On Friday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Ford Motor Company President and CEO Jim Farley argued that building up the electric vehicle charging infrastructure so people can go wherever they can with a gas-powered car will require retailers to put fast chargers in front of stores, which will require a change in building standards.
Co-host Becky Quick asked, “[J]ust the idea of building up the infrastructure and making sure that you can go anywhere that you would with a gasoline-powered vehicle, how long do you think it takes before those problems are really resolved and you don’t run into snags along the way, especially as there is more EV adoption and you’re going to need more charging stations to handle more people who are doing this, more customers?”
Farley responded, “I think until retailers start to put fast chargers in front of their stores, so as people do grocery shopping, they can fast charge, we’re now making our fast charge that can get 150 miles in like ten minutes with our second gen products [that] come out in another couple of years. So, I think that it’s going to take a number of years. What we see on the commercial side is that most people do depot charging. They have a route every day, plumbers, electricians, ambulance[s]. And that’s kind of pretty easy to solve actually, but on the retail side, it’s going to take building standards, a lot of the other things that happened in Norway. That can take five to ten years.”
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