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Comment by intopieces | Hacker News Reader

The most impactful way municipalities could encourage EV adoption would be to subsidize the installation of chargers at work. For most people - especially if they have an ICE at home for the weekend - this would eliminate the need for costly home installation and charger hunting

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If your total commute is <45 miles a day, you can easily just use a 110V wall plug, which gives ~4 miles per hour of charging.

This may exclude emergency or otherwise unplanned situations, though. If you suddenly find yourself in a situation where you need to get somewhere distant, fast - you may not always be able to achieve this using a lower-range (~100mi) EV.

Maybe I'm wrong, though. It's just that... coming from public transit-only life (I've only started driving very recently), what I really value about cars is that when you need you can just sit down and drive whenever and wherever you need.

The British government covers 75% of the cost of a home charger and will subsidise workplace and on-street charging points too.

The infrastructure is more of a challenge in the US due to your 110v system - most British garages already have 3kW sockets and the unsubsidised cost of a 7kW charger installation is typically less than $1,000.

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/government-grants-...

Except it seems like you mostly find slow L2 chargers that take 6 hours to do anything meaningful... In places where you are likely to only park for 30 minutes (maybe 2 hours at most). Might help if you have a Leaf with a tiny battery that constantly needs topping off, but useless if you have a Tesla.

Not sure why a workplace would limit charging to 30 minutes. I would have to move my car just as the coffee was kicking in.

I'm not talking about workplaces. Having slow charging at workplaces makes the most sense, because you actually will be leaving the car there for 8 hours.

Oh, perhaps you meant to reply to someone else, as workplace charging was the topic of my parent comment.

How much does a home installation cost?

Around $2600 plus the cost of electricity. Not viable for renters or apartment dwellers, and not a good candidate for subsidy since it would be used by 1-2 cars at most.

Local governments could subsidize installing 'at least x per y units' in a complex and increase the number as EVs get more and more popular. On a more hands off approach when they do start taking hold among more of the renting segment available EV parking will become a selling point. Subsidizing them would help get over that initial 'I rent so I won't have any where to charge normally' problem with EVs (ignoring they're out of the price range of many renters currently).

How is it that much and where is it that much? I paid a fraction of that.

Austin, TX apparently. FTA: “Level Two is a 240 volt socket, which are the weirdo-looking ones you see for your washer or dryer or some kinds of ovens. This is a much faster connection, adding 20-25 miles per hour, but most garages don’t have them, so you need to get an electrician to install them (that’s $2,000 right there) and then you need to buy the charger itself (usually about $600, though there are often rebates for this sort of thing).”

An L2 charger costs about $750 to install at home. I paid an electrician $300 to run a line from my fuse box to garage and install the outlet. Then the actual charger, a Siemens VersiCharge, is $450. I still need to do a bit of drywall repair from where the electrician had to cut to run the line, but that's trivial.

FWIW, this was my cost breakout as well (I'm in the bay area).

I paid a few hundred for an outlet in the garage and use the charger that came with the car. Really wasn’t a big deal. It paid for itself within the first 2 months.

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