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Comment by kasey_junk | Hacker News Reader

My big issue is that in the places that electric cars make the most sense (cities) it’s hardest to own them. What am I going to do, run a really long extension cord from my condo to the random parking spot I found around the block?

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You won't like this idea but in Japan you're required to show you have a place to park your car before you're allowed to buy one. If there was a market for parking spaces with power it seems like they'd start showing up pretty quickly.

I love this idea. With one problem. It doesn’t capture the externalities of living in the sub/ex urbs correctly. Precisely where it’s hard to park is where people are living most environmentally friendly (density).

Paired with a dramatic energy tax I’m good with it.

It captures the spatial externalities, as opposed to the US system of minimum parking requirements and on-street parking, which sets aside valuable urban space that could be used for more housing (or stores or whatever) and wastes considerable amounts of capital (underground garages are very expensive) on making it easier to drive and not actually produce the environmental benefits of living in a city.

Well the obvious answer is parking spots will need to get electrified. Most new condos where I live already come with enough electrical provision pre-planned to electrify parking spots if needed and old ones are considering adding provisions.

Household wiring will anyway not have enough current capacity to support charging, so smart plug based billing will likely be the way these things will go. Since electric cars ARE becoming cheaper economically for city use, this likely WILL happen. Accelerating the trend will be the fact that property prices will go up/down depending on availability of electric charging - so big property owners will start making these investments since there's no lack of capital among them.

Basically, these tipping point things don't necessarily happen because of "activism" but happen when economics cause a runaway effect (think spread of mobile connectivity for another example) - so to that extent Tesla is pushing in the right direction by trying to get economics right.

> Household wiring will anyway not have enough current capacity to support charging

citation needed

No need, because it is simply untrue: Electric vehicles can charge on anything from 1-ph 8A 240V, to 3-ph 32A 400V, all of which can easily be provided by common urban household wiring.

Not sure who is downvoting you. I charged my Tesla Roadster on 120v 15A for like 6 years.

Apparently motels are having to crack down on "extension cording" now. Park near your room, crack a window, free fill up...

It’s just a few dollars, maybe the should try letting people pay?

where are you located that household 3 phase is available? Lots of hobby machinists would kill for that but it just isn’t available most places.

Annecdata: all the houses I personally know of in the south bay (North California, USA) area have three phase power, and the oldest was built in the 1940es.

Charging a Model S from a 110V 20A outlet is very slow and probably not a very useful option (but I have done it on a visit to LA).

Three phase (typically 480/3)? Or split-phase 240 VAC (center-tapped, single-phase 240V)?

The latter is extremely common/the standard residential service. The former is extremely uncommon residentially.

Or even less. I tell my Model S to charge at 5A when I am at home (230 V single phase). Gets me 5 km per hour, 60 km from 18:00 to 06:00 which is fine because I average about 20000 km a year which is less than 60 km a day. On road trips I use the superchargers.

Perhaps he's referring to the recommendations that Tesla has: "We recommend installing the Wall Connector with a power output to match the on-board charger of the vehicle, typically a 40, 60 or 90 amp circuit breaker."

https://www.tesla.com/support/home-charging-installation#wal...

For comparison, the average home circuit is rated for 15 amps.

Last I checked, most homes in the USA had 220v 30A dryer outlets.

Our house has a 30A dryer outlet on the second floor. The house is maxed out on a 100A main line. To get another 40A or 50A breaker permitted, and installed would mean new main line, new meter, new main breaker, new breaker box. Bids have come in between $7,000 to $9,000. New homes with 200A service will mostly be ok, but older homes are often underserved electrically.

I had my power upgraded from 100A to 200A for $1800 in DC. Do you have to dig?

Sure here

https://www.tesla.com/support/home-charging-installation#out...

Most home electricity installations have circuit breakers @ 15 Amps where I live. Wiring typically rated to a max 20 Amps draw before overheating. At a below 15 Amps current draw levels, you'll required an inordinate number of hours of charging for getting mileage on the battery and it's just not practical.

Most homes have electric stoves and dryers.

How many km do you drive in a year? My 20k km is about 55 km per day which is easily supplied by 5A 230 V to my Tesla S in 12 hours, say from 18:00 to 06:00.

When we first got our electric car we used a cord strung out the window, 12 amps at 120 volts. Not a problem, plug in when you get home, unless you need more than 60 miles this will be fine.

Old homes would benefit from better load management technology. I want to clip something like this (http://www.theenergydetective.com/homemtuct200.html) to my main feed, and have it send power measurements to an EV charger, which automatically adjusts to fill all remaining capacity.

This wouldn't require any Internet access, just data sent over the power line, to a charger that's able to listen.

Existing home wiring could also be repurposed to carry HVDC, and therefore more power (12A * 600V = 7.2kW)... but I'm not sure if HVDC cars are designed with low current in mind.

This would be awesome - someone Kickstart it or something.

ClipperCreek sells EV chargers with a UART interface to set the charging rate (in 25% increments), so it should be relatively straightforward to stuff a Raspberry Pi or something in there.

But that option costs an extra $184, and the UART protocol is only available under NDA, which probably makes it difficult to open source.

The J1772 spec is well documented and supports the "advertisement" of maximum charging current. You could add the capability to something like OpenEVSE. https://www.openevse.com/

At the moment, I'm pretty sure I have enough panel capacity for a plain old EVSE, but if I do need something controllable, then OpenEVSE looks really interesting. Thanks.

Here's an example of OpenEVSE tracking solar capacity, which is basically equivalent to panel load management:

https://github.com/OpenEVSE/ESP8266_WiFi_v2.x#solar-pv-diver...

Interestingly, I went to a Nissan dealer in Japan (where I live) to ask the exact same question. They have a deal where you can spend the equivalent of about $30 per month and you can go to the dealer to charge your car (unlimited charging). It takes about half an hour and they have a waiting room with free coffee and a TV.

Although I'm worried that they don't have anywhere near the capacity to handle the volume if it gets popular (imagine waiting for 2 or 3 people ahead of you...), for the moment it seems doable. As my wife can't live without her car (I don't drive), we're seriously thinking about it.

I walked past one of these in Japan and it even had a really nice kids play area, a cot/baby sleeping area, a TV area with consoles, etc!

How excited would you be to see those at a gas station? It implies a wait time I’d be concerned about.

Certainly it's a different way of doing things.

Although this thread is about the common person, for me the numbers actually work out relatively well. The new Leaf has about a 400 km range. My wife drives just under 40 km a day (I wish I could convince her to get an electric scooter instead :-P). You don't want to drive it down to empty, so I guess we could get away with charging it once a week. At least in our household, that would be easy to fit in.

My wife currently spends about $30 a week on gasoline (it requires high octane and it burns stupid amounts of fuel and gasoline in Japan is stupidly expensive). That's $120 per month, so she would be saving $90 per month on their charging scheme. In exchange she has to wait 2 hours a month (and organise refuelling the vehicle about 1.5 times more than she does currently). So, let's say $45 an hour post taxes (I think her marginal tax rate including health and pension is about 24%).

So it's a good deal if she's able to avoid waiting for other people too much... And assuming Nissan continues their deal for the life of the car (seems unlikely, but by that point hopefully we'll be able to plug in at home).

The main thing that bugs me is spending $30-40K to drive 20 km out and back every day. It's complete insanity, and you can talk all you want about driving a "green car", the earth is not going to take back the carbon required to build that car any time soon :-( Unfortunately my wife (who is pretty normal in this respect) can not quite grasp that logic.

This situation is when employers providing chargers in company parking will become a notable work benefit.

This. I've owned an electric car for 6+ months, and have literally never charged it at home.

I commute via public transit, my employer doesn’t offer parking.

I work from home. My employer doesn't have an office in the country i live in.

That's another way to solve the problem.

At my previous job, my boss was an EV enthusiast and installed four chargers (at a time where only one person had an EV). I charged for free for six years and when I left there were ~ 8 EVs competing for the spots. I know for a fact that our chargers was a factor in purchase of some of those.

Doesn't seem all that hard to solve. My city, Los Angeles, reserves some street parking spots for electric vehicles and has installed outlets on the curb for those spaces.

Also, if you live in a city, unless you "reverse commute" to the suburbs, you probably won't drive enough miles regularly that you'd need to charge every night anyway. Give it a fast charge every few days in a commercial garage while you run errands.

Who pays for the power? What % of spots are electrified? If we hit an inflection point how fast can they change that % and how does the answer to the question about payment change?

The utility or a wholesaler will markup the power to pay for it. They should jump at the chance to grow at the expense of big oil.

If you have a car in the city, you should park in your building's parking garage, not in the street. The problem is that residential street parking is overused.

In the street, you charge at a meter, the same place you put in your payment. http://www.rolecserv.com/ev-charging/product/EV-Charging-Str...

> you should park in your building's parking garage, not in the street

Let them eat cake, in other words?

They're currently eating free cake. Those parking spots cost the city a lot of money directly and indirectly (some estimates say $100 a month).

But I can’t pay $100 a month for an electrified spot so...

My apartment building has a central garage with a place you can charge your car (probably) for free. Unfortunately someone (out of a few hundred) is already using it.

100$ a month is probably on the low end. A parking spot is at least eight square meters, probably more like nine. Rent here in Berlin is about 10€/m^2/month (so pretty cheap as far as big cities go). Typical houses have three to four stories, so that parking spot could be 24-36m^2 of housing.

Unfortunately, my building is over 120 years old. They weren't forward thinking enough with electricity or parking spots, I guess.

I mean they had electric cars when the building was built...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Times-Herald_race

Not quite, my building was completed in 1890.

They make a lot of sense for shared ownership. In my city, there's a cooperative running a fleet of cars, similar to bike sharing programs, with dedicated parking spots that have electricity.

This seems like the only viable option but suffers from obvious problems;

- traffic is bursty - why would car makers incentivise this?

Well, in Montreal at least, efficient public transit during rush hour + shared bikes + shared cars for off-rush-hours is a very nice combination.

> why would car makers incentivise this

The cooperative just bought vehicles. What can car makers do about it?

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