Slow1 said:Ok, so I think this may actually illustrate my point. Assume (for the moment) that public chargers all charged on the order of what you experienced. IF this were the case, would you choose to charge at home primarily and only utilize the public chargers when the range of your travels for the day required it? I can see "occasional range charge" not being an issue for most people. This should decrease the demand for said chargers and thus reduce the amount of infrastructure required. The assumption I'm making here, of course, is that the range of BEVs will be such that buyers won't have to charge away from home on a regular basis; either the range will impede the sales (we already see this even with free chargers don't we?) or the range of vehicles will increase (also appears to be in the plans of car manufacturers).
I think you're on point in this line of thinking. If I had a vehicle with 200 mile range, I'd never have to charge away from home (even taking into effect battery degradation and temperature effects) except when I want to travel 250 miles to visit my parents. As with most things in life, we should be pursuing a happy medium. It would also be nice if the investment and maintenance costs were lower for the people putting up charging stations. My thought was to have the EV owners own their own portable EVSE and the infrastructure need only be a standardized outlet (controlled, of course, and capable of running credit/debit cards). That's much more manageable, and durable, than a sophisticated and networked station.
Make it easy to implement infrastructure, give a financial incentive to do so, and increase range thus lowering public dependence upon infrastructure = winning combination.