We passed legislation authorizing spending a few billion ($7.5B, 2021 Infrastructure and Jobs Act), and have deployed a portion of it. Most of the authorized $$$ has not yet been spent; it unlocks over the decade from 2021-2030. One fault of the bill is it depends on states actually doing the work to build these stations; the feds aren't doing it directly. If states drag their feet, stations don't get built.
The timeline is even longer (and with such good cause). It also took till March 2023 to specify federal requirements for a charger! That's not a bad thing, it's not unreasonable at all. We didn't have any open systems for charging until then! There were no federal standards for what to build or how to stay or fall out of compliance! Before you start paying people to build chargers, you have to have some direction for what to build, have to make it better than the free for all of unreliable chargers that had hindered confidence & adoption so badly!
Folks act so salty about this all, such snark. But in my view so much was smartly done. There's so many layers of problems that needed to be tackled for consumers to actually get success, and it felt like these were gone through slowly carefully over time to make something useful and helpful.
For example, the charging standards require a certain amount of availability. Otherwise, folks might build some crappy chargers, not maintain them, and still claim money.
Folks have had all kinds of issues with chargers being not in service. Or fully used! One of the big requirements that took a while to hammer out was that chargers neede to live report their status: how many chargers are there, at what power outputs, at this location, and which are in use & what capacity is remaining? So you can get to the charger you are aiming for and have some real hope of charging up!
It's been just under two years since the standards got made. They're good, important standards, that insure this money was going to be for public benefit, that it really would tackle the problem. It is unsurprising as hell to me that there's not a ton of deployments yet!
For a "hacker news" site, I would expect a more reasonable set of expectations about product development lifecycle. Simply manufacturing compatible chargers is gonna take at least a year, in all probability. Site planning can somewhat happen in parallel, but going through the state to get the fed money is going to be a bit complex, especially at first. This stuff just takes time! The pool of money was mostly unspent, and I expect over time, as roll outs ramped up, the difficulty & costs would have been going down.
The political appetite & cycle is so contrary to the actual pace of the world some time. Sometimes we have to be willing to let good things take time to happen. It all felt so with-cause to me.
Ok, but taking two years to come up with a big document of standards while Tesla was able to just do all that by themselves and then build more chargers for less is kind of the issue. I appreciate that it's not easy, but the not-easiness is the problem.
Tesla took over a decade before they open-sourced their supercharger standards.
From Tesla's own website: "NACS was originally developed by Tesla, deployed in 2012 with the first Supercharger and Model S vehicle and eventually published by Tesla in 2022 with the goal of industry-wide adoption."
Tesla though has had to pair partner by partner with every other car maker who wants to use their network. Deals have to be cut to figure out how payments are gonna work with each manufacturer's car/app.
Tesla also has been operating on chargers for years! They took their own sweet time we just don't think about the first years!
Tesla never built standards. They just made something that sort of worked for them. That sort of somewhat helped some specific consumers find chargers, albeit with not enough status available to know what to expect when you got there.
None of that is at all good enough for actual infrastructure the world needs to be able to depend on. "Works for my car" isn't how gasoline works, and it's not how ev charging is gonna ever succeed.
>It takes a while to get all the surveys and permits.
Yes, that's exactly the problem, an over regulated permitting regime. If we are in a climate emergency then we should treat it as such, which means that if the Federal government can't overrule local permitting restrictions, they should prioritize funding to states that are willing to relax permitting requirements and get shovels in the ground.
