Off the top of my head, 80% of drivers drive less than 40 miles/day in the US, and that number is probably much lower in Europe and Asia. Since cars spend most of the day parked somehwere, you have lots of opportunities to plug an EV in, and so most times when you drive off you have a full battery.
Indeed, but for a technology to sell well, it doesn't need to work for everybody at once. There's a large number of people for whom EVs can work, but by the time that market is saturated, chances are that prices will have come down, battery capacity will have gone up, and fast charging stations will be more common.
Early cell phones didn't work for everybody either.
I have to buy a new piece of furniture this month. There's no way it will fit in a sedan. Does that mean I need to buy a light truck, or is there another solution?
A huge percentage of normal-distance commuters are in homes with driveways. As for the rest, how hard is it to provide charging just like parking meters?
Except most people in America don't park at meters. Not at work, anyway. Most people park in parking lots, where there's no infrastructure for charging stations. How many businesses would want to distract themselves with maintaining and running a network of metered charging stations?
I sometimes park in the Yerba Buena garage, which has eight floors and 2,585 spaces. At 5.2 kW each, it should be quite an engineering challenge to add thirteen megawatts of daytime capacity in the fully-built heart of San Francisco (for scale, that's over 1% of the entire city's peak demand concentrated into one block). If power were cheaper, maybe they could smelt aluminum at night to offset the construction costs.
Very few commuters into San Francisco would require charging while in the city, as the majority are commuting in from near distances. For those who do require power to continue their journey, it could be provided at a cost far higher than home charging.
It's rather silly to take the total number of parking spaces and multiply it by total possible charge to get your estimate of demand.
Except that most drivers can't afford two cars so they can get around on their non-average days. What is the percentage of people that never drive more than 40 miles/day in the US?
