Charge a future EV in less than five minutes – using literally cool NASA tech Experimental tech designed to cool NASA equipment in space has an Earth-bound use as well: slashing electric vehicle charging times to five minutes or less. Using a technique known as "subcooled flow boiling," this technology could boost the amount of electrical current today's EV chargers are able to supply to automobiles, by …
How would they cool the batteries? I assume that they'd get pretty hot with all the current going into them. I could see how putting cooling systems (which I assume are bulky and might involve nasty stuff like liquid nitrogen) into the chargers which don't move is feasible, but not the car's battery without making the car massive.
Icon to signify "watt" might go wrong -->
by removing up to 24.22 kilowatts of heat.
Watt a waste! But combine with a Seatback system to convert that heat into electricity, and you'd get around 291kW of electricity*, or around 24.20kWh of extra charge by using a soon to be patented regenerative charging system
Alternatively, physics says 'NO!', and people wonder why more fast charging stations are catching fire due to the challenges of dissipating 24.22kW of heat, without increasing global warming. Apparently NOAA and the CRU are keen to collocate new weather stations alongside charging stations.
*Because everything green is 97%.
FWIW, the Holy Grail of EV batteries appears to be Metal-Air batteries. Probably Aluminum-Air. Aluminum being cheap, readily available, non-toxic, and reasonably well behaved. On paper, these have much higher energy density (maybe 3X?) than current batteries. Which means vehicles go further between charges and/or have smaller, lighter batteries than current EVs. They are primary cells. You can't recharge them. But what you can (hopefully) do is pull over to the side of the road, yank the defunct anodes out, stuff them in a plastic carrier bag for later recycling/disposal, and put new fresh anodes in. No fantastic high tech charger technology needed.
A few demos have actually been conducted, so they probably aren't completely impractical.
Folks have been working on these things for 3 decades or more. And there is still presumably a long way to go. But we're talking GREEN ENERGY here, so all concepts, no matter how hare-brained are assumed to be either ready for deployment or nearly so held back only by corrupt politicians in the pay of the evil oil companies.
I'd like to see these work out someday as they seem potentially a pretty adequate solution to many of the intractable problems with EVs using current technologies. But I'm not holding my breath.
Aluminum being cheap, readily available,
What was that Skippy?
Aluminium smelters are shutting down all over the world because of increasing energy costs, and unreliable supply. Here in Oz, smelters cop it in the neck first if load shedding (read blackouts) first. Assume it is the same all over.
Charge rates much beyond the current 350kW aren't really necessary... we're already battery limited, 350kW is 20+ miles per minute (350kW * 3m/kWh = 1400 miles/hour)
Most cars can't take that much current even when it's available (half of the charger is in the car, half is on the side of the road).
If stopping every three hours for ten minutes is too much then you probably shouldn't have a license.
My EV says it averaged 6.8KM/KWh, so at 100km/h (60mph) that's 14.7 KW
So with a 400V DC fast charger I need a constant 36A from a Scaletrix slot down the middle of the road - that's probably unreasonable
Back to my previous solution of a metal grid 8ft above all roads and every one drives bumper cars
"Then along comes a 11ft tall lorry !!!"
In the US, 13'6" is the maximum un-permitted height for a lorry. Higher loads are allowed, but there has to be route planning and escort vehicles ahead to make sure there is clearance. It was an interesting delivery when the company I was with got a Centaur upper stage tank assembly. They had to push some power lines up a foot or two for the load to get under. Honestly, they should have come in the other way but nobody asked me.
15kW is about right for motorway driving.
350kW (the current spec) is more than twenty times as fast, so for every hour you spend driving you need to spend less than three minutes charging*.
* Obviously assumes that the battery and the mobile half of the charger can deal with 350kW - but that's the point, the charge cable is already capable of delivering more power than most cars can handle. We don't need a beefier cable, we have the charging infrastructure already, it's better battery management that is the next big thing.
People who drive stuff around for a living have to follow quite complicated rules about how long they can drive for without taking a substantial break.
Like I say, the rules are complicated, but a legal driving pattern would be two hours followed by a 15 minute break, then 2.5 hours followed by a 30 minute break.
The longest you can drive in a normal day is for 4.5 hours, then you MUST take a 45 minute break, then you've got another 4.5 hours, then you're done until you've had an 11 hour rest.
The takeaway is that "driving 3 hours and stoping for 10 minutes" would be in breach of working driving rules - too short a break for a start.
In the UK and EU, those are the actual law for all vehicles above 3500kg MGW (except for military)
There's even a mandated spy in the cab to (supposedly) enforce it.
Some US states mandate similar drive/rest cycles.
The reason isn't unions, it's due to truck drivers falling asleep on the job and killing people.
"If stopping every three hours for ten minutes is too much then you probably shouldn't have a license have a long commute in heavy traffic."
Even with the AC running, it's not a big drain on the traction battery. Until aerodynamic drag starts becoming a measurable issue, EV's can go a very long distance on one charge.
At my time of life, stopping every 3 hours for a few minutes is mandatory. Besides, 4 hours means it's lunch time (or tea/dinner/supper... food anyway). The car can get on with charging while I sit down with a knife and fork.
Or have to do long drives through rural areas.
For most of the driving I do, there aren't any EV chargers for several hundred miles.
I recently drove over 5000 miles over a two-week period, with just shy of 86 hours behind the wheel. Some days I had 15 hours of driving. Stopping every three hours to spend half an hour charging my vehicle would have increased my travel time by 14 hours, even if it had been possible. No thanks.
"If stopping every three hours for ten minutes is too much then you probably shouldn't have a license."
Interesting. Let's analyze this...
1. he's assuming that there are a _lot_ of possible charge points. Why? Because if there aren't a lot of possible charge points, a good fraction (30 minutes? More?) of that 3 hours will be taken up by looking for a charge point, or you'll have to plan your journey by available charge points, or both. I can find a petrol station in short order... and my car will go a lot further than 3 hours before I have to refuel. (Toyota. 12 gallon tank. 34 miles per gallon. That's 400 miles, at 70 mph that's 5.8 or so hours.)
2. who's paying for this charge? At current electric rates _someone_ is going to have to pay a packet for charging over time. Yes, the individual charge is low... but it adds up. And it's more than what the current price of petrol is, at least around here. (I refiled my car yesterday. $2.99/gallon, 87 octane. That's $36 for just under six hours, or just over $6/hr. FPL would charge at least $40 for the power. Note that when the price of petrol goes up, so does the price of electricity, even if most of FPL's power is nuke and natural gas.)
3. it doesn't take 10 minutes to refill the tank. It doesn't even take 5 minutes.
So... I would have to make twice as many stops, after finding charging stations and/or going out of my way to get to charging stations, and pay more, and take four times the time (twice the time, twice...) and if I don't like this, I shouldn't have a license?
Yeah. Right.
James, you are telling tales.
"of that 3 hours will be taken up by looking for a charge point,"
The car does that for you. If the car doesn't, guess what, there's an app for that. Most cars these days will suggest charging stops if you punch in your destination and get very shirty if you are going to go past the last one and not be able to make it.
EV's are much more efficient per mile than petrol cars. Even going from zero to 60kWh's at $.40/kWh is far less than $40 and $.40/kWh is premium pricing.
To pull up to a gas pump, wait to get the payment verified and the pump to start, fill the tank and close out is not 5 minutes provided you can even pull right up without waiting, it's more like 10 depending on how big your fuel tank is. On a long trip, a short stop is 20 minutes for me and at LEAST 45 minutes if I'm sitting down for a meal.
The whole charade has to be rounded up with asking how often do you make cannonball runs. If you just need to get from A to B hundreds of miles apart, why aren't you flying or taking the train? I do road trips to stop along the way so I might as well charge while I'm stopped. I can't do that in all the places I'd like just yet, but it gets better every week.
"If you just need to get from A to B hundreds of miles apart, why aren't you flying..."
Ahhah. Hahaha. Um, no. Air travel is thoroughly uneconomical for "a couple hundred miles" on account of all the hurry-up-and-wait, never mind cost. Assuming you can find an airport that's not 50-100km away from either A, B, or both. 3-4 hours door to door driving, vs 8+ hours for a "commuter" flight airport-to-airport - and you still have to spend at least an hour or two more getting from A to airport, and airport to actual destination.
I suppose you could just fly your helicopter... oh, you don't own one, nor have a suitably-rated pilot's license? Well, now, whyever not?
"... or taking the train?"
... BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! *deep breath* AHAHAHHEEEHEHE!!! oh, you're killing me!
Europe is probably a lot better off on this one, but passenger train travel is even worse than air across most of North America for mid-range travel of "a couple hundred miles" largely on account of "what passenger train service?". Where I live it is literally 200+km drive to get to anywhere where there is passenger rail service, and probably at least 100km+ straight-line distance from home to the nearest rail line irrespective of an actual station. It's somewhat better in the US than Canada, but as with air travel, long-distance passenger rail travel involves a lot longer travel times unless your A and B happen to be right close by the necessary train stations.
Indeed. It's terrific how the EV fans assume everyone shares their use cases.
Here's what my recent journey would have looked like with air travel instead of driving:
1. Drive 2.5 hours (at least) to the airport. 145 miles.
2. Fly to the airport nearest my first destination. Minimum of a 2-hour wait. $400 or so.
3. Rent a car, because there's no other way to get from the airport to where I'm going. Time from flight arrival to when I'm in the car is at least an hour (from prior experience), maybe more. Expedia gives me rental prices around $400.
4. Drive 2 hours / 100 miles to my destination. That's an entire day gone, longer than the 10 hours I would have spent driving it.
5. Three days later, do the same to return to the airport.
6. Fly to the cheapest major airport near my next destination. Another wait of 2+ hours at the airport, then a few more hours in the air. This is a one-way flight and I might get lucky on pricing; let's say $100.
7. Rent another car, so another $400. Drive 90 miles to my destination. I might arrive in time to have dinner with someone, if flight schedules work out.
8. A few days later, it's that 90 miles back to the airport.
9. Flight #3, the price of which I can't check because I've just lost Internet. This time I'm headed to a small city that isn't near any particularly large airports, so I'm not sure what my best option would be anyway. But it's the usual story: Wait at the airport, fly, rent a car (now we're up to $1200 in car rental fees – except this one is being rented for a week, so probably more like $1500 or $1800).
10. Now I have the choice of flying back to the airport from step 1, which is the faster and cheaper option; or visiting people on the way back, which is what I actually did. So either it's a less-rewarding trip, or multiple flights and more car rentals.
In short, the "just fly" argument is as feeble as the "you can stop every three hours" argument. That's an option for some people, for some trips. It doesn't work for everyone.
"Here's what my recent journey would have looked like with air travel instead of driving"
I'm in a similar situation when it comes to flying. It's a whole day of doing everything that isn't being on the plane and moving through the air. I'd have to have a burning need to be someplace 1,000 miles away in a big hurry to consider suffering the indignities of air travel, but I can't think of a scenario that would need to be met for me.
I had a friend argue against an EV who is on the west coast with family in Chicago and thought that needing to stop and charge was a big issue. He wanted to be able to jump in his car and drive straight from LA to Chicago if there were a family issue. I did a trip comparison that showed if we both got news we needed to be in Chicago ASAP, if I went home, looked up flights, had a shower, packed a bag and flew, I'd beat him there by at least a day if he didn't stop for a nap. It's a 30 hour drive if the highways are clear and you don't deduct for fuel and meals. I could be bumped from a couple of flights and still be there much sooner.
What I was trying to point up was that so many people that are very negative about EV's will put out use cases where they need to travel hundreds and hundreds of miles often enough that stopping to charge becomes a big issue. That is, stopping to charge when they aren't needing to stop for food and a trip to the loo.
The car I'd get right now if I had the money and one was available at a price I would find reasonable is the Chevy Bolt. It is one of the slowest charging vehicles being sold right now that can hook up to a DC fast charger. It's also one of the lowest priced EV's with a decent amount of full capacity range. The Kia and Hyundai crossovers are 50% faster to charge, but it's rare I see a used on for sale in all of the US. A Hyundai Ionic 5 charges like stink so it's ready to go after a stop for a comfort break but also very expensive. My outlook is that it's not costing me money for the time it would take to charge and I am not doing super long trips often enough for it to matter. Yes, my use case isn't the same as everybody else's, but it's not outrageously unique.
"If you just need to get from A to B hundreds of miles apart, why aren't you flying...?"
Because the same people who are ICE-shaming me about not junking my perfectly running car are also flight-shaming me when air travel makes sense.
Mind you, I think it's great that we have EVs. They are already great for many use cases and that will only improve further. What isn't great is all the shaming and breathless hype (I don't mean by you personally MachDiamond, no offence intended), which perversely fuels skepticism and rejection.
And more importantly, if you turn up at a petrol station and find all the pumps are in use, that is no big deal, just join the queue, you will get a pump in a few minutes. This is most definitely not the case at a charging station.
Petrol pumps generally push out 50 litres per minute. So most of the time you will be done pumping in less than a minute, if you have a really big vehicle and a very empty tank, it might take a little over a minute. Obviously the other stuff you have to do like driving into position, getting started, putting everything away, doing the payment, driving out; that takes longer than the actual pumping.
I actually have just bought a new EV (VW ID3), and I actually did the Maths. In short, when I charge at home I save about €30 per "tank" compared to my old petrol Car (Skoda Fabia Combi).
If I charge at a public charge station on the EnBW network (which covers most of central and southern Europe), I save about €20 per tank. Please note, I'm based in Germany so your mileage may vary.
We get less distance in the ID3 than in the Skoda (about 300km instead of 400km), but the cost to charge is significantly less, with a full tank costing about €25 at a public charge station compared to the €60 minimum we were paying for the Skoda. So Petrol for a 300km tank would be minimum €45. Hence my calculated €20 saving per 300km. At home the charging cost is between €10-15 per tank, hence the €30 saving.
Please note, these fuel prices were when Petrol in Germany was costing around 180c/L. At the moment, it's closer to 195c/L where I live, so my saving is even more at the moment. When petrol prices come down a bit, or if energy prices go up then, then my saving will reduce, but I dont expect my ID3 will ever be more expensive then my Skoda.
As for charging stations, the EnBW app, lets you see every charging station (on their or associated networks) across Germany and large parts of Europe, tells you how many charging points there are and also whether they are in use. So you can absolutely plan accordingly. However, me and my family dont do massive cross country trips with the car, so our use case may not be representative of everyone, but for us it works massively well.
Anyway, I wanted to put some actual use figures out there. If you've got questions/comments, let me know.
Looking at UK prices:
1 litre of petrol (13kWh): £1.60, equivalent to 12p/kWh
Domestic electricity: 34p/kWh
Slow public charger: 49p/kWh
Fast charger: 66p/kWh
If you allow for the fact that electric cars are 2-3x more efficient, home charging is at best slightly more expensive than petrol, and at worst, about 50% more expensive.
And if you need to drive long distances often, you're probably not burning petrol
Not in the US, I'm afraid, where diesel vehicles are relatively rare and options are limited, and diesel fueling is difficult in some areas.
Most of the personal (i.e. non-commercial) diesel vehicles left on the roads in the US these days, since Dieselgate, are large pickup trucks. Not ideal for long-distance travel.
"Not ideal for long-distance travel."
Depends entirely on what you are hauling and what you mean by long distance.
Mom, dad, 2.7 kids+dawg(s), towing a boat, with kit for a three day weekend ... I see this combination by the hundreds on Hwy 121 and 128, heading for Lake Barryessa on warm summer weekends (9 or 10 months of the year here in Northern California). Even more on Hwy 80 heading for Tahoe, or on 50 heading for Comanche, and more heading to all the other lakes in the Sierra. Sadly, the station wagon is long gone.
And of course, EVs are shit at towing ... Well, to be more accurate, they are GOOD at towing (gobs of low end torque, and they are heavy with a low center of gravity), but their range goes to shit in a hurry, making them all but useless as tow vehicles.
I'm not sure where you get the 1L petrol is equivalent to 13kWh, that seems a rather questionable value. Much better to look at it as I have as a cost per km.
But if those are really the numbers for electricity in the UK, no wonder you guys are screwed!
I pay €0,45/kWh on a slow public charger, and €0,55/kWh for a fast charger. My home rate is around €0,22/kWh.
So your paying almost twice my energy bill. No wonder it doesnt seem such a good deal to you!
Still here in Germany, I'm coming out massively ahead. But as I said your mileage may vary...
"However, me and my family dont do massive cross country trips with the car, so our use case may not be representative of everyone, but for us it works massively well."
I only do really long trips every couple of years. I travel greater than 200 miles in one go a few times a year and that's about the point where I would likely want to plug in for a bit just to keep some margin in the battery in case. The savings for all of the travel that doesn't require a charging stop would pay for all of my other driving. This is provided I need to replace my current efficient petrol car and I can find a reasonably priced used EV. In the US, most EV choices are premium and very expensive so make little financial sense in my use case even if I were paying nothing for electricity and gas went up another $1/gallon.
"Toyota. 12 gallon tank. 34 miles per gallon. That's 400 miles, at 70 mph that's 5.8 or so hours."
Must be a big, heavy SUV if that's all you get! :-)
As for charging costs, I've heard it said here in the UK that at current retail prices including taxes, those using EVs and charging only at commercial fast charging points are nearly up to or above the price as an ICE car per mile.
Commercial EV charge points pay full rate VAT (20% tax) on electricity while charging at home on the standard consumer rates only incurs 5% VAT.
dont travel in remote or very rural areas , do you. Yes, drivers take shifts to cover those 2000 km stretches. As for that 10 minutes charge claim on recharge. BTW, how does your EV handle prolonged exposure to heavy rain, water 4 cm deep and 2 km long. Asking for a friend in emergency services
> BTW, how does your EV handle prolonged exposure to heavy rain, water 4 cm deep and 2 km long. Asking for a friend in emergency services
And how does your lifted pickup truck handle meter deep snow and mud, trenches and high velocity anti-tank rounds? Asking for a friend in the 1st Guards Tank Army !
In a petrol or diesel car you have the problem of water shoshing up into the engine bay and potentially getting sucked into the air intake. Goodbye engine!
Water 4cm deep? An electric car will easily drive through 20cm deep water for as long as you like. You have no idea how well protected the electrics are in an EV.
An electric car will easily drive through 20cm deep water for as long as you like.
That's a bad idea in most cars, regardless of powertrain, if there's any significant current in that water. (Water current, not electrical.) 20cm is deep enough for a typical car to be swept away.
But, in general, considering how many critical electronic systems are in modern ICE cars (not to mention the electric ignition), I agree that this doesn't seem like a valid argument against EVs. Maybe it's a concern if you have an off-road ICE vehicle with a snorkel and you're considering an EV for that use case.
> If stopping every three hours for ten minutes is too much then you probably shouldn't have a license.
Not everybody is a soccer mom. Tell professional drivers (taxis, trucks, and so on) that they shouldn't have a license because they can't afford to lose half an hour of pay each day, and see what happens...
(Didn't downvote you though.)
Good point, so I guess I'm not going to be able to charge my Pixel phone in 2ms then?
I wonder why this idea was never applied to filling up the car petrol tank? Just replace the car petrol tank opening with one that's 24 inches wide and we'd see the same "improvement" ...
Basically this concept just sounds like threatening an occasional big bang at the recharging station.
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If the cables can handle 2,400A, the issue becomes whether the battery can absorb energy that fast or if the electronics are up to the task. Any resistance anywhere is going to heat up fast and show imperfections in an impressive way. It will also mean that one charing location = one nuclear power plant.
I don't see the point. The Hyundai Ionic 5 will charge from 10-80% in 18 minutes topping out at around 228kW. Plug in, walk to the facilities, get a cold drink and dispose of the accumulated trash one always generates on a trip and that's those 20 minutes spoken for. To try and pare it down to 5 minutes isn't that much of a benefit. Range is a complimentary issue. 300 miles of range under ideal conditions can mean a pretty good chance at 4 hours of drive time on the first leg when the car is at 100% for the start. Leave at 8am and at noon (aka lunchtime) it's time to charge. At 4pm, it's time for tea if the car can charge fast enough to do a good charge while sat during lunch. Your efficiency may vary, but if you aren't making really long trips frequently, it's fine.
If the cables can handle 2,400A, you also need a 2,400A feed on the grid side... I had someone a few months ago telling me how fast potential charging can be, and the argument of "You are more likely to be limited by available power on the feed side" was brushed off with "but the car can charge at X".
It is all very well saying we could deliver XXXX kW to an EV but where do you get it from? Most housing estates have 100 or so properties off a 500kVA substation.
For service stations they could well have a 2-3MVA substation put in to support a couple of these, but from where does all of this power come from? How quickly are we even replacing generation capacity, let along having surplice to cover this.
"It is all very well saying we could deliver XXXX kW to an EV but where do you get it from? Most housing estates have 100 or so properties off a 500kVA substation."
A home isn't going to be fitted with a DC fast charger that delivers 50kw or more. The EVSE (charger) can be set according to what the home's electrical system can provide and how big the wiring is feeding it. Alec at Technology Connections did a good video explaining that and some suggestions for an optimum installation.
If the power company offers an off-peak tariff for EV owners, it can make a lot sense to set the car to charge in the wee hours which all of the ones I've looked at will do. They can also be told to only wait for the middle of the night when they are home (GPS) and that setting can be overridden if you need some juice right away. Most people are asleep and using very little power in the middle of the night so there is more than enough capacity for people to plug in their EV. I am assuming that not everybody in the development is going to be purchasing an EV in the next week so there is time for the utility to make upgrades when they see they are getting closer to max capacity.
"Easy to fix too many amps, just have 11kV supplies direct from the grid to the car!"
I remember watching a show with an electric ferry and the connection was in the range of 11kV. It was probably on The Fully Charged Show. I can sort of remember Robert Llewelyn talking about it.
"There's no way that any routinely disconnectable connector could handle that kind of current. It would weld instantly."
The connectors lock so they can't be removed under load. If the control connection is lost, the charger shuts down immediately or won't start up. That's a common problem when the cable is heavy and pulling down too much on the car.
I'm not talking about disconnection under load.
I'm talking about disconnectable at all - well, other than via explosives.
The mating surfaces would weld. Explosive charges would easily overcome that, but as you don't get to use the cable again it might increase the cost somewhat.
"The mating surfaces would weld. Explosive charges would easily overcome that, but as you don't get to use the cable again it might increase the cost somewhat."
Most DC fast chargers I've seen ramp up rather than going straight to 100's of KW. There is a thermistor buried in the plug so if there is a bunch of resistance and the connection heats up, the charger will shut down. I know there has been a problem with a certain cable set where the thermistor gets damaged frequently but that leads to a fault condition that shuts the charger off. I can envision some arcing if there is muck in the connectors and that could cause some welding of the connections, but I imagine that's been thought of and there doesn't seem to be reports of it happening.
...but a friend who has a Tesla took it on holiday from Carnforth to Cornwall. Their conclusion: never again. It's not an easy drive in a car with reliable long range and able to fill up anywhere in 5 minutes. In a car that can't go as far, and takes longer to top up, and thus needs multiple, long stops, it makes the journey considerably less bearable. Unless something radical is done to change this, and soon, the country is going to feel bigger, and places like Cornwall will become effectively more remote.
I've just looked up a journey from Carnforth to Penzance on Google.
It's 400 miles and and should take 6hr 42mins driving time. Assuming he makes one stop for lunch and a charge half way there are 30+ rapid charger sites in the Birmingham area not too far from the M6 or M5. Most of these have more than one charger so he can expect little or no waiting around.
Using an app like WattsUp or ABRP (A Better Route Planner) he could see the state of chargers in real time making it easy to drop in on an available charger.
Adding a second stop around Exeter would give him plenty of charge to mooch around once he arrived.
I drive an EV; a Volkswagen ID.3. It has a nominal range of about 240 miles. I recently did a trip from my home near Ely in Cambridgeshire, to Manchester, then Edinburgh, a day trip to St Andrew''s, then to York and finally back home. I forget the total mileage, but it must have been around 800 miles, with trips longer than the car's range on at least two days. I did not have the least problem with charging; I was able to find fast chargers at locations where I could stop for us to have a meal or whatever while the car charged, which took less than an hour for a full charge. Of course, I was never charging from a flat battery; I rarely let it go below 25% charge.
The point is that existing charging works perfectly well. Providing more of the existing type of fast chargers would cope quite happily; there was one point where I had to wait half an hour to get onto a charger, but that's a matter of sizing the facility to meet the demand. I was able to charge the car overnight at the hotels we used; I am sure that hotels have pretty quickly realized that people look for "Car Charging Facility" when choosing hotels! Slow charging mostly - even merely the provision of a standard 13 amp outlet - but overnight that was plenty.
In all that journey there was never a point at which e felt restricted or slowed down by problems with charging the car.
Thanks for the insight.
To me the issue is if we have a massive increase in EV we need a massive increase in charging points to maintain suitable usage.
Charging for an hour when you break for coffee, food, etc is quite a good strategy and probably very good for your health and road safety. But it means a far, far, bigger area than a service station forecourt for, say, 8 vehicles (with 5 minutes fill-up times, etc) is needed as well as the corresponding power feed to such a service area.
For some folks with their own driveway and the ability to slow charge overnight it is not an issue for short journeys and for around-town EV seems a great choice.
Indeed, the issue is scale, not individual.
One EV on a street is just fine. A hundred on the same substation starts to invalidate assumptions.
Mass usage of EVs means that almost every motorway service station car parking space needs a fast charger - everyone who stops will want a top-up while they grab a coffee or whatever.
That's a lot of infrastructure, and a seriously large load.
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