Yet another Hacker News

Only 16% of U.S. fast-charging stations meet federal NEVI standards (open data)

15 points parkgraph 3 hours ago 8 comments

bluGill 1 hour ago | parent

Data, but it needs someone to take a deep dive to understand it. Is this mostly a trivial detail missing that in practice nobody cares about or does this means most chargers are useles?

gizmo686 48 minutes ago | parent

This number is pretty much meaningless. The standards being measured are:

1) four CCS ports 2) 150 kW each 3) within 1 mile of a designated corridor

1 is worth something, but not much as the industry has been migrating to NACS. When I bought my used CCS car, it came with a fast-charge NACS->CCS converter, so dealing with a NACS charger is not that big of a deal. Requiring 4 ports in general is a more useful standardad. The data does keep a seperate count of dc fast ports, so you could check for 4 ports if you want to, but the pass/fail does not consider non-ccs ports.

2 is reasonable.

3 is just a sign that you are completly mis-applying the standard. Probably because you are a computer.

Rebelgecko 1 hour ago | parent

Seems like kind of a nothingburger?

One of the criteria is "it's within a mile of certain designated freeways". Obviously it's good to have chargers along those freeways, but as long as there's a certain level of coverage it's not a bad thing if there are ALSO lots of chargers along different freeways, highways, at neighborhood gas stations, etc.

Another criteria is "at least 4 CCS chargers". Since CCS is on its way out, that also seems kinda unnecessary. I have an NACS adapter for my car, so as long as there's open chargers I don't really care what the form factor is (as long as they're fast and not chademo). However 4+ chargers in general is a good criteria. I avoid rest stops that only have 1-2 chargers because it's a crapshoot if they'll be available

tencentshill 1 hour ago | parent

AI slopsite. Generic design and very confusing wording. Why does it specify only Colorado?

parkgraph 45 minutes ago | parent

Fair on Colorado. The Colorado county and corridor files were our first state build-out, and they share the page with the national files. We're moving them to their own page so /data is national only, and dropping the files that don't have rows yet.

dyauspitr 45 minutes ago | parent

When is every gas station going to have a fast charger? When am I going to see EV charging symbols on exit signs?

parkgraph 39 minutes ago | parent

Hopefully sooner than later! These gas stations need to be upgraded and the real range will be extended for EVs.

gizmo686 26 minutes ago | parent

I already see EV charging symbols on exist signs.

As to every gas station having a fast charger; the answer is probably never. I doubt that the EV economy would ever be able to support that number of fast charging stations.

Consider that with ICE cars, approximatly every mile driven is powered by gas from a gas station. With EVs, a significant amount of miles driven is powered by residential electricity. Many more miles driven can be powered by slow destination chargers (e.g. at workplaces). This means that the addressable market of fast charges are: A) long road trips, and B) people without convenient access to slow chargers.

In addition to that, most fast chargers are just plopped onto random shopping center parking lots. The needed infastructure is just space, and a large enough grid connection.