The bigger problem is that an electric car can not take along a 'spare gas cannister' to get you to the nearest gas station.
As charging stations become more common this will be less of a problem but somehow I can't envision the future equivalent of a gas station that processes a few hundred cars per hour when doing the same thing electrically with everybody waiting for much longer times. Also, a few hundred cars concurrently recharging their batteries will require significant power infrastructure, gas stations can be put up just about anywhere where roads go (and that's not always where the power lines are), in a pinch you can power a whole gas station off a small genset.
I'm sure smarter people that me have thought this through :)
Would a gas car running out of fuel get similar coverage?
Range anxiety at the time that gas stations were few and far between would have been a comparable item.
Storing large numbers of battery packs safely would be a challenge, and they still would need to be recharged.
A single 50K liter fuel drop is the equivalent of 1.75 TJ, that's 486111 KWh (one liter of gasoline is 35 MJ). If a typical car has a 60 liter gas tank that's 850 cars give or take. A busy gas station will go through that in a few hours. Say 200 cars / hour, that's a bit over 4 hours. So the electrical equivalent of that 50K liter fuel drop delivered over the space of 4 hours (assuming equal efficiency, which probably is not correct) would require 125 MW of electrical input. As a check: One Tesla super charger is about 100 KW, running 200 of them in parallel would require 20 MW.
So it appears that even at roughly 5 times the efficiency of a gasoline engine the power requirements of a filling station capable with such volumes would be quite significant. You're talking high voltage distribution to the stations at a minimum to reduce the losses, even at 10KV that's still 2K amps.
Pretty sleepy here so apologies ahead of time if I messed up too much on the calculations.
As charging stations become more common this will be less of a problem but somehow I can't envision the future equivalent of a gas station that processes a few hundred cars per hour when doing the same thing electrically with everybody waiting for much longer times. Also, a few hundred cars concurrently recharging their batteries will require significant power infrastructure, gas stations can be put up just about anywhere where roads go (and that's not always where the power lines are), in a pinch you can power a whole gas station off a small genset.
I'm sure smarter people that me have thought this through :)
Would a gas car running out of fuel get similar coverage?
Range anxiety at the time that gas stations were few and far between would have been a comparable item.