It's an understandable thing to forget, since you can't fill up your gas car at home.
I own an EV and I only use public chargers extremely rarely.
If you live in an apartment complex or otherwise only have street parking, you likely don't have access to electricity. Or at the very least, would need to negotiate with the landlord to have a new outlet installed -- which is going to depend on how much you get along with said landlord.
"Assembly Bill 2565 would give tenants the right to install an electric-car charging station at their residence, provided the tenant submits a written request to the landlord and pays for the installation costs."
(Passed already)
So you install it at your expense, sell it at the depreciated price when you move out, and the landlord recovers the cost by upping the rent for the next EV driver looking for a new apartment. Or they don't, and you remove it and take it with you when you leave, paying the electrician labor again on both ends.
In any case, most people don’t just shell out a random $30,000 they have burning a whole in their pocket, they finance the purchase over 5-6 years. Sudden out-of-pocket $1,000 is kinda a big deal, especially if one plans on moving out in a year or two.
(Lest I get accused of being way too out of touch, I do know people for whom affording even a $200 car repair is out of reach, and something they'll put up a GoFundMe over. These people do not drive electric cars. If you can afford the ~$5K in interest that financing a car over 6 years will cost you, you can afford the $1K charger. If you can't afford this, you buy a used Ford or Chevy rather than any of the cars we're talking about here.)
In terms of selling below their invoice price, they also get an advertising holdback that scales with cars sold, so they’re still making a small amount on the sales floor. The real money at a dealership is made in the service bays, not on the sales floor. This is what really sucks for dealers about electric cars. In 42 months, my LEAF has never seen the dealer again and I’ve only added washer fluid and changed the wiper blades once.
If you care for the batteries nicely (drive slow, don't slam accelerator, avoid winter), I'm sure they'll last a good long time, but the battery is a consumable that will need to be replaced sooner than most other major components, I think the Leaf has them under the rear seats, and may be a pain to deal with. If your Leaf has fast charging, it's advised to avoid using it too often because it will heat the batteries and may reduce charge over time.
I guess the skimping of quality here seems short-sighted, but every EV has some weird, questionable choices to cut down on weight.
No one is loaning you money interest free. You are just paying for it in the purchase price or through other fees.
I will admit there are rare cases where strange incentives may make it cheaper or the same price to buy with credit, but these are very rare, and are only applicable if you artificially limit your available selection of vehicles to brand new. Even though you could get virtually the same car with 10k miles on it for much less.
Car dealerships have a number of incentives that can change their reserve price in strange ways. There's the advertising holdback and potential servicing cross-subsidies that sokoloff mentions, and then there are also monthly quotas and per-salesperson quotas. If the dealer is very close to their monthly quota and it's almost the end of the month, you can get a car below invoice price, because the manufacturer will give them a bonus for hitting the quota and so the marginal profit on the one car they sell you can be positive (including the bonus) even though the car itself sold at a loss. Similarly, if an individual salesperson is close to hitting their personal quota, they will let you have the car for the lowest price that won't get them in trouble with the dealer, because it helps them hit their numbers and gives them a bonus.
It's entirely possible that similar incentives exist for financing, and that's why people get zero-percent auto loans with cash back, and they're cross-subsidized by people who end up paying thousands in interest because their credit scores weren't as good or they didn't get as good a deal. But on average, the financing cost needs to be eaten by somebody, so on average you're likely to get better deals paying cash than financing. The dealer can also book all the cash immediately when you pay cash, which makes them somewhat more amenable to offer deals and opens up some other incentives for them to sell cheap (like getting rid of old model years near the end of the fiscal year and converting it to cash so their numbers look good and they can order more new model years).
(There can also be strange situations that make buying new more economical than buying used - I bought my Fit in 2009 for less than used 2007 Fits were going for, because the bottom had fallen out of the economy and oil had gone from $100/barrel to $50/barrel. The used car owners had paid ~$2000 over sticker price for a fuel-efficient car in a booming economy, while I paid ~$500 under invoice price because dealers were desperate to hit their quotas, and the dealer's beliefs about where the market is at adjusts faster than private owners' beliefs about where the market is at. Such situations are the exception rather than the rule, though.)
I think it's easier to do this for a popular car so your mileage may vary.
* Or really, without the options I don't want.
Source: I drag an orange 75 foot extension cable once per week and have used a public charger exactly once for novelty-sake.
So there is going to be some cost to setting this up even if the landlord allows it (which he may not).
EV chargers can be integrated into lamp posts or other items of street furniture. A city-wide network of charging points can be managed using contactless payment, with IoT sensors to indicate vacant charging points. Building out widespread on-street charging infrastructure won't be quick or cheap, but it's entirely feasible with existing technology.
There's also a reasonable expectation that some combination of car-sharing, ride-sharing and autonomous vehicles will significantly reduce the rate of private car ownership. Electric bicycles and scooters show tremendous potential for reducing the demand for car ownership in urban areas. Good public transit of course has a major role to play.
http://www.rolecserv.com/ev-charging/product/EV-Charging-Str...
Pretty much every significant apartment building built in Chicago in the last decade has had EV chargers in the garage.
The problem is that there aren't enough EV spaces to go around for all the residents who have electric cars.
If you're renting a stand-alone home, isn't there an EV station you can plug into a regular outlet? Naturally, the charging time would be slower than a 220V connection or whatever is needed, but if it's charing overnight, is that not an option?
(Don't own an electric car yet, so I'm not up on chargers)
That's if you are in the US, actually, where most outlets are 110V. If you have access to 220V or you can rewire an outlet, then charging time should be similar to public level 2 charging stations. Beware that not all charges will support 220v and will blow up (but some can be modified).
110v is the biggest barrier for adoption everywhere, that and old electrical installations.
As an EV owner, I'd say that you need either a place to charge at work, or at home (great if you have both). If you do, then it is more convenient than pulling up at gas stations (more so if you are trying to get the cheaper ones in the likes of CostCo). If you do not, then relying on the public infrastructure is stressful and time consuming.
One of the cars in my family only drives eight miles a day, and never on weekends. So I'm thinking about replacing it with an EV. Sounds like a granny cable might be all I need.
My previous commute was 50 miles a day. Using only a standard 110v, I would top off every day, and that worked just fine. I could even forget once (but not twice in a row!). It took about 12 hours to charge what I used up during the day.
So yeah. Just grab an extension cord (make sure it is rated for the current), and plug into whatever outlet you can find.
110V hasn’t been the standard since before World War II.
Slow charge for my LEAF is about 5 miles per hour from a standard outlet.
I live in a condo with a detached garage, which is on the far side of another row of condos.
So getting power from my meter to the garage means trenching through a sidewalk, under a block of condos, then through about 20 feet of pavement. Alternatively, I could trench through 100 feet of pavement from the power vault where our complex's transformer is and have the power company install a new meter for me.
The garage has a light bulb + garage door opener circuit, but the panel that feeds it wouldn't support a single charge station, let alone enough for the 8 garages that the panel serves.
The HOA isn't interested in running enough power to let residents install an EV charge station in the garage, and I'm not interested in paying for it either. So unless I can get my neighbors to help share the cost, I'm not going to be able to install a charge station.
Not practical for an individual to develop to solve their individual problem, but maybe it could become a selling point for any particular EV.
If you divert that 150W to an EV charger, so little power will make no perceptible difference to the charge overnight. Maybe 3-4 miles per night. And in fact a smart charger might conclude the circuit is faulty and cease charging altogether at this very low input.
Almost everyone that I know in my age-group is nowhere close to being able to afford buying a house.
Having something like a Powerwall that's always plugged in, and fast charging your car off of it overnight (or faster) could work. Very expensive, though.
See, that’s the problem with anecdotal evidence based on your own bubble. I’m in the exact opposite position - literally everyone I know that would buy (or already owns) an electric car also owns a house.
In most cities, the cost of time to park long enough to charge would exceed the cost of electricity.
Alternatively i would suggest: when the paradigm has shifted, the ancillary processes shift accordingly rather than cling onto some cloned reliquary husk of gasoline culture.
I’m renting a single family home in San Francisco. I drive a Chevrolet Bolt EV.
Using a little known SF electrical code that allows DIY electrical work in a fully detached house, I installed a 50-Amp 250v NEMA 14-50 outlet in my garage. I did 50A service for room to upgrade the stock EVSE in the future. My landlord is fine as I’m insured, followed all National Electric Code guidelines and laws. It cost me $100 in parts/wire.
I then created a NEMA 14-50P to a NEMA 5-15R adapter to plug the GM stock EVSE in at 250v.
It’s a little known fact about the Chevy Bolt that the included EVSE charger supports 250v - by wiring each blade on the NEMA 5-15 plug to a 125v hot lead; then wiring the ground pin to neutral. I then locked the NEMA 5-15 plug/receptacle extension cord in a lockbox clearly labeled.
While a normal 40A EVSE Gives 7.2kW, this setup- still limited to 12A due to GM/Clipper Creeks firmware - gives me around 3kWh. That’s perfect for my use. I am not tempted to really upgrade this set up a time soon, but can if I want to. It’s also easy enough to take with me.
Total installation of level 2 charging in my San Francisco rental? $150ish.
(Please don’t try this at home if you have no idea what you’re doing when it comes to working with electric. this is only informational, not an endorsement!)
If you did this in my property, when I found out what you did, you'd be in violation of the lease and paying me to have a licensed electrician out to inspect the work and do anything needed to bring it up to code.
I can't imagine why your landlord is ok with a tenant's DIY electrical work, since the landlord is the one on the hook if it goes bad now or in the future.
So unless the tenant was a professional electrician with his own liability insurance that would cover the work, it's quite possible that the landlord is not covered.
If you follow most of the most important rules (Fuse, RCCB, cood conduit, proper cable), hardly anything can go wrong.
Hell, you can easily destroy a house with a single cigarette, but nobody talks about it.
While it is certainly possible for an amateur to follow the right procedures and do safe work, it's also possible (and even quite likely) that they don't know everything they need to do, and end up doing something unsafe.
While you can easily destroy a house with a cigarette (though many landlords have non-smoking clauses here), a cigarette won't generally burn down the house a year from now after the tenant who did the work is long gone.
First, the person you replied to didn't say that they didn't have it inspected and didn't have to meet code. I just perused San Francisco's municipal ordinances. They follow the same ones I've seen elsewhere. The homeowner or lessee of a single-family detached house is allowed to pull permits on his or her own authority and do the work. The work must still follow the same inspection process from the city and must meet all relevant codes. It is not just that the tenant could slap wire wherever he or she chose; the relevant rules would still be followed.
Second, and this is the editorial part, why do landlords--at least the ones I read on the Internet--have such an adversarial relationship with tenants? "My property," "what you did," "violation of the lease," and so on. The tenant is the one making the money for you; why immediately assume bad faith? If you're going to be all legalistic about it, when you signed the lease, you signed over most of the rights for "your property" to the tenant. Perhaps that should be a more harmonious relationship?
Because tenants, in general, don't have a long-term interest in the property and are willing to cut corners. Some things I've seen:
Switching 15A breaker for a 20A breaker "because it trips too much".
Wiring an extension cord into the panel and running it through a hole in the wall to the garage "because I needed another circuit (my grow lights kept tripping the other one)"
Swapping hot/neutral when replacing outlets
Using a wire nut that's too small and taping it to hold it in place.
Not using a wire nut at all, just twisting wires together and taping them.
My apartment complex with hundreds of units has a built in parking garage, and there is one (1) electric charging station. Two pools though.
Not all houses have connected garages either.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/support/home-charging-installation
We have the 40 amp installation and have never wanted for more.
Somewhat related, but a neat hack might be to get solar installed at the same time. Re-doing the panel would be included as part of the project, which means you can A) get a loan to cover everything, and B) get a 30% credit from the government (in the U.S.). [I say might; our solar installer explained to us offhand that many people do things like that and get other upgrades as well like new water heaters, etc. You'd have to check with your CPA to confirm.] Considering that solar is cheaper over the long-term it's a pretty good deal depending on what loan terms you can get.
Not even EV owners. That's overkill.
I had the advantage of moving into a place where the previous tenant had the service and panel upgraded / house rewired for their cannabis business.
Really glad too. There’s lots of Hazardous Federal Pacific Electric panels in operation around here.