towards their $39,000 EV project.

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What do you think?

Brick Rucker 9 months ago
The very informative dissertation on addressing the range of EV vehicles is great. But it seemingly lacks the human quotient... Not everyone is motivated by fuel prices, not everyone is motivated by efficiency, not everyone is motivated by 'saving' the planet. Most people are motivated by the path of least resistance and ease of action. Make it easy. I'm not saying this is right, or great, or something I admire, I'm just saying this is the masses work. I want to see this succeed, but start selling the skeptical me, on how much easier an EV vehicle will be and how cool i'll look driving it around. Don't tell me I have to run an extension cord out to my car and wait all night to go somewhere. Lie to me a little if you have to. What if you park on the street yards and yards away from your home, like millions of city-dwellers? What if you make your living as a cargo truck driver... will there me a network built for them? do they even make EV(Haulers)?The more I think about it this a bag of square pegs and one round hole. I'm hoping to be proven wrong, but EV feels like a deadend for the time being. I think we can collectively see a very noble goal, but time and technology hasn't revealed all the puzzle peices we need yet.
anonymous 9 months ago
[...] Soon you might be able to drive that electrical vehicle from Los Angeles to San Francisco. [...]

sangr han 10 months ago
Theme : Addressing Range Anxieties.

1. The range of noticeable EVs are sufficient to meet the daily driving needs of more than 95% of drivers ((The vast majority of people (95%) drive less than 100/km a day, 82% of the respondents said they drive 40 miles or less a day, with an average daily driving distance of 27 miles.)).
As for long trip needs, all but Americans and many of developed nations have existing automobiles, in this regard, EVs are best suited to their daily use until the infrastructure comes into wide use. And people are already doing that.

2. The on-board IT system shows the driving radius on a maximum range display under the current state of charge and calculates if the vehicle is within range of a pre-set destination. And the navigation system points out the latest information on available charging stations within the current driving range.

3. In 21st century, home, workplace, or stores etc also serve as a charge station as electricity is everywhere. With a long extension code inside, just in case, riders can get help from almost anyplace, not to mention the stores to provide charge service, and many of EVs are equipped with a quick charger.

4. Unlike fuel price, as time goes by, the price of battery is expected to drop dramatically in the foreseeable future as with computer components, in that case, mounting additional battery might be not a problem. And the EVs that come in a range of 200 to 300 miles between charges are on fast-tract toward mass-market, as Batteries become more efficient.

5. Indian EV maker Reva said it has also set about addressing anxieties about e-car range, this fantastic wireless electricity/ "instant remote recharge" will be widely available down the line.

6. The vehicle-to-grid communication technology is helping the battery serve as a storage to prevent the costly blackout standing at about $90 to 100bn per year. That means utilities are shedding cost for additional storage facilities and ratepayers are selling electricity during peak demand so that EVs can make more economic sense, as we know.

It is also in the best interest of electricity utilities that EVs are going mainstream, thereby they need to put in charge stands where needed around highways, major roads with card readers or cell phone tech.

7. I'm hopeful that the charge network will extend the select districts to nation-wide scale throughout the world, and this environment can usher in active private investings in EVs. And I remain confident that investing in charge stands could give rise to multiple times as much investing effect, so to speak, some billions of investing, this simple deployment, could call into the most-sought energy independence and solid recovery around the world.

Thank You !

Brick Rucker 10 months ago
Square peg, round hole... Good luck with this one