>>13936230As far as I'm concerned, electric cars will become a practical option when they can either store an order of magnitude more energy, or they can fill up two orders of magnitude faster than they are currently able, or every single public parking spot has a charger on it.
I don't have a private parking place in my yard; I rely on street parking. That means I will never be able to reliably charge my car overnight at my home with reasonable amounts of public charging stations. If the local government invests a lot of money in installing chargers on public parking spaces, I could charge overnight maybe 50% of the time; but unless they add a charger to every single parking space in the street, I will not be able to charge overnight *reliably*. Not if everyone in the street drives an electric car and they all rely on the street parking.
If I cannot reliably charge overnight, then I am going to rely on touch-and-go charging stations that expect me to leave when I'm full. This is fine if I can charge my car in two minutes, the same way I can refuel my petrol car in two minutes; but current charging technology cannot handle that by a long shot. The charging technology will need to improve by two orders of magnitude for that to be feasible.
If I cannot reliably charge overnight, and touch-and-go charging takes long enough that it becomes a chore (which it is when it is noticeably slower than refueling my car at the petrol station by the road I pass when getting home) then the touch-and-go charging had better be uncommon. Maybe once every two months would be reasonable for a dedicated charging trip? So that needs batteries ten times as large as existing ones.
Once one of these three things happens, I think I would be happy to replace my petrol car with an electric car. But no earlier. I'm not going to hang out for 45 minutes at a roadside starbucks to charge my car every other week, thank you very much.
