An electric car I could live with!

[theholycow]

If you're going to charge at night away from peak hours, you don't need a quick charge (unless you do most of your driving at that time).

If you need a quick charge, you either need to have a big feed and abuse the grid, or you need to have stored up a bunch in the charging station beforehand.

[GasSavers_BEEF]

my point was more that you need a certain amount of energy to charge the car. be it a trickle charger or all at one pop. it should be the same amout of KWH used. not a bettery expert so don't quote me on that one.

by charging at night, you don't cause too much strain on the grid (maybe minimal strain would be better) but you have the option to speed charge otherwise. if you needed to go somewhere right after work but your charge was low, you could in a matter of minutes charging.

[JanGeo]

The pole transformers probably handle several houses at 100-200 amps each so they should be able to put out a lot of amps. We have a single transformer on the pole outside my back office and it feeds maybe 3 buildings and I am talking electric heat in some of the units in my building. The amps are there believe it or not. Our building has over 1000 amps at 240 volts on the breaker panel in the back hallway.

[ma4t]

Anybody reading up on Better Place? http://www.betterplace.com/

So far Israel, Denmark, Australia, California, Hawaii, Canada, Arizona, Portugal, and a few other places I've probably forgotten, are moving rapidly (no pun intended) toward infrastructure with Better Place or similar companies. The key is, all of these places will be running NEVs - Neighborhood Electric Vehicles. NEVs only need to handle short commutes. As the technology gets better, I'm sure we'll have more long range EVs.

Detroit (or maybe the rest of the state you never hear about) is trying to be the center for batteries.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b24e60aa-2...nclick_check=1
The logic is, the vehicle can be made anywhere, but the battery is heavy. OEMs can save by localizing manufacturing of batteries, and lower their exposure to foreign exchange volatility at the same time. Michigan has the educated and experienced work force, which BAE recognized when they set up in Troy.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b24e60aa-2...nclick_check=1

MA4T

[thecheese429]

Ahhh, my favourite musterion. The box (or, rather, what's outside).

Maybe it has a charging station consisting of little more than a capacitor (or just batteries) that HOLDS the 100 or so KWH necessary for one charge, and maintains its own charge with maybe 50 amps (possibly less) on the grid.

Then, yes, you do have pretty fat cables going to the car, but it isn't a realtime grid load.