this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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Electric Vehicles
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and that's totally fine, that's how you achieve mass adoption and energetic independence, make it more advantageous to use.
The main challenge for dense metropolitan areas is that inhabitants have less options to charge their car at home when they live in an apartment and park on the street.
I got pretty excited by the new curb chargers developed by RheinMetall in Germany: https://www.rheinmetall.com/en/products/e-mobility/charging-infrastructure/curb-stone-chargers
That's a pretty sweet charger, not gonna lie.
However, at least from what I've been told, in a lot of places the main obstacle is the grid and not the space. It's simply not designed to deliver the amount of electricity that is required at the moment. I don't know if it's already been dealt with, since I heard that years ago, and obviously, if it hasn't it's something that needs to be dealt with anyway at some point.
The grid as a whole will need upgrading as demand increases, but it is in no way an obstacle to people getting charging at home.
It is an obstacle for fast charging, but if we limit this too level 2 charging it can work.
I doubt that fast charging will ever be a thing in residential settings, regardless of what kind of grid upgrades they do. That kind of DC voltage will kill too many diy type homeowners.
Are we still talking about curb charging?
Yeah. It's not like the majority of North American towns are going to have the budget for this, and the higher levels of government don't give two shits, so it would be falling on the homeowners to get it installed.
Curb charging is really geared towards dense urban areas, where people don't have a garage or dedicated parking space, or don't own their homes and therefore can't make such changes.
At any rate, a homeowner can't simply install something in the curb, and even if they did, it's the curb, anyone can park there.
The grid shouldn't have much trouble handling car charging loads as they are similar to 240v ovens in our kitchens and HVAC systems in the wattage consumed. We don't typically have trouble with the grid when new homes are added that include both of those type of large wattage appliances.
Looks sweet and futuristic, but it wouldn't last a week over here in the states. Some dipshit would try crushing it with their lifted diesel pickup to compensate for their tiny pp.
But then again, that can be solved with a pair of concrete bollards. One on each side.
The far larger problem would be that every single charging cable would be stolen in 60 minutes or less.
If they were going to be crushed it'd mostly be by EV drivers who can't fucking park. Adding bollards could make opening the charging side door pretty interesting for some models. As an example if there were bollards in the setup in the picture then you'd be entirely unable to open the right rear door of the vehicle. For vehicles who have their charging port on the front ahead of the drivers door the driver themselves may be unable to exit.
I would disagree that home charging is necessary. There are other ways you can enable charging for the drivewayless.
Ie: My homes power supplier has a deal where I can charge my car at a specific companies chargers and only pay my home power rate.
I don’t have anywhere home charging capability. But because of this deal, I haven’t had any problems charging. I have just folded charging into my weekly routine.
Go to the gym, charge it up. If I need to walk the dog and the car is particularly low I’ll go walk the dog around a charger.
And it’s not like there’s a huge amount of chargers from this company around me.
I agree that it's not a huge hurdle, but the great part of having and EV is to be able to skip the charging part entirely for daily commutes. Come home, plug in, drive off the next morning with a full charge, that's what it's about :)