Comment by kelnos
A quick search suggests there's around 145,000 gas stations. This article mentions Tesla has 17,800 supercharger stations. I didn't care enough to look up the station counts for the other EV charging companies. But that Tesla figure is around 12% of the gas station total, so let's say the total number of EV charging stations is somewhere between 15% and 20% of the gas station total.
I could easily see EV charging stations approach the level of saturation of gas stations in the next 10 years.
Yes, today people are going to stop wherever there's a nearby charging station. But that's going to change, and fairly quickly.
> 17,800 supercharger stations.
Did they mean 17,800 supercharger units or 17,800 locations with super charger units. Because I've seen those numbers interchanged before.
The problem with chargers (and I say this as an EV owner) is that many people mostly charge at home, so they aren't using them even weekly. However, everyone goes for a road trip say around memorial day, and the EV chargers are PACKED. It is just a huge disparity between normal and peak usage. Or you go on a road trip and you need one in the middle of nowhere Idaho on the way from Seattle to Yellowstone.
Thankfully L3 charger units at least are cheaper to buy/install/maintain (in theory, if people didn't think the coords had copper worth scrapping) and can be installed in more locations than gas station pumps (like super market parking lots).
Given the disparity in peak usage, it makes sense, at least, to compete on availability rather than price, since even if you are paying $60 to charge up, it is only a few times a year. It is much more important that the chargers be where you need them, and to have free units when you need them, oh, and they should be working! ... than to be the cheapest price.