Everyone Will Want to Charge Their Vehicles Fast, These Entrepreneurs Bet

The trick will be keeping all the innards cool

Steve LeVine
The Mobilist

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A new fast-charging station at JFK Airport in New York. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty

Some time, years in the future, our transportation mindsets may change — we may forget all about what we now regard as the convenient corner gasoline station, and the reliably quick fill-up while rushing to an appointment or dropping off the kids. Instead, most of us will have new muscle memory and simply plug in our electric vehicle as soon as we get home, so it’s all charged up in the morning. If we happen to occasionally need added juice — say, for the random time we are on a long holiday — charging stations will be concentrated at intervals on highways. Otherwise, we are now watching the twilight of the gas station.

Or so assert lots of first-movers who over the last six months have written to tell me how wrong, wrong, wrong I am to argue that we will need nearly ubiquitous fast-charging stations before mainstream American motorists will relax and look seriously at buying an EV. They say they charge up at home, have left bad memories of smelly gas stations behind them, and that so will everyone else.

Lest I be accused of secretly hording buggy whips, I agree that behavior changes, and that it very well might in how we plan — or don’t — our future routine travel. But, to the degree it…

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Steve LeVine
The Mobilist

Editor at Large, Medium, covering the turbulence all around us, electric vehicles, batteries, social trends. Writing The Mobilist. Ex-Axios, Quartz, WSJ, NYT.