If Western nations want to solve this problem within a year, they just need to repeal relevant environmental protections long term, to make building and operating separators cost-effective.
Seems like there might be some downsides to that. We should probably understand those first.
What if you have no internet connection? I can drive an hour from my place and have no internet.
Put your route in while you have Internet. It'll continue providing directions, including to charging stations if required, without Internet. Many areas I drive regularly don't have Internet. Works fine. Alternatively, this is the one case where you might actually have to plan recharging yourself. Unlike with ICEVs, where you always have to do it yourself.
But, yes, if you regularly drive 500 miles, without stopping, through an Internet desert, uphill both ways, then an EV probably isn't for you.
The "fears and concerns about charging" are NOT about charging in the family home, it's about when the person owning the electric car takes a trip
Nah, both are concerns. Neither is actually a large problem in most cases, but both are actual concerns. If you don't have a good way to get a charging cable out to where you park your car, the home charging concern is actually the bigger one. For those with garages, or even driveways, it's not really an issue.
The Article then goes into multi-family homes that can't easily run a line to a 240 VAC charger. That's not an "Anxiety" about charging, that's a hard limitation.
Somewhat, though you don't actually need 240V. 120V is sufficient for most people, as long as there's a fast charger in the area for the occasional top-up when they have a few consecutive days of heavier-than-normal driving. 8 hours plugged into an L1 charger will put ~40 miles into the battery, which is enough to cover 280 miles per week of driving. That's quite a bit more than most people do when not taking a trip. Those who drive more than that on a regular basis need a 240V L2 charger.
So it's more about whether they can get a charging cable out to the car at all, not so much about whether they can specifically get 240V out there. If you're parking on the street you probably can't run an extension cord over the sidewalk, even an ordinary 15A @ 120V cord.
Then you have people running the EV cable under (and pinched by) a closed garage door. I see this all the time, also.
The pinching shouldn't be a significant problem. Garage doors should have a bottom seal that can deal with 3/4" or so of variation in height and still be able to seal well. Just make sure the cable is stout enough (most L2 cables are plenty strong), and if the garage door springs are correctly adjusted it shouldn't have to take too much weight anyway. If counterbalance springs aren't mostly offsetting the weight of the door a typical 1/3 or 1/2 HP garage door opener won't be able to lift it anyway.
with some planning
That's the whole problem. It takes planning and an ICE doesn't.
An ICE maybe requires less planning if you can't charge at home, but the driver has to do that planning. With an EV, what planning must be done is done by the car, so it's less effort. Well, the driver does have to get into the habit of using the nav system so the car knows where you're going. For daily driving my car is really good at predicting where I'm going so picking the location is two taps, one to open the destination list, one to pick the top item in the list (or one button then speak the destination aloud). And doing that has additional benefits because the car has real-time traffic data and can route around problems.
For people who can charge easily at home, an EV requires far less planning than an ICE. You plug in when you get home, you unplug when you leave. No thought required. The battery is just always full, you never think about refilling. It's still a good idea to use the nav system for optimal routing... and so you can completely ignore the charge state, letting the car manage it entirely.
This is what I say, too.And then you hear the next person saying 'but EVs have a range of 250+miles!' I'm sure some do. But I find it unlikely they'd charge overnight at my house - I've got 200 amp of 220 but not all could be dedicated to the car.
You definitely don't need (and couldn't even use) all 200A for the car. L2 chargers max out at 80A, most only use either 30A or 40A, and even that much is actually not necessary.
Look at it this way: You only need to be able to replace your average[*] daily driving distance in 8 hours. Suppose your uses 250 Wh/mile, and you average 40 miles per day. That means you need to be able to replace 10kWh in 8 hours, which means you need to charge at 1.25kW, plus a bit for charging losses, so call it 1.4 kW. At 220V, that's 6.4A. You probably wouldn't actually do that, you'd instead set it to charge at 30A so you'd charge at 6.6kW and replace your mileage in an hour and change, but 6.4A is all you'd need.
But, wait... notice that 15A @ 110V is 1.65kW. So, in the hypothetical above, your needs are actually covered by an L1 charger, e.g. a typical wall outlet, which you already have in your garage and many other places! This is the case for the large majority, all they really need is a standard wall outlet 95% of the time. Sure, they might have to spend 10 minutes at an L3 charger once every few months if they happen to have a few heavier-than-usual driving days in a row, but that's still actually less time wasted than going to a gas station every week.
(Note in both of the above paragraphs I'm assuming 220V or 110V, but in practice your power is probably closer to 240V/120V, so you actually get a bit more for the given amperage.)
The erroneous belief that they need to be able to install an L2 charger deters a lot of people, and it really shouldn't. If you can run an extension cord from an ordinary outlet to where you park, and there's a fast charger that you can go to in the relatively rare instance you get low (fast charging is maximally efficient and minimally wearing when the battery is low), you can happily drive an EV.
And as for public chargers when traveling...If there's queue you'll be there for hours and if there's not you'll be there for an hour. No thanks.
I've done around 20k miles in long distance road trips all over the western US in the last 8 years and never had to wait to charge, not once. I have a handful of times gone to different charger than the one optimally located for my route because there weren't many chargers available at the optimal location. But my car handled that for me automatically because it knows in real time how busy each charger is, and also knows the historical usage patterns at each.
OTOH, about one time in 20 when I go to refill my diesel pickup I end up waiting for a pump. Maybe less than 1:20; confirmation bias may be kicking in here. But it definitely happens sometimes, and it's never happened to me when fast-charging my EV.
[*] Average case, not worst case. The car's battery acts as a buffer to cover occasional heavy driving days, this is the same reason you don't have to get gas daily.
No, I don't recall any other discussions about SMRs.
Are you for real? This is either a direct lie or you need to have your head examined.
Why are you such an asshole?
Okay, but how is this "releasing new versions of Windows for the upgrade fees?" What "upgrade fee" is Microsoft collecting in your scenario?
its not going to keep working for much longer either. Sooner rather then later Microsoft is going to start building Windows components with 86_64v3 instruction set requirements.
Err... anything less than 12 years old (Haswell) already supports those. The list of unsupported CPUs starts with things significantly newer than that (Skylake CPUs, which support v4 of the instruction set, are not officially supported for Win11 at all and will plain not install Win11 24H2).
I switched to the online version over a decade ago. Why? It supports Linux. Sure, you may not want your taxes in the cloud. However, the IRS puts your tax documents on the Web no matter how you file.
Yeah, and the concern in the summary is just silly. What makes Xesdeeni think that Intuit's desktop software doesn't upload everything to the cloud anyway? For the last several years TurboTax has created cloud backups of your local files by default... and IIRC there doesn't even seem to be a way to tell it not to. As I recall you have a choice of protecting it with a password or not, but I don't think you can tell it not to upload... and even if you can, how would know know if the software is honoring your request?
In general "I don't trust company X with my data, but I use their software" makes no sense, unless you only use their software on an airgapped computer.
What are they?
You weren't paying attention the last 23405734027 times I explained, why waste my time on you now? The short short answer is per-unit costs and security. If you want more, see if you can find my zillions of old posts on this subject which I know you have had the opportunity to read because you were in many of the conversations where I wrote them.
No, I don't recall any other discussions about SMRs. It's not something I've ever paid much attention to. If you don't want to explain, don't explain, no need to be touchy about it.
I thought republicans were the party of small government
They still are, it's just that the current generation want to shrink the government until it's just one man.
One man plus a few million jackbooted thugs.
Thank goodness for "morons". No, not you though.
You are like the global cooling clowns with your conflation of ideas.
There are obvious economic reasons why SMRs will never make sense.
What are they?
Microsoft releases new versions of Windows for the fine upgrade fees.
Who the hell is paying Microsoft for Windows 11 upgrades? If you have a valid Windows 10 license, the upgrade is free (as in beer).
In the last fifteen years, critics have leaned more and more heavily into telling people what they ought to like, as opposed to how likely they are to like something.
This has always been true, not just the last 15 years.
Bus error -- driver executed.
