by somerandomqaguy | 2026-01-27 06:28:29+00:00
> Remember that gas stations weren’t on very corner when the gasoline car was invented, either.

Yeah but gotta keep in mind when the first gas cars as tools came out, you didn't need a gas station on every corner either. You bought your fuel from the drug store. Even then a lot of early 'gas' cars were readily modified to be multifuel; kerosene (which was available everywhere due to use of for lighting), naptha, coal gas, mineral spirits, but you could modify the car to run off moonshine if need be.

But okay, let's just say for a second that there were no world wars, and in this universe petroleum wasn't discovered until a good chunk of electric infrastructure was built out.

I'd probably wager that liquid fuel engines would probably catch up to the electric vehicles pretty fast and likely surpass it in popularity in 30 or 40 years. You can pack a gas motor that outputs 20x more power into a package that's the same size as a DC motor. For farmer's that's a vehicle that can till deeper or a larger piece of land in a single pass, for merchants that means more goods you can carry in a single run.

For the wealthier class probably the electric would've been attractive but keep in mind that one of the biggest reasons wealthy urbanites owned cars at the time was for racing. Electrics in the original timeline were considered to be more ladylike because you didn't need the muscles to manually crank the engine (and risk punching yourself in the face when it turned unexpectedly). Probably in this timeline though, because electric motors are more advanced, you bypass that problem much more quickly and now you've got a vehicle that's only slightly more maintenance, but way more capable. And when the first times when a gas car out runs electrics of that era and makes said wealthy BEV owners look slower... yeah.

Yeah I'd assume that BEV's would advance more but ultimately they'd probably just hit the plateau of what battery chemistry and DC motor design can with pure analog systems, probably with either NiCD or NiMH chemistry. The next big leap with chemistry from those to lithium didn't really hit mainstream until the advent of extremely battery management circuits came about. And without WW2 in this universe driving the need for transistors...

>I also think your use of your personal anecdote isn’t a very convincing argument by itself. BEVs aren’t right for you as of today, in a world which isn’t a part of this hypothetical. You also pointed out that you are a minority outlier by having odd requirements like “I don’t have data on my smartphone.” Do you think that’s common? I think most people even un in developing countries have smartphone data access.

Last I checked, it was about 15% to 20% of Canadians that don't have a data plan on their phone, so that's 1 in 5 to 7 Canadians. So you're not wrong, but in a city of 1 million, that's close to 150,000 to 200,000 people. Minority yeah but not exactly one that can be readily ignored, that's still a lot of people.

Granted though, Canada has public WiFi access points basically everywhere so it's not too hard to get away with it.

>Over half of homes in US housing stock are single family houses with implicit access to charging. Daily commutes are around 40 miles. I argue that we should logically see ~50% of new vehicles being EVs but we are way below that number and I put that on customer familiarities and preconceptions.

I'm Canadian, and hypothetically that's true here too. In practice it's not as clear cut as that.

Detached garages here for the most part are built with only a single 15A circuit running to it, so even a full level 1 charging working it can cause the breaker to trip when someone turns on the lights or runs the garage door opener. Upgrading it needs permitting to be filed and signed off by a master electrician, and typically also involves trenching and replacing of conduit, even if all you want to do is just add in one additional 15A circuit. And detached style garages were the norm for housing builds until around I wanna say 2000 to 2005 ish, when attached garages started becoming more the trend.

If I had to guess, I'd say that's about roughly half of the single family homes in that situation here, so chances are that if the family wanted a BEV with a detached garage, you're spending $1800 to $2500 on top of the cost of the materials and labour for the EVSE install itself. Most electricians last I asked were charging roughly $2000 parts and labour included (which is really high, most because AFAIK because the moment the word EVSE leaves the client's mouth, electricians add the Rich-Person-Tax onto their quotes). $4500 extra on top of an already more expensive car is a tall order.

The other half of houses circa 2005 to 2018 are probably in better shape but those typically only have 100A panels so... if they don't have additional equipment outside of stove, dryer, etc then they're probably okay to install a level 2 charger. How many of those can or can't, I don't know. But for me at least it does complicate the math quite a bit because I'm somewhat more partial to getting a heat pump over at home BEV charging if I had to chose.

The other issue that spans all wealth levels is households that for whatever use their garages for storing junk instead of their cars. I don't understand it but it's, remarkably common to see. And the city I live in makes it illegal to pull charging cables across or over sidewalks so that makes that bit of a issue.

That being said that's me commenting on the Canadian side. I don't know how much of an issue it is for Americans in general. US households AFAIK adopted 200 amp panels as standard 20 years ago so that shouldn't be as much of a problem.