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Where will ‘garage orphans’ charge electric cars?

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151 pointsthrow0101a526 comments

Yet another reason the real answer to the climate crisis isn't EVs - it's public transit, bicycles, e-bikes, scooters, e-scooters, walking, etc. All these other modes are much lower impact on the environment than purchasing and operating an EV, much less an ICE.

Or carbon-neutral liquid fuels for use cases where you absolutely need an ICE-type vehicle with 300+ mile range. e.g. synthetic gasoline or biofuels. Unfortunately, those fuels really need a carbon tax to be competitive with fossil fuels.

Plenty of travel (both commutes and long distance travel) which is too lengthy for bicycles / scooters, but doesn't have public transit servicing it.

So build the transit. It's cheaper than highways and doubly so when you factor in the private vehicle cost borne by users of those highways.

Electric rail transit is significantly more expensive than highways, and operational costs are really high if you're trying to offer frequent service on less trafficked routes.

Public transit is cost effective for urban cores and commuter rail routes to those urban cores, but everywhere else it's simply not economical.

I think that's GP's point: Instead of investing in EVs, we should be expanding public transport to reduce the dependencies on personal vehicles in the first place.

Who is "we"? I don't know about where you are, but where I live, there is tons of public transport, with more being developed all the time, but nobody wants to use it because the design of the area is fundamentally unsuited to mass transit. If we spent 1/10 the time and money making infrastructure for EVs, everyone would be able to have one already, but we don't. We keep trying and failing to make public transit work.

Okay, fine, we should build out public transport and start designing city and suburban features around public transport.

Is that satisfactory?

A lot of the reason for those long commutes is that housing in dense, urban areas served by public transit is too expensive. Affordable housing is a climate change issue.

You have to add "redesigned cities" to that list. Electric vehicles are almost as much a patch for ICE cities as they are a replacement for internal combustion.

I don't think most actual cities would need to be wholesale redesigned; plenty of urban planners have proposed plenty of incremental ways to successfully re-tool cities to favor humans over automobiles. And it has successfully happened in the past - see Amsterdam, for example, or (admittedly to a lesser extent) Montréal.

I would love to see a city in the Western parts of the US accomplish this mainly because of how difficult of a task it would be. The majority of people live >15 miles from downtown areas. Mass transpo can only be generously described as an after thought. I've played SimCity, and if you did not place your subway/train/bus stops efficiently, the citizens did not use them. That plays out in real life as well, except it is much more difficult in real life to just break out the bulldozer to re-engineer the city to make it more mass transpo friendly.

"Simple" things like good bike lanes and traffic calming enable cities to redesign gradually, and of course this is largely already happening (perhaps too slowly) in many cities.

Some cities in mainland Europe are like this already. They make cars unnecessary. Even bikes, as you can walk everywhere.

I'm talking about midsized cities (100-300k inhabitants) that are really compact thanks to 4-8 levels in every apartment block and ubiquitous use of lifts.

Lifts are the disruptive technology. They make energetically efficient cities possible and cheap.

I also find these cities much more nice to live in. Nice parks, avenues and shopping streets. I guess they are the heirs of the Hellenic tradition of valuing meeting squares a lot.

In contrast, as much as I like other aspects of Anglo-Saxon societies, their terraced or detached house model is energetically unsustainable, and yields both liveless suburbs and downtowns.

>Lifts are the disruptive technology. They make energetically efficient cities possible and cheap.

Are lifts really as efficient as escalators? An escalator is constantly moving (unless it's malfunctioning), so there is no wait to continue moving. An elevator on the other hand is not. Maybe it depends on the number of floors? I can see an elevator being faster going from ground to floor 40 rather than zig zagging floors from ground to 40. Does anybody use "express" escalators that skip floors allowing for faster transit to higher floors?

> Are lifts really as efficient as escalators?

I wouldn't be surprised.

> An escalator is constantly moving (unless it's malfunctioning), so there is no wait to continue moving.

That wastes energy but makes it time efficient for users (in terms of latency). OTOH, escalators are slow compared to most lifts/elevators, which means total trip time efficiency isn't good unless you are only going a floor or two or are competing with an elevator that stops a lot, where the latency gain may still beat the loss of vertical speed. Which is why escalators tend to get used where you've got lots of traffic volume but they aren't going up/down lots of floors.

I used to work in an office building with escalators that are powered off at night -- there was some sort of motion sensor about 10 feet before the escalator that would power it on when someone approached, you'd have to be running to reach the escalator before it reached normal speed.

So on-demand escalators are possible, just rare.

In the daytime either they kept them on all the time, or maybe there was enough constant demand to keep them running as I never saw one powered off during the day.

I thought on-demand escalators were the norm, from subway to malls I don't think I have ever seen an escalator that not my on-demand.

But I can't say I've put a lot of thought into it.

Are you thinking of elevators, maybe?

There are maybe a few hundred on-demand escalators in the whole world, and millions of normal ones.

I definitely want to hear where you got an estimate that there's less than a thousand on-demand escalators in the entire world.

No. And I've personally used at least a hundred on-demand escalators just in my city.

They're more efficient because of reduced frictional losses, the contact point of an elevator is a pulley at the top of shaft and a couple guide rails. The guide rails are mostly there to provide lateral support. As for latency you can design around it, modern tall buildings will usually have multiple elevator banks that service different floors. A lot of engineering can go into designing the dispatching for elevators.

That reminds me of https://play.elevatorsaga.com. Have fun!

Escalators in Incheon airport start when you approach and stop when you exit.

Not just Incheon, all around South Korea.

In Germany most of them also stop (and sometimes fail to start when you approach...)

Many or most of them, at least in Munich, are reversible as well.

Our hospital used to have lifts that didn't stop at floors. The had no doors, you just jump on them and get off. They were intended for staff only, to quickly get between floors so slightly out of view of the public. They were replaced a few years ago though. Mabe too many accidents?

Were they paternoster lifts? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster

Yes, that's the ones. Never heard the name of them, thanks!

Much is made of the "self-driving" part of autonomous vehicles, but I think "self-parking" could end up being just as significant. Imagine if there was no longer any reason to mandate parking capacity for planning and zoning purposes; you drive to your destination, and your car goes and parks itself (paying/negotiating automatically if needed), and returns when summoned via phone.

This sounds like high amounts of traffic: a bunch of people being dropped off and being picked up at arbitrary locations with the cars then having to go to and come back from various other bottlenecked hotspots.

I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion right away.

You open up a lot of free space if you can take away street parking, which could also significantly alleviate traffic, for example with dedicated lanes for small-personal battery powered bikes, scooters, etc.

It’s also not necessary for vehicles to travel several miles to find parking. Typical urban parking is designed so the average person is walking maybe a couple hundred feet maximum? That’s a lot of localized parking. If the car was traveling just a few thousand feet on average to find a lot, that’s not a lot of extra parking-miles traveled, but still a paradigm shift in parking process.

Also, you eliminate the issue of people circling the block trying to find parking, which is adding slow traffic in dense areas.

Finally, it’s likely the vehicle is not going to park, but rather off to pick up its next ride.

At the most optimized, there are pickup and drop off points at every block where someone gets out, and immediately someone else gets in, and off the vehicle goes to the next stop.

> Finally, it’s likely the vehicle is not going to park, but rather off to pick up its next ride.

Yeah, a managed fleet system could have very different congestion characteristics, but the proposal was specifically that self-parking might be a game changer on its own. At that point it's basically valet parking, and you still have to stash the cars somewhere, and they still have to go back and forth between that somewhere and wherever the passengers got out.

You get rid of the circling but I don't think you get rid of queuing and grid backups.

There's a lot of automatic parking in Tokyo and other cities in Japan.

Drive up to the building, which has space for just one car in the "lobby".

Get out of the car, enter data into the console. Your car then enters the building and is stored by a robotic system.

Later, do the same in reverse.

> Typical urban parking is designed so the average person is walking maybe a couple hundred feet maximum? That’s a lot of localized parking.

Typical urban parking outside of car-centric US cities is "your car takes up as much space as your apartment/hotel room/office cubicle, where the hell do we have space to put it?" For someplace as crammed as Manhattan, the parking isn't "around the block", it's on the other side of the traffic choke points.

> Finally, it’s likely the vehicle is not going to park, but rather off to pick up its next ride.

I don't buy that. Traffic patterns in large cities end up showing a distinct bimodal pattern: there is a large influx of people into the central business district in the morning, and then a large outflux of people in the afternoon. If I'm commuting by self-driving car, and I get in at 8:45-ish, there's going to be no demand for my car since everyone who needs to be in work by 9:00 is on the way.

You can see this in systems that are already optimized to move people en masse to/from cities: commuter rail and bus systems. Large city railroad stations often have rail yards for train storage near their downtown hubs simply to store the trains during the day.

You can also see this with bike and scooter shares. Bikes and scooters clump up at hubs that enter the transit system in the morning and empty out in the evening commute.

It would be a lot of traffic, but circling the block to find a parking spot is already such a huge contributor to traffic that it might still be a net win

That doesn't work in many low density areas (prime example is American suburbia). So your answer for those people is to make them move to a more dense area that can support such solutions. Which isn't a bad idea, but it's a much harder thing to accomplish.

Ebike/scoot to transit hub, trains to commercial areas. It’s not rocket science.

Bikes and scooters are great (provided there are safe riding lanes and trails) until there's any weather. If I have to show up at work looking presentable then biking through a downpour simply isn't an option. If there's any sort of snow or ice on the ground then biking simply isn't an option.

Yes. You also need to factor in things like having young kids. Before I had them taking an ebike to a train would make perfect sense. Now though, without a car it would be incredibly difficult to get them to daycare and make it to work on time without waking up before Dawn.

You can't put the kids on the ebike to daycare? Seems like that would be faster and easier than dealing with a car.

Just wait until you start in on the total mess that is school drop-off when every parent decides they have to drive their kid to school. Much faster to breeze past the stopped traffic on a bicycle, unstrap the kids and send them on their way, and bike to the train.

Not every one has only two kids. It's going to get awfully tough for those with four or five without a minivan.

So when you get to that edge edge case they drive a mini-van. No one is saying ban cars, just use them less.

https://bikeportland.org/2012/06/28/with-six-kids-and-no-car...

This seems like one of the consequences of the decision to have so many children.

Only three kids, but it was never a problem not to own a car, here in a city with good transportation and where riding with a kid front and back of bicycle is normal.

It's not hard to wear rain gear or budget some time to clean up once you arrive at your destination. Any sort of plan to encourage active commutes should also include facilities in workplaces for this sort of thing.

Snow and ice: not as big a problem as you think. Cities and towns can plow and salt bike paths even easier than they do streets. You can also put studded tires on bicycles if you're in a particularly snowy area. See Oulu, Finland or Winnipeg, Canada for cities with plenty of winter cyclists: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/feb/12/ice-cycles-no...

I think when he says "show up looking presentable", it may be that he needs to be in suits or business casual, preferably unwrinkled. Also, I am exceptionally disinclined to bike through below-zero weather, snow tires or no (referring to the hypothetical canadian). Let alone Texas summers, which regularly hit 105 this time of year. I don't care if there are showers or not, it's just darn unpleasant to be outside this time of year.

Sub-zero weather isn't too bad down to maybe -10C. After that, it's pretty brutal.

I do try not to take superfluous trips on my e-bike above maybe 95 though.

Since he's talking in F (e.g. 105), when he says sub-zero, he means -18C or lower. Or did you mean -10F?

Ah okay fair enough. I'm from the US, but lately I've been playing a game with temperature set in C, and am used to working in C from talking with a bunch of international people in programming chats.

Yeah sub -18C is extremely cold. Definitely not cycling out there. I don't think I've ever seen below 0 Fahrenheit where I live.

Not wanting to is a really reasonable position, as it is with 100+ degrees. Lots of parts of America get that cold for a solid chunk of the year, so if people can't take a bicycle, how would you build a system to accommodate that kind of a load spike?

I cycled to work for years in the Netherlands (down to -5C in winter) and Australia (frequenctly 35C+ in summer). The secret in both cases is:

(i) keep appropriate clothes at the office;

(ii) wear suitable cycling gear (as the Dutch say, there's no such thing as unsuitable weather, only unsuitable clothing);

(iii) find a way to shower at work;

(iv) be good humored when weather or other mishaps occur...

A German guy told me that was a German expression.

Which one of you is right?

Sounds like Dutch humour and phrasing to me, but I've heard Germans use "There's no such thing as poor weather, only poor preparation"

I was actually joking. I wouldn't be surprised that the expression is used in many places that experience inclement weather.

I claim this as the Norwegian "Det finnes ikke dårlig vær, bare dårlig klær."

Seeing as my version is a rhyme, it's obviously the superior one.

-5C isn't particularly cold. Would you have been out in -20C with gusty winds and drifting snow? How do I get those appropriate clothes to the office, and where do I store them? Can't be all wrinkled -- and these days you may not even have an assigned desk. And I can be good humored, but will my boss be?

Really, though, if we consider bikes safe enough for transportation, why can't we have ultralight enclosed EVs?

(i) nope, I'm not crazy; (ii) in your Ortlieb bike pannier or backpack; (iii) commandeer a cupboard in a quiet corner; (iv) if your boss isn't good humored, it's time to change jobs, or change the boss; (v) because they blow away in a strong wind.

(i) There are plenty of places where it gets down to "only" -5C or -10C where it would still be practicable; you're giving worse case scenarios but those don't apply everywhere. We can do what we can where we can. (ii) Bring it in your pannier or backpack (buying wrinkle-free helps as well).

* https://www.londoncyclist.co.uk/how-to-carry-a-suit-on-your-...

Where do you store your car?

Assuming your car takes up 12sqm * 2m I assume you'd find plenty of space to store some panties replacing your wet ones ;)

If we managed to get 80% of the people living in places where the weather is mild and the topography mostly flat to switch from car commutes to bike commutes we would already have changed large parts of the world.

95 and 105 degrees are suprisingly different, especially with sun. 95 you can stay in the sun and will burn, but won't get heatstroke (probably). 105 you will get heatstroke unless you hydrate about 1/4 gallon/hr of water and get to shade in a reasonable amount of time.

And speaking of burns, I burn really easily. I've tried the super-oily disgusting stuff and every thing; more than 30mins of direct noon-day sun and I usually burn. I am not getting skin cancer, thank you very much.

(i) This part is very defensible, depending on company culture.

(ii) I don't know what this would be for cold, but I assume you can layer. Heat, you can only remove so much.

(iii) "Find a way" is not a great defense.

(iv) Easier said than done, and similar to iii in that they both boil down to an over-all sentiment of "deal with it".

Cycle in with your lycra and then change into your work clothes. I've pedalled in -10C and 35C in Toronto.

Showering at work isn't necessary either: sweat is odourless, and the stickiness comes from bacteria. So you can actually shower before cycling to get things clean and you'll be fine the whole day.

In some ways we're actually ourselves too much:

* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/550291/beyond-soap-...

Based on my experience dancing, the trick of showering before exercise only works for about 4 hours if you're wearing cotton or wool. Lycra gives you about two. When you're dancing for more than four hours everybody is stinky and exhausted and nobody cares. At the office? Make sure to schedule your meetings in the morning, and definitely avoid supper meetings.

1. Cycle in, perhaps working up a sweat.

2. After cooling down a little, change out of potentially stinky commuting clothes into your work clothes.

This seems to work for me, and given the characters I work with, they'd let me know if there was a problem without any qualms.

Do you think people don't cycle in the rain? Just get a waterproof and waterproof trousers.

The Dutch don't seem to have a problem:

* https://www.iamexpat.nl/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/biking-safe...

* https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/cycling-in-the...

In Toronto I cycle from April to December, rain or shine. I know folks that also do it January to March, but I can't be bothered to buy the extra insulation layers so I take transit.

I have two panniers: one for my lunch and the other for my rain gear:

* https://www.rei.com/c/cycling-jackets/f/f-waterproof

Have you ever attempted to ride one of these through snow?

Also, how would something like this work with little kids?

Biked in snow plenty of times. It's fine. Also cities can plow bike trails even easier than they plow streets.

Plenty of bike options for little kids. Seats, trailers, box bikes, etc. etc.

How can they plow bike trails easier than streets, especially in the case where the trail is not attached to a street?

In my city there is often street parking during non-rush times, and so parked cars can get in the way of the plows and so it may be hard to clear.

On a bike trail there are no such obstacles: just push the snow to the side.

Use smaller plows. They can be fitted to ATVs/quads.

You're assuming a "commercial area" (i.e. a downtown core) that is any less spread out than the suburbs. In a lot of car-centric American cities, it's just a continuous sprawl where the residential sprawl gets called "suburbs" and the commercial sprawl gets called "downtown", without any increase in density.

Or build out infrastructure in those areas too. In suburbs, there's plenty of room for separate bike paths and trains. It doesn't require everyone to move into Soviet-style superblocks and towers.

Trains don’t work in suburbs not because of space limitations - there just aren’t enough paying customers per mile of track to make the economics work.

There are not enough taxpaying residents to make roads work, either. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/4/30/my-city-has-ma...

You NEED roads though. Even if you can reach 100% of the city through walking and public transportation, what do you do when you move? Take a train trip for your sofa, and another for your dining room table, and so on? How do local stores and restaurants get their goods delivered? How do you get packages larger than an envelope delivered to your home? How do emergency services and fire rescue reach your home?

Do towns exist with public transportation but no roads?

Heh, yeah. The 'apartment living on a bike' hypothesis is really at odds with itself in this sense, I feel.

If you own and live in a place long term then you can slowly bring materials to it, build up furniture, etc, it all works and makes sense.

But really this all seems to be based on hyper-specialism. The moving company is the only one allowed to use the roads. You've no space for tools or materials, so no DIY, get the joiners in. And so on and so forth.

Personally I find that really depressing. You may as well just plug yourself into the wall and turn on VR.

You need _some_ roads, but not to the extent of your typical suburban sprawl. Where I live (Vancouver, Canada), there are sufficient roads for most travel, but the city also has relatively high quality public transit and decent bike routes. I don't think GP meant that a city should have no roads, but rather that transportation infrastructure is almost always going to be an expenditure for a city. America has simply chosen to prioritize cars over other transportation options.

Higher density minimizes the need for cars.

This is a typical neighborhood road in Berlin

https://www.google.de/maps/@52.4463121,13.309308,3a,75y,244....

This is a road in central Tokyo

https://www.google.de/maps/@35.705447,139.7784828,3a,75y,260...

This is a random road in San Mateo

https://www.google.de/maps/@37.5600243,-122.3067183,3a,75y,3...

You need roads, but you don't need roads that as wide as those in American urban sprawl

I feel almost agoraphobic when I look at pictures of suburban USA. I think it's a combination of flat landscape, low buildings, wide roads, no mature trees (your example notwithstanding) and no real features on the horizon.

Off topic, what's going on in the Berlin example? The whole left side of the photo looks like it's been redacted, are the homeowners requesting their houses be removed?

German privacy laws \o/

When the street view cars came to Germany, so many people requested redactions that the whole project got cancelled. Only the biggest cities have coverage and it hasn't been updated since 2011.

Trains work fine in the suburbs, when the burbs are built around the belief trains either will, or do exist.

Not everyone can ride bikes, and trains just take you from one place where you don't want to be to another place where you don't want to be.

Most of the places I want to be are right next to subway stops. Just because you live somewhere with garbage transit doesn’t mean transit is inherently bad.

> Not everyone can ride bikes

And those unfortunate souls will have to buy cars, but the roads will be much less congested now that most are on bike paths. A single free lane is faster than three packed ones.

There's a rehab hospital here in Boston that does assistive bike rides. They have a wide variety of bicycles and tricycles and can get just about anyone out there pedaling with either hands or feet.

Yes, pretty much everyone can ride bikes. Or scooters. Or velomobiles. Or hang gliders. There is some human-powered vehicle out there for everyone.

We just have to get out of this local maxima based around driving oil-burning SUVs.

Interesting article from CityLab on why plugging public transit EVs into a city can be more challenging and expensive than originally planned: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/06/electric-bus-...

"That’s what Philadelphia discovered when it decided to expand its existing fleet of e-buses with newer models—ones that featured bigger batteries. The city failed to recognize in the early planning process that it would be prohibitively expensive to acquire land in its busy downtown area for charging stations along the bus routes. So they decided to install all the charging infrastructure in the bus depots."

The MBTA found that CNG buses had the lowest lifecycle cost and cost per greenhouse gas reduction. Diesel-electric hybrids have maintenance issues, and battery electric and hydrogen buses have significant capital costs which makes it difficult to realize the significantly lower operational costs.

https://www.abettercity.org/docs/Alternative%20Propulsion%20...

However, even pure diesel buses are much more efficient at moving people than single-occupancy vehicles.

It's also worthwhile to note that a real plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions would necessarily include substantial capital outlays: not just bus charging infrastructure but grade-separated rail, dedicated busways, bus rapid transit, cycle and scooter infrastructure, etc. etc. Not to mention all the other climate adaptions that need to happen at an infrastructure level.

It’s never going to be a one size fits all solution. While all the things you mention work for “some” people, an EV is the best option for “some” people.

Yeah, which is why it's such a huge problem to jam cars everywhere, even places they don't belong like city centers.

Like old people, or people who don't want to fall down and break a wrist or hip.

(and then there's what elon musk says -- all lease return model 3's will be added to the tesla automonous taxi network)

> Yet another reason the real answer to the climate crisis isn't EVs

If our objective is to significantly reduce carbon emissions from people moving from point 'A' to point 'B', fully electric vehicles are a red herring solution. It's more realistic and cheaper to focus on plug-in hybrids. That way you can achieve 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from driving 4-wheeled vehicles without requiring new infrastructure or requiring people to drastically change their habits.

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/14/reducing-carbon-emissio...

And yet, public transportation is not the same. Americans love their cars because we are a very independent people who appreciate the ability to go where we want, when we want. An EV could at least conceivably be a replacement, though that will be difficult until they can charge in a time comparable to that of a gas station fueling and go as long or longer. I don't want to have to plan around some schedule set by a committee.

Issue number two: other people. Public transportation is not as nice as a car because you are not insulated from others. I can run my AC nice and high and listen to a pod cast in peace and quiet in my car, even if I've got to deal with jostling cars on the outside. In a train/bus/etc, you never know what you'll get. Half the time there's some one with music blasting, or cussing loudly. The other half they guy next to me smells awful or takes two seats because he's a land whale. If by some miracle neither of those things is true, all the seats are taken. Public transportation sucks,

I like my car, and see no personal reason to switch to a less-comfortable and less-available form of transportation for the sake of some one else's political win.

Public transportation takes a lot of time.

It doesn't necessarily lead to an efficient workforce.

The hour of commute time saved by driving could probably be translated into percentage points of GNP for a country.

I'm not sure how any of this contradicts my comment. Or were you agreeing?

I was agreeing.

If you live somewhere with good public transportation, it is much, much faster than driving. Trains don’t have to sit in traffic.

Using public transit as your main mode of transportation is not the same as swearing off cars entirely. If you live somewhere with good transit you can get to 99% of the places you want to go without a car with no additional inconvenience. You can take the train to work, bike to the gym, walk to the grocery store, and then when you want to head out to the mountains you can hop into your car (or a rental).

You can reap the environmental benefits of switching mostly away from cars without sacrificing your freedom to drive to the small number of destinations that are not convenient to get to by other means.

Agree. I have an ebike and commute 8 miles each way. It's been fantastic and I arrive home in the afternoon feeling fresh despite it being 95F out.

Hopefully (from a convenience standpoint) driverless will be the solution. Could still be zero emissions. Hard to imagine half the country migrating to denser areas within 30 years.

I 100% agree, not only are they much lower impact on the environment but from an implementation perspective are far simpler. I find it kind of funny that people talk about the future of travel and transit being automated electric cars that can pick one person up and take them to another predetermined place without the passenger's intervention. I immediately think it kinda sounds like a bus or a train. I think we have gotten into the habit of falling so in love with convoluted high tech solutions that we overlook the most basic and straightforward answers to these deep problems

Actually, the switch from incandescent to LED street lights could easily smooth this over.

The old incandescent street and traffic lights were frequently hundreds of watts, on long chains over large distances.

This can be repurposed to car charging with little in the way of power delivery redesign.

It's been entertaining to read the discussions (below) about how to make this practical. So far, it looks like the only way to make this work is to a) live in a city, or rebuild your suburbia into a city, and b) construct your entire life around riding that bike - choose a job with a tolerant boss, spend extra hours every day showering and changing clothes after biking, etc.

I'd rather drive an air-conditioned car, sit in traffic for that hour or two, and enjoy my private backyard (however small it may be).

Instead of constructing your life around a bike you construct it around a car. You can't commute to work any other way, if it breaks down you are bound to mostly Uber as a backup strategy to get anywhere.

Except those car-centric environments you live and work in are a more effective gate to keep the poor out than the grandest gated community. Almost no where else on the planet is the idea of a city being a tiny urban core surrounded by hundreds of miles of single family houses in spiraling one lane streets of sprawl the norm. Its a purely American fixation on centering all human activity around cars. And for your benefit, even - the world would be alight in a raging inferno if we ever tried to globally house everyone in quarter acre single family houses with 4 hour single-occupancy car commutes every day.

It's more accurate to say that life has been optimized for convenience and net happiness, and that ain't a bike.

> construct it around a car

I don't, actually - it's that a car is far more useful than a bike. I drive 25 minutes to work; I haul (5 bike-ride-loads of) groceries several miles to my house; I visit friends anywhere from 1-5 hours away; I casually drive into the city and back. Even if I felt like riding 10 miles each way, rain or shine, or using public transit, it takes so much less time to drive my car, and I have to either find multiple clever solutions to each of the other activities I use the car for, or just go without.

My car gives me freedom from limitations; bicycle dependency only adds to them. To use a bike instead of a car, I have to fundamentally adjust my life, in every way for the worse.

You don’t seem to able to wrap your ahead around the fact that driving appears to give you more freedoms only because you live in a city that was designed around cars, not because cars are inherently faster or more convenient. The convenience of the car is an artifact of city planning decisions, not a universal truth.

Example: do you realize how preposterous the idea of driving several miles to get groceries is to someone who lives in a real city? If I want to get groceries I walk to the grocery store two blocks away. If I don’t like that grocery store I walk to the other one four blocks away. Or the other other one five blocks away. It takes me less time to walk to the grocery store than it takes you to drive to yours. The counterfactual to a 10 mile drive is not a 10 mile public transit ride, because without car-induced sprawl everything would be much closer and you would have to travel much shorter distances to have access to the same amenities and see your friends.

Public transit is also not slower than driving in a city with proper transit. I don’t own a car and almost every single journey I take is either short enough to walk, or faster on transit than in a car. It takes me 10 minutes to get to work on the train, the same drive would take half an hour due to traffic.

A car enables cities in less hospitable environments to be inexpensively populated. Where I live it’s regularly above 110. You’re not cycling in that. Population density is too low for light rail, and only the mentally deranged and hopelessly poor ride the bus, making a greater disincentive for anyone else who wants to bear a 15 minute wait in 110 degrees.

For actual numbers, my commute is 20min by car, 2.5hr by public transportation, or 1.2hr by bike. Public transportation would need to be no more than 40min for me to consider it, and I’d only consider it because I wouldn’t have to drive. Once self driving cars arrive, I’d never consider public transit, even if driving were twice as long.

> driving appears to give you more freedoms only because you live in a city

I don't live in a city, just like half the population of the US. You assumed that, and now the rest of what you wrote is irrelevant.

80% of the US population lives in a city.

That is nowhere close to true, unless you are counting suburbs as cities.

Many, probably most, people don't want to live in density as high as that. They value greenery or simply the space to not have a neighbor breathing down their neck. What you consider preposterous is a tradeoff with other goals in mind.

The ongoing urbanization of the world seems to be a counterargument to that.

Also, density is what enables greenery. Endless rows of detached single story houses with a lawn is what kills natural landscapes.

Will there be grocery stores every four blocks in your bike structured city?

> Will there be grocery stores every four blocks in your bike structured city?

Sure:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/205+Roncesvalles+Ave,+Toro...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roncesvalles,_Toronto

There are already neighbourhoods and cities like this. Do you know how many vegetable/fruits stands there are on the above street? Plus a couple of delis, a fish market, dry cleaners, four banks, a library, a BBQ joint, a couple of pizza parlors, pharmacies, dentists, optometrist, etc. The tram / street car tracks you see connect to a subway station.

Plus everyone on the residential side streets have a backyard, many have garages connected to lane way:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Westminster+Ave,+Toront...

This is how we used to build cities.

Cars are present but optional. If you want one you can still have it, but they're are not needed.

Just because you design a city in a bike-friendly way does not mean you have to get rid of cars.

Amsterdam is a perfect example of this: cars have not been completely eliminated, just de-emphasized. Making cars a nice to have instead of a need to have.

The detached home is much more the centerpiece than the car.

The car is the currently most convenient way of enabling the detached home, but I think you'd have an easier fight of providing transportation alternativers there than of convincing everyone to give up the yard and privacy and everything else there.

It's not the only possible way, and most vehicle trips are still relatively short (https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips) so I sure hope we can do it with last mile + transit vs self-driving cars.

Yes, sustainable population growth is based around a fairly high population density and dropping a car-centric lifestyle.

> enjoy my private backyard

This is a misconception I see all the time. Living in a city, and even in an apartment, does not preclude having a private backyard. The choices are simply not just "detached house" or "skyscraper".

I live in an apartment, don't own a car, yet I have a private backyard large enough to grow trees or build a decent DIY shop.

You can have high density, with front and backyards, with a garage (connected to a lane way), that supports public transit. Toronto was built this way in the pre-WW2 days (see Street View):

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Westminster+Ave,+Toront...

These houses are a bit pricey now, but that's because urban living has become fashionable again. From the 1950s to 1990s prices were a lot cheaper because all of the demand was for white picket fences in the suburbs.

You can reasonable build reasonable density, where public transit is possible, without going to Manhattan- or Tokyo-like densities. Perhaps put some mid-rise (5-10 stories) buildings on the main arteries, but the side streets can be quite smaller-scale.

I bicycle, ride buses & trains, I have an e-bike and I love it. But realistically we have between ten and thirty years to fix all this. That's not enough time to reinvent the entire world from the ground up, so in addition to the technologies you list I am also hopeful for EVs, synthetic fuel, and so forth.

This stopped me from buying a Tesla with my most recent car purchase. I live in a 100 year old apartment in Boston that has 0 parking spots for over 100 units. My wife and I share a car, mostly for weekend adventuring, so we rent a spot in a dude's backyard down the block from us. It works well for us, much more convenient than the rat race of street parking. But it was hard to imagine that life with a Tesla. I could probably negotiate that I could plug it into an outlet connected to the guy's house, but I'd only get a slow trickle charge, and it's an odd request he could easily reject. I could rent in a garage with chargers, but there are none near my apartment, and it would also be much more expensive. The thought of only being able to charge at Superchargers was a big turnoff.

The slow trickle charge is indeed slow, but it's not truly a trickle. It runs about 4-5 Miles/Hr. If you largely drove on the weekend, you could fully recharge the car in a 4-day session. (24 * 5 * 4=400 miles). Additionally, most weekend trips are not 300+ miles, so you would often return with 20-30% battery, which would reduce your charging time to just 3 days. That sounds doable to me.

If you don't have a huge commute every day, a 110v "trickle charge" is actually quite adequate. A Model 3 gets about 5 mph charge on a 110 outlet. That's at least 60 miles over night and 120 miles in 24 hours. You can always supercharge if you need it.

> I live in a 100 year old apartment

Keeping in mind '100 years old' sounds dramatic but is now as recent as 1919, which doesn't sound that old when you write it out! That's about a fifth of the housing stock in the UK I believe. Obviously, almost none of these houses have garages.

I wonder if local governments could install plugs under little hatches like they use for stop cocks all the way down residential roads.

https://stock.adobe.com/be_en/images/blue-painted-water-stop...

London is putting charging points in street lamps:

https://www.electrive.com/2018/08/21/char-gy-new-player-on-l...

European countries have a much easier time than the US in this regard due to 220V mains voltage. Even with a standard outlet you can fully recharge a Tesla overnight.

> Even with a standard outlet you can fully recharge a Tesla overnight.

Nah. 230V 10A is about 2kW and 15A about 3kW.

More realistically it's 24h for a 20-80% charge.

That said, 2kW is a 10kmh charge, so "overnight" (let's say 12 hours) you can do a 60km commute from a regular socket.

It's at least fairly cheap to install a standard industrial outlet (single phase, or three phase if the house supply has it -- this varies in Europe). That looks to be what older/cheaper street lamp installations have -- a domestic outlet isn't appropriate for outdoor use anyway.

That gets 7kW or more.

From https://www.spiritenergy.co.uk/kb-ev-understanding-electric-... :

> If you have a standard domestic single phase (230V) supply, you won't be able to achieve a charging rate of more than 7.4kW. Even with a standard commercial 3 phase connection, the power rating for AC charging is limited to 22kW.

22kW is plenty, and e.g. my apartment in Denmark has a three-phase 40A supply, so houses surely have more than this.

Sorry "fully" was the wrong word here:

Standard European wall outlets (Type E & F) are 230V and 16A, so that gives you 3.7kW. At that rate, the Model 3 can charge at 22km/h [0].

So you could charge 20% - 80% (220km of range added) in 10 hours overnight. Even if your "overnight" time is a little shorter, that is still going to be enough for most commutes.

[0] https://www.tesla.com/de_DE/support/home-charging-installati...

Taking their 78% figure I get 6.8 million people who would need one. I don't think I would call 1,150 even a toe in the water.

There are 2.6 million cars in London and only 54% of households have a car:

http://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-ar...

So the toe is bigger than you think it is.

I've been trickle charging for the last 3+ years I've owned a Tesla. I live in a condo and the HOA was ok with me pulling an extension from an existing 110V line and charging from it for a nominal fee (we agreed to $50/mo).

I got an electrician to pull an extension (cost ~$200). I have a non-driving commute and use the car mostly on the weekends, so it's worked out great vs the cost of installing a level-2 charger ($1000+).

Meanwhile my apartment charges me $15 more per month in parking to charge an EV with 40 Amps. No fee for the electricity.

That sounds nice—I take it you own the parking spot? That would have changed the equation for me considerably.

No, I'm renting the parking spot as well.

Per your circumstances (living in Boston, already possess a car, drive occasionally), a new Tesla purchase might be non-ideal even besides the charging issue, from a climate standpoint. There is a breakeven point where your cumulative carbon savings from using Boston electricity (i.e. mostly natural gas) versus gasoline intersect the one-time carbon emissions from manufacturing a new automobile. For folks who already own a car they don't drive much, the breakeven may be very far away, meaning that a new Tesla purchase may actually be a net negative from a carbon standpoint.

I was getting a new car either way, replacing one that had broken.

Ah, that definitely changes the calculation completely.

If it makes you feel better, my new car gets 10 more MPG than my old one :)

No, electric vehicles are the best option in nearly all cases. Natural gas makes Boston electricity one of the cleaner grids in the country. For my zip, a LR Model 3 makes 131 MPG[1] per unit of CO2, while manufacturing produces ~5 tonnes more CO2 (an SR will be ~3.5 tonnes)[2].

That's a break even period of only 15,000 miles. Unless your gas car will be tossed away in under 15,000 miles you are adding more CO2 to the air- and that's assuming you actually make 29 mpg, which is not likely on a car that is only 15k miles from EOL. Even if you don't touch the car for years, if you eventually sell the car the next owners are practically guaranteed to drive that many miles. The average American drives that far in 13 months.

Of course the money you spend on a new electric car might be better spent elsewhere, but in any state with a moderately clean grid, replacing a gas car with an electric car is a clear winning choice. Even on the very dirtiest grids in the US a Model 3 produces half as much CO2 as a gas car making 30 mpg- even slightly less than a Prius. The payback time is still only ~30k-35k miles, and in all likelihood owners will put several times that on the car.

[1]: https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/ev-e...

[2]: https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cl...

That's interesting. The last time I did the math it looked like the breakeven point would be well over a decade for me (approx 4000 driven miles per year). It may be that things have changed since.

You can also just buy a used EV. If it has more than 40-60k miles, has already paid itself off. Completely, not just the extra cost of manufacturing.

Another often-missed factor that may shift the ethical breakeven point is that local air pollution is _really_ bad from a public health perspective, to a degree that's criminally underemphasized. If you're going to be burning fossil fuels for power, doing so in a centralized place away from dense populations makes a lot more sense than doing so next to schools, parks, residential density, etc.

Another fun fact is that, in my lifetime, Massachusetts will be a very green-energy grid. We are building a transmission line through Maine to connect to a Quebec hydro plant, and offshore wind is growing fast (though it all takes time). A Tesla I buy today will probably be carbon-free in its lifetime!

4000 miles per year is much lower than the US average of 13k, or 12k km/year in the EU

I live in a high rise apartment with three shared level 2 chargers in the garage. I would say there are ~10 EVs in the building and sharing the chargers has never been an issue. It's like shared laundry; you really only need it once a week or so for a few hours. Once it's easy to make people pay for electricity, adding lots of chargers will be a no-brainer for garage owners.

Laundry. That just might be the perfect example. What a huge division of experience between the wealthy and the less wealthy.

Most homeowners have laundry in their home. Starting and switching loads is a few minutes, and the rest of their time is still free. Many high-end apartments have laundry within a short walk from each residence. It's largely the same experience. But then those with less ability to afford "nice" housing often have to use shared public laundromats that are not as close to home. You probably plan a trip once a week or two, and it takes you several hours. If you're lucky, it's close to other errands, but since you've got your hands full with your laundry, it's not like you can really combine it with grocery shopping.

In a future where everyone drives EVs, the wealthier will have higher range vehicles, easy access to super fast chargers, and even chargers in their home or luxury apartment. But the poor, with lower range vehicles, will just have to visit a mediocre public charger, and hope they can make that time useful, or read a newspaper while they wait. They'll have to be more thoughtful about how they use their car because going an extra 20 miles for some unexpected errand might screw up their schedule and send them to the public charger where they can waste a half an hour of precious time waiting in line and getting a partial charge.

Why will public chargers be slow? We should assume that those who provide public charging services (the gas stations of the future) will be trying to optimize throughput + convenience store sales.

DC fast chargers currently get you 40 miles in ten minutes[1] (that sucks!) so your extra 20 miles gets you an extra 5 minute wait. Presumably that wait can be "limited" by getting your shopping done or grabbing a bite to eat while you do it.

[1]https://pluginamerica.org/understanding-electric-vehicle-cha...

I think your example/link illustrates the point.

> These stations are expensive (up to $100,000) and require more power than your house, so you’ll never have one of these in your garage.

In other words, most chargers are not going to be "the best." Especially ones in less affluent neighborhoods, within a short drive (or on the way) of wherever you happen to be. Maybe it's a 10 minute round trip for a 5 minute wait (assuming no line) to charge up for and make up the extra 20 miles you need.

Realistically there are best case and worst case scenarios in our future. When chargers are all as fast and convenient as gas stations, the problem pretty much goes away. Anyone that could buy an ICE car and get to the gas station when they needed to could also have a 200+ mile EV and get to (really fast) chargers when they need. If that doesn't happen (and until it does) there will be plenty of people that cannot switch to an EV without adding out-of-the-way trips to their lives, and having long wait times while they charge on less-than-the-best chargers.

As I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread, forcing "shopping" or "dining out" to be a part of fueling your car is unnecessary coupling. It sounds natural, because gas stations are almost always convenience stores. Personally, I rarely eat out (especially alone!), prefer to never set foot in a convenience store, and my spouse does the majority of the food shopping. My charging time would be as equally wasted as my gasoline fill-up time.

> > These stations are expensive (up to $100,000) and require more power than your house, so you’ll never have one of these in your garage.

I challenge this on the cost front and on the power front.

There is zero reason why a fast charger should be $100,000 other than the fact that the volume is sufficiently low that these are all hand built. The semiconductors in that thing can't possibly be $100,000 in volume. Copper is roughly $10 per kilogram--or $100,000 and you could use 10 metric tonnes--there is no way those things hold 10,000 kg of copper.

As for the power, these things are probably more than 90% efficient, so they don't use any more power than the smaller ones (the load they are charging is a fixed size regardless of how fast you charge it). They may use more current, but that's the whole point! These things charge your car faster.

The biggest issue with installing these at home is probably access to genuine 440V (or higher) 3 phase. And you probably get around that by making the charger the equivalent of a Powerwall--it stores the energy at normal 220 feed levels but blasts it into your car from it's own batteries as fast as it can.

Permits, load studies, switchgear components for 3-phase systems (breakers etc.) cost more, engineering costs drive this up, etc. The grid and city permitting processes weren't designed for broad "consumer" scenarios, at least basing it off of the current Seattle experience, where even Level 2 charging can be difficult.

> The semiconductors in that thing can't possibly be $100,000 in volume. Copper is roughly $10 per kilogram--or $100,000 and you could use 10 metric tonnes--there is no way those things hold 10,000 kg of copper.

I mean... yes, you're right. A better example would be that electric cars can already convert 3-phase to DC (as well as the other way), and the Tesla Model 3 can convert over 200 kW even though it comes with a motor, battery, and an entire car for far less than $100k.

> As for the power, these things are probably more than 90% efficient, so they don't use any more power than the smaller ones (the load they are charging is a fixed size regardless of how fast you charge it). They may use more current, but that's the whole point! These things charge your car faster.

Closer to 95%, most likely. There also theoretically are very few bad chargers (despite exceptions[1]) since most of the cost is in installation, insurance, and weather/tamperproofing.

[1]: https://hackaday.com/2019/08/07/a-post-mortem-for-an-electri...

$100K doesn't seem like that much to me. Compare to the costs of like, having a massive petrol tank under the floor with regular maintenance, lorries filling it all the time, the amount of space required for that.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I imagine the cost of installing a new petrol station anywhere close to civilization would dwarf that.

That article is from 2011. Modern fast chargers are 2-3x faster than that, and the next generation (350 kW chargers) will cut times in half again.

> the next generation (350 kW chargers)

It's not even "next generation" chargers; it's next generation EVs at this point. Nearly all new Electrify America rapid charging locations have at least one station that can do 350kW. We're just waiting for EVs like the Taycan* to be released (less than 1 month -- Sept 4th!) to be able to accept charge rates approaching that. EA is on-track to get 2,000 fast chargers at nearly 500 locations up and running by end-of-2019.

*The first generation Taycan will charge at 250kW. But the infrastructure is coming online now as EV manufacturers iterate on battery pack technology to accept faster charge rates.

God yes I don’t have laundry machines in my new place (there’s space for some but I gotta get my own) and walking several blocks to the laundromat on a weekly basis is A Hassle.

I am lucky in that my work fits on a laptop so I can just sit there and get stuff done while the washer and dryer run. But if I had a shitty service job it wouldn’t be money-earning time for me.

Every service job that I worked in high school and college had a washer and dryer in the stockroom that was there specifically for people to do laundry - specifically their work laundry, but if there was nobody using it you could get some time to do your own laundry.

Work laundry used a shared (inventoried from the shop when I worked retail) detergent, but personal loads required you to provide your own.

Also, most luxury apartments have in-unit laundry. Just like they typically have electric charging stations in their garages. Laundry actually is scarily analogous here

Perhaps a laundromat with chargers.

I've often said that if I were to open a retail business, it'd be a 24 hours combo, laundromat, pizza place, coffee shop and book store, probably with a side of bodega inside.

Laundromat thrift store. You need to wash all the clothing you take in and people want to wash stuff after they buy it.

A food truck might bundle with a tool truck. Considering that food trucks occasionally run out of trailers you could explore the idea with minimal risk by owning one and partnering with someone who has the other

The idea has potential but you'd need the experience of actually running these kinds of things in order to figure out what combinations result in the economics fitting together nicely. I think there's high risk that the regulatory burden of serving food may add overhead that makes other ventures uneconomical to bundle.

I mean adding a thrift store isn't an inherently bad idea

Throw in a community / rooftop garden, a bank of solar panels, and a nuclear bunker and we'll be in the world of Fallout in no time.

You're right, but ultimately, this just points to apartment living being basically a hack that is only acceptable for the poor, and some very specific prestige situations (e.g. the alpha cities; a flat in London is 'special' because it's London; a flat in Leeds is just crap).

It strikes me as being another one of these 'let's make the life of the poor better' type situations, where you assume the continuation of strong class boundaries.

A person should be able to modify their living environment as they choose within reason. Plugging in a car or plumbing in a washing machine is such a basic adjustment that really should never be an issue.

It becomes such because we have this whole class-based nonsense of tons of people being serfs to a hamster wheel of landlords or whatever.

> Laundry. That just might be the perfect example. What a huge division of experience between the wealthy and the less wealthy.

While a bit off-topic: I never understood why a lack of washing machines in flats is such a huge issue in some countries.

In Germany, most flats come with a connector for your own washing machine, those that don't have on inside the flat often have them in the basement, where every party living in the house just adds their washing machine.

Public laundromats do exist, but from what I can gather they are quite underutilized because there's barely any demand.

Does anybody happen to know why these vast differences in "washing machine availability" exist in other countries? Is it really that much more expensive to lay the water/wastewater lines for washing machines inside the flats? Doesn't all that just plug into the same plumbing that's already there?

Germany is usually used as an example of good tenants' rights, though. I've never lived there but my understanding is that there's nothing wrong with renting, well off people might do it too, and so it's comfortable.

Apartment living mixed with bad tenants rights is a recipe for disaster because the majority of people then end up basically living in a minimum standard hellhole that no-one cares about. See: UK private rental sector.

I checked if it's something that's required by tenants law, but from what I could gather nothing like a "tenants right to a washing machine in their house/flat" exists in Germany.

And it's not like the situation is that perfect either, these past years rents have been exploding in most places with any economic development. Government response has been slow to non-existent on the issue.

It doesn't have to be legally enshrined for the general attitude to help the situation, though.

A bit like how buses in the US, or at least the parts I've visited, seem to be a shitfest, because they're only a thing poor people use, whereas in Europe they're often a lot better not due to legislation per se.

In my Eastern European country it's the same deal, basically everyone has their own washing machine (often washer-dryer in one unit). It's usually fitted in the kitchen or bathroom rather than a separate laundry room.

Some buildings are five stories without an elevator, yet the residents at the top still have washing machines. Unlike Germany, it usually comes as part of the apartment when you rent it.

Thinking about it now, I don't even think I've ever seen a laundromat in my city...

I can speak for why this happens in New York City:

1. Lack of space in apartments

2. Lack of basement space to put shared washing machines

3. Cheap landlord who doesn't want to install/maintain shared washing machines

This question bothers me for some time already: why can't you guys just buy a washing machine?

Where I live everybody has one and we have salaries like 10x less than they have in US. And also flats are mostly tiny.

Taking you clothes somewhere to wash it sounds like first world nightmare to me.

I own a condo with a garage, yet I can't put in a charge station. I need to convince most of my neighbors to have the HOA do it.

The garage is a separate shared structure and is only wired for lighting and the electric garage door. The only way they could put in EV chargers would be to trench though 30 feet of asphalt from the electrical vault (assuming that vault has sufficient capacity), then wire up the garage. I'm not sure how metering would work in that case, I assume that'd have to put in meter boxes for each resident.

Several people have tried, but couldn't get interest from more than a handful of residents, and the cost to do the initial work is too much for one person to bear.

I had to trench about thirty feet to install a charger in my back alley. It was expensive (about $1500) but I looked at it as a long-term investment that would pay off over a decade. If I could have shared that cost with, say, 10 neighbors it would have been pretty modest. My state also has a reimbursement program that will cover a portion of the installation costs. These capital costs are problematic but not really devastating. Even if nobody wants to use taxpayer funds, cities/utilities could propose investment programs with payback done via a small extra fee charged to electric usage over a few years.

The estimate was about 10X more than that -- I'm not sure what made it so expensive, maybe because the wiring had to be sized to handle all 30 units, the HOA wouldn't let it be built to handle just the few people that wanted an EV charger today. And there was some sort of upgrade that had to be made to the underground electrical vault.

A $15,000 loan, at 5% interest, works out to about $159/month over a decade. Divide that by ten neighbors, it's about $16/month per user to charge -- excluding the cost of energy. This isn't nothing, but it's a reasonable enough price if you have 10 people in the facility who are interested. Obviously the theory and practice are very different things, but as barriers go this one seems surmountable. Particularly given the fact that electric car charging is eventually going to be more and more popular/valuable to purchasers or renters. In short, this is a very tiny fraction of the price of a new roof.

Ontario changed their provincial laws a little while ago which makes EV charging "mandatory" to the effect that a condo/apartment building must do it unless they can produce an engineering report that says it (a) be some kind of safety hazard, or (b) would compromise structural integrity.

All new builds must have at least the conduit in place (if not the wiring). I wouldn't be surprised if having EV stations becomes a selling point in pre-construction marketing.

Check to see if your local energy utility has any rebates on charger installations.

I don't know where you are, but I'll give an example locally. For commercial installation (since it's HOA) if you're with LADWP (Los Angeles), they will reimburse for the cost of the charger and installation up to $5000 for the first charger, and $4000 for each charger thereafter.

LADWP will also install a separate meter (if you so choose) and give you a discount on the energy specifically for EV charging.

Might be easier to convince the HOA if the net cost to them to install it is... well, hopefully nearly nothing.

I used to run an extension cord out of my 2nd floor window, but I wasn't parking on the street. My space was off the driveway, behind a fence and a gate, but only about 12 feet from the curb.

More recently, I had been parking an electric car in my apartment's lot, and running an extension cord from the exercise room, out to the car. Then the apartment decided to close off those outlets.

In both cases, the car's battery was only 24Kwh. With 110 volts, it took about 18 hours to fully charge. With a battery the size of a Tesla, that charging rate is going to take all week.

The average car is only driven enough miles per day to require about one night of charging at 120V to top off. A lot of folks, even Tesla owners, get by fine just using existing 120V sockets.

I get by with a 100' extension cord (12 gauge) for my 100D Model S charging off 120V. The vehicle detects the voltage drop and reduces its charge rate accordingly. 36-48 miles of range per 12 hours added to the vehicle (the average American round trip commute is ~34 miles/day).

If I'm in a pinch, I'll pop over to a Supercharger for a top up, which is at the local grocery store so I'm shopping anyway. The charge is so fast (~150kw charge current, ~25 minutes), I sometimes have to go move the car mid shopping trip.

There's a guy with a Tesla around the corner from me, who does this (cable out the 2nd floor window), and he does park on the street. Not sure what he does if he can't get a space close enough. (A neighborhood of row houses with little off-street parking)

I think the car makers have to accelerate integrating solar charging into their cars. You probably wouldn't get 100% of your charge that way, but you could get enough to substantially reduce dependence on the grid.

Leaf had a solar charger as a gimmick. It doesn't work. There isn't enough panel space.

The Leaf solar charger is for the 12 volt system, which is separate from the main battery. I can't really conclude if it is a gimmick or not but my 12 volt battery has not yet died. To be fair, the car also charges the 12 volt battery when it is plugged in.

I wonder what pedestrians et al. think about the cable running across the sidewalk. I don't think this solution scales well, also from an insurance perspective.

There was a time when I was renting a room in a house in East Oakland. The home owners had a traffic cone, and I used one of those cable-covers to cross the sidewalk. I never had a problem, other than overhearing a young woman who lived next door call me, "That douchebag with the electric car."

My neighbor does this as well. He does cover the cable with a piece of vinyl. I see him dicking around with his extension cord and vinyl several times a week, and then he tells me how charging EVs is totally not a problem and how convenient his car is. In the mean time I spend 5 mins every 3-4 weeks to fill my car up with diesel and I'm good for another 8-900 km. I wouldn't want an electric car today if I got one for free (well then I'd probably take it, I'm Dutch after all)

Someone in my old neighborhood did this too. It generally seemed like a pretty bad idea, but it didn't actually bother me.

Not substantially, no.

> I think the car makers have to accelerate integrating solar charging into their cars.

Nah. Solar on cars is a dead-end -- even with perfectly efficient solar panels, a clear sky, and the sun at the zenith, the most power you can possibly get is 1.3 kW/m² (cf. [1]). I don't know exactly how large of a solar panel you could put on a car, but even with a huge 5 m² panel, you'd still be looking at over 12 hours (i.e, multiple days of charging) to charge a Tesla's 85 kWh battery. With realistic panel efficiency and sun conditions, it'd take even longer.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant

> over 12 hours (i.e, multiple days of charging) to charge a Tesla's 85 kWh battery.

The tone is somewhat pessimistic.

Full charge every two-to-three days for a range of ... what is it? 265 miles? Effectively untethered car if you only need 50 miles daily.

Again, keep in mind my numbers are assuming a large, perfectly efficient solar panel under ideal conditions. Realistic numbers will be much worse. For example, most commercially available solar panels are 20-25% efficient.

1.3kW/m^2 * 20% efficiency = 260w/m^2

260w/m^2 * 5m^2 = 1.3kW

1.3kW * 4 hours daily sun = 5.2kW/day

265 miles range / 85kW full charge capacity = 3.1 miles/kW

5.2kW/day * 3.1 miles/kW = 16.12 miles / day

Still sounds too good, what did I miss?

That initial 1.3kW is ignoring atmospheric absorption. You lose some 300 W even at zenith without clouds. More if you're really far from the equator and/or it isn't currently solar noon. If you're in a city, you may be in shade a lot and certainly don't have the sun at its zenith for 4 hours regardless.

5m^2 is too big for a car, and the panels are heavy and expensive. Toyota used to have a prius with a solar panel roof - it produced enough energy to run the fans (not the AC) while the car was parked on a hot day. Not even in the ballpark of the energy needed to move the car (and it was an expensive option).

16.12 miles a day is not going to cut it. In your previous comment you suggested 50 miles a day. In various studies, Americans drive >30 miles a day.

16 miles would hardly even cover most American's one-way commute, let alone any other errands or trips.

>you suggested 50 miles a day

/s/suggested/calculated using data provided by parent comment/

Nobody in the entire comment chain brought up distance except for you, which you kicked off by suggesting 50 miles daily usage.

Regardless, even your drastically lower 16 miles a day isn't going to satisfy the needs of the average driver.

Affordable solar panels don't get 260W/m^2 peak. The solar panels on a car don't track the sun, so average power output is way below peak.

You don't get 1.3kW per square meter for 4 hours a day. 42,339 MW of PV installations produced 39,401 GWh of energy in 2017 in Germany[1], so on average you get peak power for just two hours a day with panels that are angled appropriately.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#Statist...

Then you get not all of you charge from the solar panel, but a quarter to a half. So what? That's still good. If the car basically had 20 free miles a day, that would mean much less reliance on plugging in.

You are probably going to spend more energy than that just lugging around solar panels.

Seems not pessimistic enough to me. Realistically most people would capture on average, while the sun is up, about 100 watts if they covered their car in solar panels. A car needs at least 10 KW to cruise at 60 mph. This means you need to charge for 100 hours for 1 hour of driving. Actually 200 hours because you can't charge at night-time.

I have experience with solar and boats and it is generally the same problem.

No, you won't ever be able to power a boat or a car only on solar for long distances, unfortunately. Maybe if you are driving a few miles.

We can do what we do in the boating community - put a honda generator on top of it ;)

Solar panels on car is a good idea that sounds like a bad idea that sounds like a good idea.

It sounds like a good idea because if you can get your power from the sun you don't need to change.

It sounds like a bad idea because the charging rate is incredibly slow, especially compared to the rate a car can use energy. Solar power wouldn't noticeably increase the range, except for a very special-purpose non-street-legal vehicle.

However, it's actually a good idea because many people don't drive all that far in a given day. If you drive five miles to work, park in the sun, then drive back home, you might recover a pretty big chunk of that and not have to plug in quite as often or maybe not at all. The analysis is similar if you bike or take public transit to work and usually only go on medium-distance drives on the weekends.

I used 120v exclusively for the first 3 months I owned my Model 3. It took a few days to get back full after a long trip but it worked great for day to day driving.

I did finally put in 240v but only because it was easy since I just had to go through 1 concrete wall. This does speed it up 5x the 120v rate (2x volts @ 2.5x amps) which is nice after you drop down to a low charge but not really noticed in day to day use.

> I used to run an extension cord out of my 2nd floor window

> More recently, I had been parking an electric car in my apartment's lot, and running an extension cord from the exercise room, out to the car. Then the apartment decided to close off those outlets.

Won't even get to what I am sure others have raised about safety issues. My question is why do you go to this effort? What in you makes you want to go to this extent in order to use an electric car?

Why not?

Personal contribution to the environment?

That's a big one for me. It's the largest thing you can probably do to reduce global warming, personally. EVs are also faster to accelerate, and more fun to drive.

Well, not the largest. I'm doing something better. I offset all my carbon and drive an ICE SUV. I'm actually carbon-negative every year.

I do contribute sulphur oxides and all that stuff, but global warming is driven less by those.

I would argue that we do not yet have a true way of offsetting carbon emissions.

Planting trees (that take decades to grow might or might not release the carbon again soon after) or helping other people emit less does not render your emissions harmless.

The only way that can work is to take it out of the atmosphere again for good. Is there is an offsetting option that I'm not aware of that does this?

I think it's the second largest. If you do pretty much any amount of flying, your carbon footprint will be dominated by that unless you drive an absurd amount.

You are aware that much of your electricity is generated from carbon-emitting power stations?

That depends heavily on where you live - CA, WA, NY have a high percentage of renewables - and even then, most fossil fuel power plants are still more efficient than an ICE car.

Because the cars are literally that much better than ICE. There's no comparison in the driving and ownership experience. Plugging in is not an inconvenience. Going to a gas station actually is an inconvenience and I'm dying to dump my second vehicle for an EV

Drastic reduction in pollution of my local environment.

Eventual huge reduction of CO2 emissions (once mining and other activities become fossil-fuel free enterprises). Small reduction now assuming local electricity sources are CO2-free.

Perhaps me aiming to reduce my CO2 emissions won't make a difference. I'm going to do it anyway. You should too.

I think "charging time" is the wrong metric to think about. The relevant metric is "miles/h". The model 3 may have a giant battery pack that takes forever to charge fully, but it's also very efficient so whatever electricity you get into it corresponds to more miles. All that matters for the situation to be sustainable is that you drive less than the amount of miles that you can charge while not driving, on average. That's a simple comparison between miles driven, the current you can charge at, and the number of hours you can charge per day.

I always thought this was a big problem for EVs, but recently came to think nightly charging might not matter so much for these drivers. If an urban apartment dweller has an EV with 200+ miles of range, can't a public fast charger be used once or twice a week instead? I lived in an apartment with a ~200 mile range ICE car and filled it less than once a week.

It's mentioned elsewhere in the comments.

> This issue will hopefully be transient; once charging speed is comparable to filling your ICE vehicle with fuel.

> Until then, the lack of fast public chargers combined with the relative slowness of charging makes this a major downgrade from ICE.

In other words, the only reason most people are OK with this one attribute of EVs that is inferior to ICE is the fact that they can charge at home (and/or work.) But there are plenty of people that do not fit into that category.

By being able to easily plug-in at home, overnight, one always has a full battery in the morning. Especially nice if you can program things to charge during off-peak hours.

That is exactly my point. The people that can plug-in at home find it very convenient, but if that's not an option, it's not convenient at all! So I don't understand why you posted that comment as a response to mine?

Filling your car at the gas station is a five minute stop on the way home. Filing your electric car is at least an hour if you have a DC fast charger and that gets you only 80% full. To get totally full, it would take a multi-hour stop.

Sure. If your commute is 15% of your range, you’d be able to charge once a week. I’m pretty sure most people could work out a multi-hour stopover near a charging station into their week. Put them near a restaurant, arts, or shopping district and bingo problem solved.

Near where I live, there's actually one in the parking lot of the almost derelict shopping mall. But that's also right next door to a particularly busy grocery store. There are usually vehicles in it and this is in an area (Mass) that doesn't have a lot of Teslas generally and certainly not in the somewhat rundown small city this store is on the outskirts of.

You’d do a weekly food shop, and do your weekly charge at the same time.

“Well over an hour” is wrong, there’s almost no electric car that won’t do an 80% charge in 45 minutes, and most take half an hour.

I never said it would take an hour. I specifically said you could get an 80% charge in about an hour.

And the grocery store better have a lot of chargers if everyone is doing their weekly fillup while they shop.

> Filing your electric car is at least an hour if you have a DC fast charger and that gets you only 80% full.

“At least an hour” to 80% charge. I don’t think there’s a car on the market for which this is the case.

People will charge in a variety of way. Some people in apartments will have block parking for which there will be chargers, some people will go to superchargers or similar, some will do it at the gym, some at the train station, some shopping, some at work, others will have chargers for on street parking. Other people will use car sharing schemes which have dedicated chargers. Ultimately cars are parked for hundreds of hours a week and you only need a tiny fraction of that for charging.

Only takes 15 minutes to go from 0-40% in a Tesla Model 3 Long Range (310 miles max) at a superCharger, and full is only about an hour because the last 20% is slow.

You can hit another charger 2 hours down the road after that 15 minute charge and plug in for 5-10 minutes to get to the next charger if needed. It will be ready after you're done taking a bathroom break and you bought a snack.

Few people need to charge to 100% on a road trip if they have a good EV. Tesla did the right thing with their design. Everyone else should catch up.

Imagine if GM cars only came with 5 gallon gas tanks but the Audi came with a 15 gallon tank. That's basically what we're talking about. Don't shit on EVs because only one company is doing it correctly.

> Filing your electric car is at least an hour if you have a DC fast charger and that gets you only 80% full.

..What? Where are you getting your numbers from.

>can't a public fast charger be used once or twice a week instead?

It takes me less than 2 minutes to fill up my tank and pay, now you want me to sit 1-4 hours at a fast charger a week twiddling my thumbs?

Never mind the fact a Tesla Model 3 starts at my annual salary.

I think it works if the fast charger is at e.g. a shopping center where you can grab dinner or shop while the car charges.

Any solution that requires a certain behavior is unnecessarily coupling that behavior to transferring energy into transportation.

In a world where a couple owns two EVs, and only one does the weekly grocery shopping, do they have to swap cars to get them both charged? Do they have to start eating out to charge their car? What if you use Amazon Fresh for food deliveries? Give that up; you need to charge your car.

In other words, there are lots of ideas that might work for some people, but they shouldn't be necessary for EV ownership.

I think your point hits to the heart of it for many people's situations. You can fit car-charging into your routine if you make some very specific changes to your routine to accommodate it, and you must make possibly several hours of time for those changes every X days, or else you'll have a car with a flat battery and no quick fix that will let you complete your regular car-requiring errands.

If that errand is "go grocery shopping" or "drop a large package off at the post office", you might be fine rearranging or postponing, but if it's "go to work", you're completely screwed. There are quite a few jobs where "I can't get to work because my car's battery is dead" will get you fired.

For me, I'm privileged enough that it's simply inconvenient to put that constraint on my lifestyle (inconvenient enough that I won't buy an EV), but for many people it's a showstopper.

What if workplaces add chargers as a benefit? I've seen several do it near me. People then just plug their car in at work.

> Any solution that requires a certain behavior is unnecessarily coupling that behavior to transferring energy into transportation.

Remember when we coupled health insurance to employment? (Also, what if I want to retire next month, but I still drive an EV? Now I'm stuck spending hours of my retirement waiting for my car to charge somewhere? First world problem, I know...)

These ideas are OK for a few people. But then wealthy people with wealthy employers are perhaps less likely to be "garage orphans" to begin with.

I agree that it is not a silver bullet. However it does account for a large portion of car down time and would be a useful place for chargers. Maybe it would work if they were pay chargers as well?

They have a few at work, but people complain about nobody vacating them promptly. With no guarantee that I would reliably have one every day, I'm not sure I see the point, I would always have to be prepared to get home without it.

At my company they do EV valet for the chargers. But it's a big company full of crazy perks.

I'm at the grocery less than 10 minutes from the time I park my car til the time I start my car to leave. Aside from Church, work and my gyms (good luck getting a CF affiliate that barely keeps his doors open to install EV chargers in the parking lot of the half of a warehouse he leases and I don't see a chain gym in a small strip small that barely has adequate parking adding them to encourage people to loiter longer) I don't particularly go anywhere other than my apartment.

There are tons of us in this scenario that would have to go waste our free time sitting around at some business, running our cars for heating or air conditioning, while we charge one or more times a week.

The only way you ever get more than a token percentage of homeowners to switch to EVs is make it where you pull up to a building, a robot arm removes your batteries, slides new ones in, and you pull away 30 seconds later.

I know 1 person that owns an EV, he has a Tesla. Everyone made fun of him when he bought it, and still does months later. It looks like Tesla has two locations in all of Indianapolis with 8 super chargers at one and 12 at the other. 2 locations for 361 square miles.

The only place he goes regularly where he can charge it is his attached garage where he had a charger installed. I've only seen a few random business with a few generic (non fast-charging) charging stations around Indy with the exception of the EV smart-car looking cars in some of the hipster neighborhoods that you pay a monthly fee to use and have to return them to a handful of charging locations.

Not sitting twidding your thumbs. If they are near somewhere you want to be recreationally, you’re set. The gym, the grocery store, the movies, a hiking trail, spending 1-4 hours at one of these once a week would likely enhance your life not take away from it.

If your solution to the difficulty of finding an EV charger is "put EV chargers literally everywhere," that would hypothetically solve the problem, but how do you propose to make that happen? That's what the question here is.

Somehow people figured out how to make gasoline fueling infrastructure, which is amazing in itself. Extracting fuel out of the ground, transporting to refinery, transporting to destination holes scattered nearly everywhere around the world and pumping refined fuel back in, and then pumping back out of the ground into little fuel tanks in cars for it to be burned. If someone described that to me as a plan for internal combustion I would not believe them. With EVs, we actually have the delivery mechanism for fuel already mostly figured out.

I know, it's amazing how it seems like it should be a relatively simple problem to solve, and yet it remains unsolved in real life. Hence my question: How do you propose to make that happen?

Time.

We've had less than seven years of a legitimately usable EV even existing. Seven years.

Low power points aren’t expensive.

Ultimately if it was the other way around, and gasoline cars were the new technology, people would think it was mad to put huge underground storage depots filled with explosive liquid dotted throughout residential neighbourhoods. Charging infrastructure will just become normal. If there are people willing to pay to use it there are people who are going to fit it.

An EV charging station just requires a nearby transformer with spare capacity and a bit of digging. Here in Oslo (Norway) they're peppered all across town.

Check out this[1] map of them. It's slightly misleading since it counts one station which can charge either CCS or CHAdeMO as two, but still. To get a sense of scale, driving from Lysaker on the left to Manglerud on the right is about 15 minutes.

A fair number of them have been put up by the local government, but the rest are commercial.

[1]: https://www.ladestasjoner.no/kart/?lat=59.9138688&lng=10.752...

If I, as a business owner, can get 1-4 hours of your time and spending money - it’s probably going to be well worth it to front the cost of land and charging equipment for a park-n-charge spot

And yet business owners aren't rushing to install chargers, even in places where I'll regularly see a bunch of EVs on my way through the parking lot. So that theory doesn't seem to pan out.

Here in Norway they do (about 50% of new cars are electric, so there’s always someone in need of charging)

The local convenience store might have 1 or 2[1], big shops like IKEA might have 20+ free AC charging spots, and 5-6+ DC fast chargers[2] (costs money).

[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@60.3579898,5.3582122,3a,42.9y,9...

[2]: https://www.google.com/maps/@60.4750298,5.3308811,3a,75y,23....

> So that theory doesn't seem to pan out.

There are many reasons why my theory could still be valid but the circumstances have not yet kicked in. Awareness of the potential for profit could be missing. I assume the cost of installing EV charge stations is still coming down. EVs are definitely still largely a luxury item in north america, so usually owned by drivers with garages. and of course, the percentage of EV cars could still be too low to justify the infrastructure.

So, my theory may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's still largely untested.

It's because we don't live in the metaphorical frictionless vacuum where the speed of light is infinite.

Less pithily, complex, multi-stakeholder ecosystems don't instantaneously adapt to shifts in incentives, but that doesn't mean that we can't reason about tendencies that will shape long-term equilibria.

Here in Norway the cities and government offer(ed) subsidies to build EV chargers where it’s needed. (About $3000 for a public dual AC charger, or $22000 per triple DC fast charger)

We’re slowly but surely moving towards “chargers literally everywhere”.

Why is a fast charger 1-4 hours a week? You can do an 80% charge in a Tesla Model 3 in 24 minutes with the new generation of Superchargers, https://electrek.co/2019/07/02/tesla-supercharger-v3-range-m.... That will only improve in the coming years. 1-4 hours is not a valid charge time even now.

This is where my family is - we're considering an EV but do not have a charger at home. We live in a reasonably dense urban area w/ a dedicated spot in a garage and don't typically drive more than 200 miles a week, so we'll just use public chargers.

This will be a second car though - and I would be slightly wary of this sort of responsibility for a primary vehicle.

That might work for urbanites who drive to work and work in the same city where they live.

But I know quite a few people whose daily commute is 40+ miles each way. They'd be visiting the charger every other day. That's unfortunately very common for people who live in San Francisco and work outside the city, and vice versa.

(I have a different problem: I walk or take transit to work, and have a car mainly for longer trips outside the city. I also have no charging station in my building's garage, so I've stuck with an ICE car for now.)

Surely not having access to private parking is almost entirely an urbanite problem, to do with living in apartment blocks. Anyone who lives in the suburbs would be very likely to have their own parking.

Fully Charged recently ran an interesting panel discussion that they put online yesterday with a few vehicle to grid experts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkh33KjF3Gc&t=0s

One interesting thing with vehicle to grid is that EV battery capacity is becoming a valuable commodity. It's valuable to EV owners because they can sell back electricity to the grid and manage when they charge using either solar or simply low rate night time energy from the grid. This saves them cost and some cases makes a profit. It's valuable to grid owners because they can serve peak demand from plugged in EVs and dump access clean energy back into them so they can stay on top of peaks in demand and supply. It's even attractive to battery leasing companies or EV car companies responsible for managing the batteries because keeping them fully charged all the time when they are not in use is actually not that great for battery life. Some car manufacturers are already experimenting with battery warranty and vehicle to grid usage in order to take away the concerns about wearing out the battery.

So, vehicle to grid may be used to address exactly this issue. It's a complicated topic of course but providing charging points to garage orphans could be a profitable business. There are all sorts of interesting things happening around this.

Assuming everyone's selling it back I'd imagine there have to be easily swappable batteries then to deal with the increased wear. At least so it's not a big operation for the dealer. I wonder how much more difficult this would make car designs...

They covered this in the panel discussion. In short, some car manufacturers seem willing to allow this under their normal battery warranty (i.e. they expect this to be not much of an issue) to minimize risk for the user and take away concerns around this. Some manufacturers are already building inverters into the cars to facilitate vehicle to grid (and vehicle to vehicle even). Most manufacturers (e.g. VW, Renault) expect this to be common in a few years and are looking to standardize how this works.

Swapping batteries is of course covered by existing warranties and obviously this is already technically doable as part of normal car service. So, no special new design is needed for this. I imagine this typically involves unplugging a bunch of cables, loosening a few bolts, etc. Doesn't sound like rocket science. In any case, your base assumption that this becomes a regular thing for EV owners is probably simply wrong. It's rare now and it will probably not become a lot more common. EV batteries are pretty good.

Several states have laws that require apartment building and condo managers to allow tenants/owners to install EV chargers (at their own cost). I expect this trend to continue slowly across the US.

If you can't charge at home, public charging is going to continue to expand rapidly (as electricity is everywhere). It'll just take some time, and effort on the part of local citizens and policy makers.

If you own an EV, get involved! Advocate for home, workplace, and public charging stations where you frequent.

Several states have laws that require apartment building and condo managers to allow tenants/owners to install EV chargers (at their own cost).

Which states?

California, Colorado, Florida, and Oregon. Shorthand is typically "right to charge" laws.

California for Condo/Townhome owners. However, in my experience, it didn't help. I had a condo with a shared garage, and the HOA said I had to pay for not just a line from the electrical room to my parking spot, but also the equipment/piping to scale it to any of the other parking spots. What would have been a $2000 installation turned into much more. My point being, even though there are laws that allow you to do this, there are ways they can make it out of reach if they want to.

Sounds like your HOA needs a visit from your lawyer. Making pay for all costs for your needs is one thing, demanding you pay for costs for everyone else is another.

Bet if you did pay for it all, the HOA would not credit you for any other BEV owner you attracted and tapped into the power lines.

Sounds like they want the benefits but none of the costs.

Yea, exactly. The bill leaves this part of it in a grey area. What are "reasonable" costs that an HOA can impose? Getting a lawyer involved would have been very costly. I eventually sold the stupid place and moved on.

There are quite a few single family homes that just have on-street parking with no dedicated parking spots (myself included). EV isn't an option for my unless my workplace had charging for nearly every vehicle. The current 2 charging stations are already taken most days.

Have you spoken to your local city about getting charging pedestals installed? Or having chargers added to street lights? Have you spoken to your workplace about having any amount of chargers installed? Progress is not a function of time.

The transition to electric mobility will require effort, but is not impossible. I am happy to speak to whomever is required to work towards having chargers installed near your home or workplace.

"Progress is not a function of time", this is a really deep quote.

I use it too much, but it's true. The world gets better when people put effort into it, not just because time passes, and its important to remind others that complaining is cheap but doesn't pay dividends like fixing problems. Along with the idea “A society grows great when old men [people] plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit”. Learn to enjoy planting the proverbial trees, the future will be thankful; and to be frank, we owe the future better than today. It is on loan to us, and we should act accordingly.

Those laws seem like such a raw deal, though, since it's not like you can take the charger with you. You're allowed to upgrade your landlord's property at your own expense, providing you also take out an insurance policy at your own expense. And even if you're fine with that, it doesn't really help "garage orphans," since you can only do it if you have a garage or assigned parking space with access to electricity.

I saw an interesting pitch from Sparkcharge [1] at an incubator event, which is deliverable super charger batteries.

If it scales, it would essentially allow people to order charging on the fly, get it delivered/hooked up by an Uber driver, and then just leave it for pickup in the lot they parked in. This is obviously only an urban or suburban solution, but could help with some of the issues.

[1] https://sparkcharge.io/

Besides garage orphans, also those with self standing homes and a garage will have (or become) a problem.

Say that in you street that are 50 single family homes connected to a same cabin/transformer.

The electric infrastructure powering them (lines, transformer, etc.) has been dimensioned to power them at their average current power consumption rate + something to take care of peaks + something more to take care of exceptions (like - say - a constructions site for the renovation of one of the homes).

Now the existing infrastructure will have no issue with your single electric car charging at night, and probably with that of your neighboor on the left and that of your neighbour on the right, but the moment a given number of families will have an electic car, each of them will try to use 5 kW of additional power more or less at the same time.

That is a lot of "juice" and it sums up quickly.

I believe (correct me if you have better data) that in the US the infrastructure is generally dimensioned[1] for something like 6 or 8 kW per unit, so, adding to each house some "constant" 5 kW for the charging (even if only at night) is almost using all the capability of the infrastructure and possible peaks might create issues.

[1] when estimating the need of a line the usual formula is roughly between

1/3 max power x 1.20

and

1/2 max power x 1.10

so assuming the peak is 15 kW, that would be between 15/3 kW x 1.20 = 6 kW and 15/2 kW x 1.10= 8.25 kW

The "businesses renting out their lots after hours" is an interesting model, though in high-density areas it's not clear that this would be enough, and might not be well co-located with residential demand.

City-owned public infrastructure (i.e. lamppost charging) makes a lot of sense too, but infrastructure changes are slow and expensive, and will certainly lag far behind demand. It might be a way for municipalities to earn revenue, though.

One could also imagine how much self-driving might help this: The car could pilot itself to a nearby charging station/lot without any inconvenience to the owner. But we are not there yet with capability, so this remains a near-term problem.

Why does everyone need a place to charge at home? Sure, it is one of the big advantages of an EV, but not everyone can take advantage of it. If the car has a 300-400 mile range, then charge it like you fuel up a gas-powered car. Takes a little bit longer, but that will improve over time.

I imagine the same people who are garage orphans are probably also those who haven't got time to charge their machines for an hour or two.

That's already a concern for road trips, but day to day that'll be a nightmare. Just hang around the charging station for an hour while your car recharges.

Since it does not take an hour to charge for a normal drive, maybe you are the one with bad timing.

If a person is driving 30 miles or less a day they only need less than 10 minutes charging to get by.

Yeah, I didn't consider the reduced time required for the short trip. Though that's adding 10 minutes to every electric car owners commute, isn't it? Can you imagine a large portion of the city all trying to charge up every night?

Electricity rates and demand are insanely low during the night. In fact whole sale rates can dip into the negatives where they will literally pay you to use electricity. Aluminum smelting plants run during this time. Even if everyone suddenly started charging cars at night at the most we would be back close to daytime demand, but more math is needed.

Sorry, not night - evening - when everyone is all headed home and when one typically would fill up one's car.

Gotcha, that’s actually the time of peak demand and adding a whole new class of high power consumption during that time is indeed scary. In the UK for example where it’s tea time then as well and a bunch of people put on electric kettles. Utilities do a lot of work during that time load balancing and borrowing from other regions for extra power.

Taking your car to the fuel station every day is a nuisance. ICE cars only need to go about once a week.

And most people can get by with charging a current gen long range EV once a week if they don't have a charger at their residence.

Not everyone, but most people drive less than 250 miles a week.

In that scenario stopping at a charger every day would be silly. Stop once a week at a charger that's near a grocery store, movie theater, restaurant, etc.

Both of my local Tesla chargers are near grocery stores. Electrify America is installing chargers at Wal-Mart.

Charging an EV is less like going to a gas station and more like picking a place to go that happens to have EV chargers while you do other things.

> Both of my local Tesla chargers are near grocery stores.

How close? Can you push your cart back to them?

> Electrify America is installing chargers at Wal-Mart.

How many? If we want this whole "electric car" thing to take off, you're looking at, what, 50% of the whole parking lot? Not a half dozen stalls right beside the store.

Not the post you responded to, but I've seen 20-30 Tesla chargers in the parking lots of several grocery stores. You could very easily push your cart to them.

I imagine Electrify America is installing a number that they believe will meet the current demand of electric vehicles. They don't need to fill the parking lot for the hypothetical future where everyone has an EV. That will still take some time and they can easily scale up as they need to.

In both cases they are at the 'back' of the parking lot, so definitely within cart or bag-carrying range.

It doesn't cover everyone yet, there's no way that we're going to have infrastructure to replace 100 years of gasoline infrastructure in a handful of years.

Also you only need to cover those who can't charge at home, which is a lot of people but not all of them.

I drive 100 miles a day, and park away from my house but could still have an electric car, if only my workplace installed chargers. Isn't that the answer? I work on an industrial estate with 450v (minimum) 3 phase power in every building. There is a huge amount of flat roof space for solar too.

Put them I supermarket car parks. It can charge while you're shopping.

Anyway, I would dispute there are people that can't find the time, they may not want to spend 2 hours a week filling up the car, but just like you don't find cars abandoned at the side of the road now, because owners can't find to time to fill up, the problem isn't going to be appreciably worse in the future.

It's a matter of scale though - filling up with gas is a 5 minute, once every two weeks activity. If you're filling up for 10 minutes every day or an hour a week, that's a hard sell.

Charging an EV is not really like filling up with gas. You need a slightly different mindset.

You're not going to be waiting around constantly for your car to finish charging. In reality, you're charging at night while you're sleeping. Or charging at work while you're working. Or charging at the supermarket while you buy your groceries.

The article is about how people can't charge while they are at sleep. There's going to be a huge portion of people who can't charge at work. I guess you have to charge at groceries, which you'll need to go to every day. Though the grocery store will need to be dramatically refitted to support that, and will need to justify having a power grid the size of their parking lot increasing their power bill just because it's convenient for people. It's hard to justify why a grocery store would want to do that.

Why would you need to do it every day? EV ranges are rising above 200 miles, that's an order of magnitude higher than most peoples commutes, so for most people once a week would be enough.

Shops would do it because money and footfall.

> Why would you need to do it every day?

Because people are talking about how it only takes a short time to recharge enough to offset one day's commute. That only works, though, if you charge every day. If you only charge weekly then you're stuck waiting to recover 200 miles' worth of charge at a time in preparation for the next week. If you're using a fast-charger near somewhere you need to be anyway for an hour or two every week, great. Otherwise that adds up to a lot of wasted time—and human time is the least renewable resource we have.

Sketchybeasts concern was people "who haven't got time to charge their machines for an hour or two". Which suggests a once a week thing, which is why I suggested putting them in the supermarket, Sketchybeast then suggested they'd need to be charged everyday, and had previously, which is why I pointed out that they can easily be charged once a week.

So yes, I agree.

The grocery store won't be giving away the electricity for free. Maybe they'll subsidise it a bit if they realise that offering charging brings more traffic to their store. But it won't be free any more than gas stations give away free gas!

The electricity grid already extends to most workplaces, most urban streets, most parking lots. Destination charging, where you're plugging in for hours rather than minutes, doesn't need a huge industrial grid connection like super-fast charging hubs do. Sure, infrastructure needs to be developed, but it's manageable and it will happen easily enough once the demand is there.

I wonder how much capacity it takes to power a parking lot full of street lights vs a parking lot full of Teslas. I imagine it's a wide gap - each Tesla draws about 1.4 kW[1], while each streetlight draws 80 watts[2].

[1] https://www.pluglesspower.com/learn/tesla-model-s-charging-h... [2] https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2004/MarinaAvetisyan.shtml

Some city dwellers live near only dodegas, convenience stores, and fast food shops. The corner pantry isn't going to install a parking lot in some cases, let alone car chargers.

But those city dwellers likely drive considerably less than people with a garage and don't really need to constantly find a charger.

The latest generation of cars and chargers don't need an hour to charge. A Tesla Model 3 can already charge at 250 kW, which is over 1000 miles per hour. Practically speaking, that means a decent charge in less than 20 minutes. On a long trip, most stops for gas take around that long anyway by the time you use the restroom, buy supplies, eat, etc.

The newest chargers being installed today go up to 350 kW, so the charging infrastructure is being future-proofed for even faster charging as the cars improve.

I buy the "use the restroom, buy the supplies, eat" argument for long road-trips, where it's probably a good idea to stop for 30 min to relax. But not for the fill-up during your commute to/from work when you can't charge at home.

Put the fast chargers at shopping centers.. Unless the car is run down to nearly a dead battery, it won't need but about 20 minutes on the charger. That's about how long a short trip to the grocery store takes.

Is it feasible to put in hundreds of high voltage chargers?

Perhaps not today, because there aren't enough cars to use them - demand needs to catch up. But yes, it's feasible to fill entire parking lots with outlets at every parking spot. There are already examples of this in Norway.

The outlets can be built to share and distribute available power, so the grid connection required is not as huge as you might think. In practice this isn't an issue, as it's unlikely that every outlet will be drawing the maximum current at the same time.

It's 1.4 kW / Tesla charging at 120 V [1]. That's basically one 15 Amp breaker per charging station. A 30 Amp breaker buys you two cars at once. That's a lot of circuits to run out to the parking lot.

https://www.pluglesspower.com/learn/tesla-model-s-charging-h...

Dedicated car chargers usually run on 240V. Typically you'll have 15/16A for ~3.5kW or 30/32A for ~7kW.

You certainly don't need to run separate circuits over long distances for every individual outlet. You can run one higher-power cable to a hub unit which then breaks out to many (maybe dozens) nearby outlets.

> The outlets can be built to share and distribute available power, so the grid connection required is not as huge as you might think

Doesn't this re-introduce the original problem? If less power is available, you have to spend longer charging.

> "Doesn't this re-introduce the original problem? If less power is available, you have to spend longer charging."

Not a realistic concern, at present, because the chances that a large parking lot will be filled with even 10% EVs is small. At any given time, most stalls will be occupied by fossil cars, cars not needing charging, or will just be empty.

In the future as demand increases, if you start to hit the limit then you can look at upgrading the electrical supply.

I don't see why not. The spikiness of the load can be handled via onsite battery packs. The battery packs can charge when power is cheap, discharge when it is expensive. The batteries can also be able to be used by shopping center tenants to help lower their costs.

Also, let's not forget that these chargers aren't there for everyone to use, but for those who cannot charge at home. For those who can charge at home, that will be a much simpler, cheaper solution.

> A Tesla Model 3 can already charge at 250 kW

Can it really? I saw something more like 130 kW when it started charging, because it was pretty low. It tapered off steadily. Still only took about 45 minutes overall, but I doubt the hardware could actually sustain 1000 miles/hour charging levels for more than a few minutes.

https://insideevs.com/news/343622/tesla-model-3-on-superchar...

> "Can it really? I saw something more like 130 kW when it started charging, because it was pretty low."

You need to be using the new V3 superchargers, which are just starting to roll out, to get the 250 kW rate. V2 superchargers top out at ~130 kW.

The charge speed does taper off as state of charge increases, but reaches 70% in 19 minutes. This is well over 200 miles of range, hence "decent" charge.

The Model 3 is also compatible with Ionity CCS chargers in Europe, and gets about 190 kW on those.

Is "garage orphan" really a commonly used term? It sounds really weird & needlessly emotional to me.

Just saying "people without a garage" seems perfectly adequate to me & does not require manufacturing new terms.

> Among EV experts, there’s a name for folks who have to park on the street: garage orphans.

Apparently The Globe And Mail thinks it has value.

The inconvenience of charging away from home is much bigger than you make it out to be.

Other posters here are mentioning ~40 miles of charging in an 18 hour period. That's pretty dang restrictive.

No one who charges an EV away from home is charging at that rate, that's for an at home 'trickle' charger. Look up any L2 charger and you're well above that rate, and rates are only going for public chargers.

I miscommunicated context. The 40 miles in 18 hours is the at-home charging. I wanted to emphasize how restrictive that charging window is.

That's also for just a standard 110v outlet. Works fine for me with a ~25 mile round trip commute.

And that's usually not charging from 0 to 40 miles of range. The car's battery starts each morning at 90% (a limit set in the car), and ends the day at 90% minus 25 miles. So even though it's only charging 25 miles each night (which doesn't take all night), it's ready to go 300 miles whenever I need to.

A little longer? What am I going to do at a gas station for an hour? I am already bored when I am there for 3 minutes with an ICE car...

A) It doesn't take an hour to charge an EV unless you're charging past 90%, which isn't typically done as it hurts the battery.

B) You're bored b/c you have to stand next to the pump waiting for it to finish. This isn't a problem with EV charging. Go get a coffee or read a book.

Not everyone has time to "get a coffee or read a book" when the car runs empty. Some people live years without a free hour to "just go read a book", for example: anyone with young kids.

Charge while you go grocery shopping? While you're at work?

I've found that those same young kids also don't tolerate long periods in the car very well. The periodic stops to charge work pretty well - you stop, plug in the car, then take them to grab a bite to eat and blow off some steam.

(Then you end up having to go unplug the fully-charged car long before they finish eating!)

The day we ordered our Tesla, my wife and I (without kids) stopped at a truck stop on the way to the Tesla store that we end up stopping at on most of our trips out of town.

We did the following: a. Fueled up the car from about half a tank to full b. Used the restroom. c. Bought two fountain sodas

We timed the stop from when we parked to when we got back in the car. It was fifteen minutes. I would expect that any family that stops at that stop is there at least that long, if not longer. ---

Going back to in-town charging though.. You need to realize that all you need for a charging station is a parking lot, and you can leave the car while it charges. Put DC fast chargers in a grocery store parking lot, and people can charge while they do their weekly shopping. I doubt anyone with young kids is spending less than 30 minutes at the grocery store each week.

So instead of getting a coffee or reading a book, they can go buy cereal and frozen chicken nuggets.

I'm surprised that coffee shops/bookstores haven't started to target this demographic yet. Buy a coffee, an hour or two of quick charging, and read a book for a couple of hours in a comfy seat while your car charges. Considering how many people will go to those establishments already, it seems like a pretty easy hook (and probably has a lot of demographic overlap).

I think coffee shops prefer that most people pay their money and move along a lot more quickly than that.

It's likely that the reason you can't find a seat in most coffee shops already is because it isn't profitable to provide a two-hour seat to everyone.

Plenty of coffee shops have built their business around providing a place that's comfortable to relax in: free Wi-Fi, power outlets, lots of comfortable seating. Sure, all else held equal, they'd prefer that people move through quickly, but they'd also prefer to charge triple the price. The reason they don't, and the reason they do provide for customers hanging around, is that it's a way of attracting business (and prevents loss of business to competitors who try this strategy). The parent comment's suggestion seems more in less in line with this general approach.

Exactly. I simply don't get this. All of that effort when it's (for lack of a better way to put it) 'not ready for prime time'. Other comments include running an electric extension cord out the window and other hacks. A cord out the window be serious.

Imagine for a second of what compensating good could be done for the world if people put the same time, thought or effort into something else with more immediate (and urgent payback).

I agree that running a cord out the window is ridiculous, but planning a ~40m charging stop at a place that has shops, restaurants, grocery stores, etc. like my local chargers doesn't seem so inconvenient.

I can personally choose to buy an EV, I can't personally choose to convert the power plants in my state to nuclear.

Obviously supporting multiple policies that improve emissions and sustainable energy is the way to go, and supporting one does not mean I don't support the others.

It's not any extra effort to plug your car in at the grocery store while you're shopping. In fact, it's often less effort because the electric charging spots are often closer to the doors.

Then you don't have to make an extra stop or trip just for gas. It sounds way better than the current situation with gas.

Extra effort? You have the anxiety of wondering if the spot will be open or not. Also as the method becomes more popular it would make sense that the spots will not be increased immediately and therefore will not be open. And of course the grocery store is only one place you go and how many people go there regularly enough to use it for charging and how many spots do they have or will have?

> It sounds way better than the current situation with gas.

Seriously? Where do you live and where would you get gas? This is a non issue for most people.

My experience today is that there are almost always open EV charging spots at places that have them. No anxiety needed.

The major payback of buying an electric car is that it creates knock-on effects by (a) causing battery and charging technology to accelerate more quickly than any other consumer dollar expenditure can, which will have other benefits ranging from grid storage to electrified public transit, (b) demonstrating to automakers that ICE cars are a dead end, and they should accelerate their plans to move to electric (which they are doing more rapidly now, thanks to consumers buying so many EVs), which hopefully (c) leads to a virtuous cycle in which ICE deployment drops, governments legislate against gas cars (at least in Europe and China at first), oil demand drops, investment in oil exploration drops, refining pollution drops off a cliff, and maybe we have a fighting chance of making it through the next few decades. Obviously none of this is sufficient on its own, but certainly a better way of spending consumer dollars than buying a petroleum car.

Also, from a selfish perspective, EVs are almost infinitely more fun to drive. Don’t even get me started (as someone who has a parking spot with a charger) about this ridiculous historical idea of going to buy my fuel at some “gas station” instead of having it delivered to my house while I sleep.

Both of my local Tesla chargers are in the same parking lots as grocery stores. One is also near a movie theater and several restaurants.

EV charging (except specifically for long distance travel) is less about "Let's sit here while the car charges" and more "Let's plan a thing we were probably going to do anyway at a place that also has EV chargers".

Obviously that gets a lot easier as more chargers get installed. Electrify America is installing fast chargers in a large number of Wal-Mart parking lots across the US.

I don't want to sound like a broken record but... how many times do you go to fill up your car with gasoline, and you think "Where can I go/what activity can I fill my time with so I can get gas?" (At worst, you think, what gas station is on the way?)

It makes perfect sense that in this less than ideal scenario where chargers are sparse and inconvenient that you change up what you do for entertainment to center it around car chargers. But it has to stop being a requirement for it to make sense for "everyone" to switch from gas to EV.

Sure, charging an EV is not the same paradigm as filling a car with gas. I'm just not sure it needs to be. If every Target, Walmart, and Whole Foods had a bunch of EV chargers that could charge your car to 80-90% in 30 minutes that would handle the charging needs for a lot of car owners.

For "everyone" to have EVs we will need chargers at apartments and work places, or for fast chargers to get into the 80% charge in ~5min range.

That problem is not solved yet but is being tackled from both sides.

I don't have a garage, and the work charger charges by the hour.

So if one has an EV, and it doesn't charge quickly, you'll be dinged through the nose.

Had the charger been charging for the kwh + a margin, then sure. But as is, EVs are off the table for me.

Sounds like a pretty tight-fisted workplace. You would think they'd want to encourage employees to sustainable transport, not try to make a profit on charging.

They probably just want to discourage one person from hogging one charging station all day.

How else would you set up incentives so that many workers can share one charging station?

That's an extremely normal workplace. I've checked out tons of workplaces in my city, and for the ones that actually have chargers, the standard seems to be $2/hr for the first couple of hours and $4/hr thereafter. A workplace that's willing to give up money to help people buy EVs would be uncommonly generous.

Where are you located? In some (US) states, it is illegal to resell electricity, so companies with EV charging networks in those states (including, for example Tesla) charge by time, rather than by the KWh. In this way, they are basically able to claim that they are charging for parking, while the electricity comes along for free.

In other states without those laws, many of the networks charge by the KWh.

Currently living this lifestyle. Luckily there's a set of level 2 chargers in a nearby parking garage that don't see heavy use, so I just charge there.

But I still have to pay a premium, and walk half a mile there and back, so it's not exactly as hassle free as just plugging in when I get home. Also need to plan ahead significantly if I'm driving anywhere far.

I'd seen the idea of using street-furniture, such as lamp-posts - but can't help seeing visions of coils of cable looping all over the pavement/sidewalk (in the UK at least, lamp posts tend not to be on the road side of the pavement). Plus, if this isn't new-build, whatever's powering those lamps isn't going to charge your car. Well.. it might charge one or two, but once you've got 20 cars, all wanting to be charged overnight..

If you're going to have to lay new lines, then cheapest approach is surely to just put cable in the gutter, and then protect it with something similar to those rubber speed-bumps you can bolt into the ground. Downside is the low profile prevents great big connectors/supply units - but would be fine for the equivalent of the domestic-plug....

...I'm meandering now, but wonder if you could retro-fit drain covers to contain chargers...

In China, small shops and restaurants buy coin chargers for their patrons.

1 CNY buys you 300Wh or about 4 times less the market price =D. Though, the shopkeeper often charge extra from patrons for small change.

In Stuttgart, Germany, Daimler piloted a rent-by-the-minute electric car program (which is proliferating with normal petrol cars elsewhere, called Car2Go). The Smart ForTwos that they use are all electric, and the cable is bolted into the trunk of the car, so it takes its cable with it. The charging unit and car's "fuel port" are both receptive sides of the connection, and both the car and the charging station (the city installed them so anyone with the right cables can use them) has a lock that keeps the cable from getting removed when it's in use.

Works pretty well and this sort of model would likely work fine, with you keeping your cable yourself.

Car2Go used to operate in my US city, but they pulled out a couple years ago under the guise of "an onerous new tax burden" (despite no new taxes being passed). I think the real issue was they were just plain expensive -- barely cheaper than an Uber, and way less comfortable.

Other rent-by-time companies like ZipCar are similarly expensive. I'm not convinced that business model works, at least the ways I've seen it implemented.

Car2Go works here that you don't have to leave or pick them up from designated spots -- they have an agreement with each city to allow general parking, even in neighborhood zones.

Not sure if it was the same in your city, I'm used to ZipCars having special spots which is a little less convenient.

It's a good alternative to public transport when you need to cross a city and transfers would be annoying.

Since you mentioned all the cabling everywhere, I'd be concerned about copper thieves stealing the cables.

Many years ago I went out to South Africa to work in telco.

When cabling up an area, they laid:

1) Deep cables to carry the data 2) Shallow cables to be dug up and stolen, without affecting the data-carrying ones.

Fully Charged had an episode on Ubitricity:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKaEhBjt1ls

This mostly works if the posts are closer to the curb, but in some places they are on people's front lawns so the sidewalks are completely clear.

Where I live (London) there's a few of these lamppost chargers and people do use them. The thing about cars is that they... move. So you can drive your car to a vacant lamppost charger 5 minutes away and park it there. The walk back home, not a big deal.

It is certainly holding me back at the moment. I have allocated off-street parking under my apartment that is actually owned by us as part of the lease, but I doubt the building management will let me install a charger, and I don't think the law in the UK means I can force them to let me.

In London there are a few public chargers dotted around, but they are fairly infrequent. I don't have any data but it feels like there are perhaps 2 public on-street chargers for perhaps every 10 to 20 residential streets.

The nearest one to me is about a 15-20 minute walk away, and if I get there and it is full or broken, then what? Try the next charger that is 30-40 minutes walk away?! The contention ratio of homes to chargers is insane - it must be in the 500-1000:1 level (guessing)

There are however lampposts everywhere. There is some talk of adding charging points to lampposts but I think there are only very small-scale trials at the moment. If I could rely on every lamppost also being a charger then I'd buy an EV literally today.

Sadly, right now it feels like PHEVs are a more sensible option until public infrastructure catches up.

Lampposts is exactly how I charge whilst not having off-street parking, in central London. The council converted all the street lights to LEDs, meaning there is excess electricity delivered. So they put plugs on the posts. Works brilliantly. https://imgur.com/a/I5AtwJk https://www.ubitricity.com/

Fully Charged did an episode on this:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKaEhBjt1ls

However, in many cities the posts are not in the sidewalk, but on people's properties, so as to allow clearer pedestrian paths. This is generally true in Toronto (where the story is written), especially on residential side-streets.

It was this video that got me lobbying my local council (Lambeth) to try them. Which, impressively, they did.

"clearer pedestrian paths" seems like a really bad trade-off for putting public infrastructure on private property (and all the right of way / access issues involved). I wonder if, since the wiring is clearly there, something on-sidewalk could be added (something parking meter-ish).

This has probably already been taken care of when the land went from public to private ownership I'm sure there various clauses and agreements in place via various by-laws and such.

A pretty typical street in the older parts of my city (use Street View):

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Westminster+Ave,+Toront...

Putting poles in the sidewalk would be a non-starter and anyone suggesting it would be laughed out of the room.

Nice, sidewalk refilling has always been a thing http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_-LvpBoDIt4Q/TLcAQWn7TwI/AAAAAAAAIw...

Wow. I've seen this in Thailand https://www.bangkokcheaphotels.com/roadside-gasoline/

I've seen a few listings where EV charging parking spots are listed as a perk. You might be surprised how willingly your landlord is keen to go with you paying to upgrade their building.

Many people might think it's ridiculous to have to pay to have an expensive piece of infrastructure installed that isn't theirs to keep once they move away.

It cost me <$200 to install a 110V outlet in my rented condo's garage to charge my car and this is in SF where everything costs 2x as elsewhere.

For someone in the UK, this is an even better deal since their car will charge twice as fast at 220V.

> There are however lampposts everywhere. There is some talk of adding charging points to lampposts but I think there are only very small-scale trials at the moment.

Look on the Ubitricity website, they have maps of their installations in London, there are over a thousand already and anyone can pull up and use them using the qr code system.

https://portal.ubitricity.co.uk/map

A few years ago I lived in a fairly northern Canadian city. Most people had block heaters installed in their cars and plugged them in when the car would be sitting in the cold for more than a few hours. Otherwise, the car would be too cold to start. Most companies and apartment buildings had outlets installed in their parking lots, and at home people just ran extension cords.

You don’t even have to go particularly north to see plug in block heaters. Pretty sure I’ve seen them as far “south” as Toronto. Guess they’re all ready for the EV generation.

Block heaters in grocery stoer parking lots/apartment buildings in Toronto? Where?

You can still find them even in the suburbs of Minneapolis, though I haven't personally seen anyone use them in years.

There need to be more chargers at places where people park their cars when they are not at home. That is parking lots at the work place and parking lots of malls and supermarkets. Parking at work would need little more than a standard plug, assuming you are 8+ hours at work. At malls and supermarkets, you would have medium-fast chargers, as you are parking for 1-2 hours. And with the lastest gen fast-chargers, a recharge can be done in as little as 20-30 minutes, so having a good coffee store with WIFI along with the charging stations (no bad smells at charging stations) should mostly solve the problem for an occasional charge and wait.

Not exactly pertinent to "garage orphans," but i was struck by the picture featured in the article and the design choice of how electric chargers look.

They seem to be an exact replica of a traditional gas nozzle. Striking to me how initial conditions matter for human perception and adoption. While EV is an entirely new technology and thus could be built from a cleanslate, the easiest way to drive adoption was to shape it as close to the existing solution as possible - which was specifically designed to transmit a liquid. Clearly it works - but an important design lesson for me!

Electricity and gasoline both travel through tubes, and both are dangerous if they breach insulation.

Handles are convenient for people with hands.

Quite a lot of senior citizens go for EV cars - they are not as fit and strong as your average HN reader (who seem to be the only other demographic buying EV).

So there needs to be consideration for them. Apparently it is really quite hard work plugging in if you are in the twilight years with health considerations. The more you need the mobility solution an EV offers the more likely it is that you are going to struggle putting that big charging cable in to your Nissan Leaf.

Is this just another example of Skeuomorphism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph

I can see where this would drive adoption. From the user standpoint, familiarity is a selling point. The more the electric car can be seen as a drop in replacement to the internal combustion vehicle, the less the potential buyer has to consider. If the Tesla were steered by two sticks instead of a steering wheel, it probably wouldn't ever appeal to more than the enthusiast.

Big Fat High Flowrate Hoses are stiff and need a big handle to manhandle them around. Pistol grip handles work well for this.

Big Fat High Wattage Cables are stiff and need a big handle to manhandle them around. Pistol grip handles work well for this.

One guy I used to work with drove a Nissan Leaf, and he ran an extension cord from his car through the office front door and charged at work. I'm not sure if he was a garage orphan or just cheap.

To me, this seems like a transient problem. As battery technology improves, we may be able to move back towards a "gas station" model for charging. BMW/Porsche already has a charging solution that can do 100 km in 8 minutes [1].

[1] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/282364-bmw-porsche-demo-...

If there was no switching time, that'd be 7.5 cars / hour for a potentially every-other- or every-third-day quick charge, and the high voltage required does reduce battery life (I think).

I'd be curious to know how long gas stations plan on someone staying at a stall for a full fuel up, to know what sort of capacity in an area would need to be replaced or added.

Part of the benefit of EVs is that fueling points don't require all of the fluids storage and safety; putting in transformers can be easier and allow fitting charging points to many more places a car gets parked. But it'll still be an interesting issue if an optimum charge takes 20-45 minutes.

Besides garage orphans, also those with self standing homes and a garage will have (or become) a problem.

Say that in you street that are 50 single family homes connected to a same cabin/transformer.

The electric infrastructure powering them (lines, transformer, etc.) has been dimensioned to power them at their average current power consumption rate + something to take care of peaks + something more to take care of eceptions (like - say - a constructions site for the renovation of one of the homes).

That is a lot of "juice" and it sums up quickly.

I believe (correct me if you have better data) that in the US the infrastructure is generally dimensioned for something like 6 or 7 kW per unit, so, adding to each house some "constant" 5 kW (even if only at night) is almost using all the capability of the infrastructure.

I believe that some of that is covered by other appliances becoming more efficient. How many 60-100w light bulbs did people used to run in their home? Tube tvs? Those devices have largely been replaced by more modern versions that use an order of magnitude less power.

This is my understanding as well, I remember reading something that said new power consumption is either flattening or decreasing because modern electronics and appliances are getting more and more efficient.

Except for air conditioning in very hot days. We still break records on hot days.

In California, at least, yes, energy demand seems to be declining. I can't find the graph I saw a year or two ago.

Peak usage was in 2006, although it sounds like Sep 1 2017 usage was ALMOST as high. State population is growing overall, but not fast. I think it's roughly flat now, but has grown since 2006 for sure.

> Energy consumption of the state's residential sector per capita is lower than that of any other state except Hawaii thanks to relatively mild climate.

> California's peak electricity demand occurred on July 24, 2006, at 2:44 pm, with 50,270 megawatts. Since then measures to reduce peak load have resulted in decreased peak demand, even as the state's population has continued to grow.[28] In 2017, the peak load was 50,116 MW, on September 1

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California

This is certainly the case in the UK. Electricity usage has dropped by 9% meant 2010-2017[1], despite a growing population (and by 18% over a longer period).

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/30/uk-electric...

People put 5kw of solar on the garage roof. When everyone has electric cars you also have a huge mobile battery fleet.

My Model 3 charges at ~240v/48a, which is around 11kW.

At peak times in our house, say, heat on, lights on, TV on, cooking, doing laundry, we pull perhaps 3kW. Our house is pretty efficient; gas appliances, LED lights, no air conditioning, etc.

The car charges after 9pm, but that's just because our rate drops then. If midnight was even cheaper, it would charge then. We don't charge every day, but if we did, it would take perhaps 1 hour. And this is for a car we drive 18,000 miles on in its first year.

3-4x the demand of a 'normal' household is not nothing, but it's not insane, either. Considering EVs don't need to charge every day, or every hour of every night, it's not that tricky to see the aggregate load as fairly similar to peak afternoon/evening hours in your average suburb as people return home from work.

To be sure, if everyone started charging their EVs at 6pm, we might have a problem. Likewise, if everyone had an EV and they all clicked on at midnight, we might have a problem. But the load on the grid is not that huge from an instantaneous perspective, and can be managed by variable pricing and/or some kind of grid scheduling tech.

I imagine a world where the electricity grid is intelligent enough to have a "conversation" with appliances to efficiently spread load across the day, more accurately plan capacity, and do it at a lower cost to consumers and the environment.

That's happening here, my power company has a GraphQL API[1] where I can read my current consumption (5 second resolution), they also offer up the current price, including an indicator of the price level compared to how they see the rest of the day (CHEAP, NORMAL, EXPENSIVE).

All houses/apartments in Norway got new smart power meters the last couple of years. They standardized on a data interface (a bus you can connect to using a RJ45 plug), so you can access your own data if you don't want to go via your power companies API.

There are EV chargers[2] and other appliances (Heat pumps/ACs) that can react to this price indicator, charging your car when power is cheapest.

It will also load balance based on how much the rest of your house is using, they're moving towards an "wattage" fee here, to avoid massive loads at peak hours. If you get near the limit, the car charger can slow down.

Here's some images of what their app gives me[3].

It's easy to pull their data into home automation systems, here's mine[4].

You can do pretty smart stuff like: Charge my car when it's cheap, but it must be ready by 07:00.

[1]: https://developer.tibber.com/docs/guides/calling-api

[2]: https://norge.tibber.com/products/easee/

[3]: https://imgur.com/a/RYYqcjY

[4]: https://imgur.com/a/8ef0jck

Very cool! I seem to recall first reading about such plans as early as the 90s. It almost certainly wouldn't be allowed most places in the US because regulatory schemes always need approval to change, and it would be considered suspicious and an attempt to hide 'true' costs from the consumer (eg, the power provider can just change the rate any time they want, it will hurt poor people who can't afford these smart appliances, etc etc. Too bad.

In our case the power provider, the to the house line owner and the producer are all separate. My provides buys from the cheapest renewable offered up on NordPool. My fee to the provider is fixed (39 NOK per month). They don't get a cut of the cost per kwh to the producer. If one producer raise their price, they'll just be outbid. If they all raise their prices too much their reservoars will overflow. I pay the market price to the producer from the spot market + some percentage tax/fees to the government + line owner, and a flat fee to the provider.

Makes it hard to get scammed by the power companies/providers I think.

You'll get the current power source from their API or App. ATM I'm getting 100% hydro from "Kvitingen Kraftverk"[1], but that will probably change during the day.

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/2uRhsZ2 or https://imgur.com/a/oXeccnR (ocr translated)

Wow. The grid in the US sucks.

Yes, the grid is "big enough" and (hopefully) "smart enough" to compensate peaks, the possible issue I was pointing out was not at "grid level", but rather at "local neughborhood" distribution.

If the transformer serving a given number of houses is (say) 300 kVA, it remains 300 kVA, and as well the actual distribution cables/wires are rated for (still say) 100 kW each, they remain that size/gauge and both will likely need to be replaced by "beefier" stuff.

BTW I took the US as an example because they - on average - consume already a very high amount of electricity pro-capita something like 12,000 kWh per year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

and so it has surely an already well dimensioned infrastructure, but besides the nordic countries (Norway/Sweden/Finland) Europe is less than half than that, Germany and France around 6,500 most of the other EU countries around or below 5,000.

Besides there can be some repercussions on single homes as well, depending of course on local Laws, to give you an example here in Italy there is a "limit" at 6 kW, for constructions until 2008 there was no need of a project for the home cabling for power consumption below 6 kW while since 2008 the project is always compulsory, and <6 kW can be made by the electrician/contractor but if it goes > 6 kW it needs to be made by an electrical engineer.

Since most houses are < 6kW, very few, even of the recently built ones have a project redacted by an electrical engineer and the moment you ask the provider to get (say) 10 kW you will need this project which will cost you (only the project) something in the 1,000-1,500 Euro range to which you have to sum the actual electrician/contractor work to add a line for the charger, probably another 1,000-1,500 Euro.

Sadly, if you started putting outlets on the side of street poles in the Bay Area you would attract camper vans rather than EVs. (cue the story of the guy who drove to LA using RV parks to recharge)

Its an interesting question though, EV parking lots would seem to make a lot of sense. And certainly it would seem that HOAs for apartments and condos could benefit from them if they charged a bit for the power.

My friend toured the USA in his 2012 Model S before the SuperCharger network existed by only charging at RV parks. The truth is that gas is harder to find in some places than electricity. You just have to take a few minutes to think about the grid and where power is at and the entire debate about feasibility of EVs is flipped on its head.

My question would be - does frequent short charging sessions cause issues for the battery packs? Versus longer full charging sessions?

I know that lithium cells with their different chemistry are more forgiving of charging and discharging (vs NiMH, NiCd, or Lead Acid). I wonder though if that doesn't cause other effects, such as perhaps longevity issues that might cause overheating or something?

i have a tesla model 3 and i believe that multiple smaller sessions are better for the longevity of the battery. elon has said that 'a plugged in tesla is a happy tesla.'

you're also only supposed to charge to 80 or 90 percent charge unless youre going on a road trip, since charging to the absloute max (and conversely, discharging to near zero) is worse for the battery.

I'm not a battery expert, but I think the full charges do more damage than charging to 80% capacity or so. But I don't know if there's any difference to battery life with multiple short charges vs one long charge up to 80%.

Deep discharges and sitting at low state of charge for a long time are the main things that shorten battery life.

Also harmful is charging to the absolute maximum state of charge. I believe most vehicles have a setting to terminate the charge at a level that maximizes battery life and another setting that maximizes range.

It seems like an opportunity to building an electrified parking garage where people can buy a powered spot. Could also sell powered street spots to municipalities in a rev share agreement. Many office buildings and apartment complexes are ramping up charging facilities with the number of EVs.

Lots of shared building garages as well as public parking lots/garages have dedicated spots for EVs with chargers built-in nowadays.

My office has installed a couple of free level 2 chargers and I haven’t needed to charge at home or elsewhere since. Charging for a few hours a couple of times a week is enough for my Bolt and my 10 mile commute as well as driving around the metro area on the weekends.

I like the streetlight idea for getting more chargers out there. It'd also be great if every parking meter had at least a trickle-charger.

Hopefully solar efficiencies will continue to improve to the point where trickle charging via solar is actually viable.

I've been meaning to suggest to the franchise owner with a bunch of Wendy's around here that putting EV charging stations in some of his excess parking. Get some folks who might consider coming for lunch to come, pay to park for half an hour, then leave without monopolizing spaces for a long time because they have to get back to work. Also become a hub for food delivery drivers.

Beyond that, there are a few charging stations at local malls, one at a Meijer (regional chain, think Target with a large grocery store), probably a bunch of others that I've just not noticed. Common element is that they're at places where people can shop.

The Target in my neighborhood has like 10-20 charging stations. Its packed to the brim with Teslas with even a waiting line at times. I'm not sure if they are people trying to save money or apartment dwellers.

Honestly I think the low hanging fruit would be to put 115V outlets in at apartment complexes that have designating parking spaces. Just normal 115V, which is usually already wired at or near the spot.

Where will garage orphans add gasoline to their cars if they must park on the street?

If only there was a way to add energy to a vehicle outside of the home. Cars park all over the place. Distributed charging infrastructure doesn't sound too impossible -- parking meters probably already need electricity. Park and rides or business parking lots incentivize people to shop or commute in certain ways for a relatively modest investment.

parking meters probably already need electricity

Not 50A they don’t. Retrofitting it would be a substantial engineering effort.

You don't necessarily need 50A everywhere. Level 1 charging only needs about 12A. It's slow, but if you can be plugged in most of the time, it doesn't particularly matter that it's slow. That's probably enough to keep you topped off when you're just doing light commuting. A lot of level 1, a healthy amount of of level 2 and a smattering of level 3 would probably cover people's charging needs.

It’s still a pretty big upgrade. Parking meters take basically trivial power to run right now. The ones near me are solar! They might not even be connected to the grid at all!

It's not really comparable. Garage charging makes EVs more convenient than ICE cars, but they're much less convenient if you can't charge at home. ICE cars can stop at a gas station on empty and be back on the road completely full in two minutes. Even with a fast charger, it takes upwards of half an hour to charge an EV. Level 2 charging takes hours.

Maybe the PNW is different, but there are chargers everywhere here. Charge during work, while you shop, etc.

Charging will be an incentive or even an expectation. Imagine if your employer said, "We'll fill your tank with gas while you work", people would love that perk. Having free or subsidized charging at work seems like an inevitability to me.

The year of Linux on the desktop seemed like an inevitability for a lot of people. It never happened. I'd love for the future you envision to come true, but I don't see any reason to think it will, given how little movement there is in that direction even in a super EV-friendly region like Southern California.

To be clear, there are chargers at my work...but only two, and they're for-profit, so the converted cost per mile of range is more than it costs to put gas in my Prius. It was the same at my last workplace.

In NorCal I got charger in following places: 1) apartment complex (one set of public + separate apartment dweller chargers) 2) at work 3) at supermarket I do shopping most often 4) on public parking in various places

"The future is already here — It's just not very evenly distributed"

Workplaces need to install solar panels and chargers for electric cars. A large percentage of cars are parked for 7-8 hours at work and 8-10 hours at home. Charging car batteries with solar energy in the afternoon is the most optimal way to decrease carbon use as charging at home at night means you are using the most carbon intensive electricity.

In (large?) parts of Europe, parking meters at each spot were replaced with central parking pay-machines. But even if there are powered meters at each spot, I doubt that the power lines can deliver semi-fast charging currents (say 5 kW so that you get 40kWh in an 8 h time window) for so many spots. While not impossible, this would mean substantial construction. Whoever pays for that, they probably want to recoup that by inflated power prices.

"parking meters need electricity"

The vast majority are mechanical or solar-powered.

If you find some that are wired, good luck running hundreds of kilowatts through the wiring built for delivering 10 watts.

The main difference is that a gas pump can dump single-digit megawatts of power, so a "full charge" only takes a few minutes.

The best commercial EV fast chargers (that require a six-figure DC power converter) are on the order of a quarter of a megawatt, and a good level 2 charger (basically a glorified dryer plug) is just shy of 10kW.

But it also requires human attention. There's TONS of time in a day when your car is just hanging around somewhere. It doesn't need to be as fast if it's ubiquitous.

I'm one of those and have never had any issues with charging. I park in a public garage with 6 charging spots near the entrance and once every 1-2 weeks when I get home I park at the chargers, plug in the car (at 11KW Type2) and move it to a normal parking spot when it's full (typically 4-5 hours later). So the time I "waste" every 1-2 weeks is pretty much the extra walk to the garage and back.

There was a guy several years ago trying to get his car charged. The city will have tons of work in the future to allow this [1].

[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/09/01/toronto-electric...

How about running one of those gas-powered generators next to the car?

Put a sign next to it saying, "my government doesn't invest in green energy".

Something like this image, but with your slogan/sign on it?

https://imgur.com/UgEs6va

There was a Model 3 owner at the last apartment I lived in. The buildings had garages for some apartments, and he had one. But the management wouldn't let him hire an electrician to wire up a 240V charger. So he left the interior garage door open and ran a cable to the clothes dryer outlet instead.

The chargers are cheap and getting much faster and will be deployed everywhere you can run an electric line: https://twitter.com/sampenrose/status/1152625267589840896

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1152625267589840896.html

This is kind of the "Year of Linux on the Desktop" of EVs. I'll believe it when I see it. I live in a community with an incredibly high number of EVs, but I can't get one because I am not a homeowner and there's no charging anywhere besides people's garages.

The above thread suggests there's going to be free, ubiquitous inductive charging in a few years. Just look how far we are from that. Even in putatively EV-friendly areas, it's still really hard for someone without a garage to consider an EV today. California can't even find the political will to fund its EV rebate for the whole year. How likely is it that there will just be magic free electricity everywhere in 10 years?

Ten years ago viable electric cars did not exist. At all.

In California the bankrupt PG&E power company will be turning off power during fire season high risk periods to limit their exposure. Escape from fire in an EV won't be possible unless you keep a fully charged vehicle on standby regardless of the charging location.

Can you drive a tesla while it's being charged? A small trailer with a generator on the back could work as an emergency.

yes with some caveats https://generatorgrid.com/blog/tesla/

>“Most neighbourhoods have somewhere – a local community centre, library, school or a church – with parking that’s empty at night, and these folks could use the revenue,”

Yeah that is what we need traffic / coordinating who parks at these gathering spots.....but just to change.

This thread seems to be an argument between inner-city people who don't see a need for a car, and people who don't live in a city who can't understand why people in cities don't give a toss about anyone else.

Surely this is a problem specific to cities? Must be unusual for people in suburban or rural areas not to have access to their own parking.

The article at hand - agreed - is a city-centric topic in itself. What I'm getting at is the borderline aggression within the thread here.

I know at my current company they decided to put in a Tesla charger station out back. Not too many in the company have one but any regularly visited location with a supercharger could substitute.

I have this problem with my electric moped - I often need to find a charger for it.

Its going to be an app that connects users with each other to help provide charging facilities.

Or else, gas stations will pivot.

RV plugs curbside. We could make this standard if we cared to.

Seems the US is at a severe disadvantage here with 110V.

Also, surely people can charge at work? 8 hours at work should cover a fair bit of the population

The US has both 240v single phase and 208v three phase across the entire country. Any house with an electric range would have 240v service and can likely handle a L2 charger.

This problem requires multiple solutions, here's some that I think work great in Norway:

- "Lamppost" charging, Oslo (and other cities) put up a ton of charging poles in the streets, you use an RFID card to start charging. They've recently been free, but now cost $1 per hour ($0.5 at night). They look like this[1a] or this[1b]. Oslo will have about 2200 of these at the end of the year.

- Parking house charging. My regular parking house got it's own zone for electrics. Your license plate is read when you enter the parking house, then read again if you enter the charging zone. Automatically billed when you leave. This is my main charging atm, I've a garage, but not had extra power installed yet. My car has about 500 km range. Leaving it a work day in a parking house once per ~14 day is enough for my (limited) use. Some of the parking houses in Norway are built with battery banks to handle the load of 100+ chargers. Here's a video tour of one of them[2] (I don't live in Oslo though, but it's similar). I think I end up paying $12-ish for parking+charging for the one I use for 8+ hours.

- Shopping centers / convenience store charging. Many stores here got free AC charging now. And some of the larger centers / stores have established fast chargers (DC) on their parking lot (costs money to use). I can charge 250 km range while doing 30 minutes of shopping for around $10.

- Charging at work. Many work places here in Norway offer free charging as a perk.

- Friendly neighbours. In my street there's a dude who's put up a sign: "You're free to use my charger if I'm not here, send me $1 per hour using vipps (local app for mobile payment) to XXXXXX if you feel like it"

- And if all else fails, have plenty of paid fast chargers around in central locations, sucks to wait around for 30-60+ minutes, but it's a nice backup.

There's tons of charging spots in Norway, but the number of cars is outpacing the number of chargers, we'll probably see more congestion and queues in the coming years.

While I've never hit a full parking house yet, it will happen sooner or later, so it really helps to have a long range EV, that way you can go "Meh, I'll charge tomorrow instead.."

[1a]: https://www.google.com/maps/@59.9287147,10.7231223,3a,59.2y,...

[1b]: https://www.salto.no/media/images/referanser/_big4by3/søyle-...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktNKWLwjQJM

I thought it was illegal to own a car without having a parking spot. I don’t know really, can someone clarify?

It is not illegal to own a car without a parking spot. Where did you even hear that?

Plenty of places, but maybe I misunderstood it. I thought it was illegal at least in the United States and Japan. I don’t know for sure, I don’t live in either country.

In Japan you have to prove you have a parking space before you buy a car:

https://www.reinventingparking.org/2014/06/japans-proof-of-p...

https://jalopnik.com/why-the-japanese-will-never-buy-lots-of...

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2017/06/04/how-tos/pa...

Kei cars (tiny city cars) don't require proof of parking so they are a popular segment of the Japanese car market.

I suppose that may be the case in some strange places, but it's definitely not the norm.

I thought people like that would use the Tesla self-driving robotaxis. They won't need their own car.

Why is this a problem? Gas-powered cars don’t fill up when they’re parked. Just solve the problem the same way - let people go to a specific place to charge their car like they do to fill up with gas.

I have a Tesla and live in an apartment and it’s really not a big problem. The Superchargers are pretty convenient. And once Tesla rolls out L3 chargers more widely it will be even easier.

How fast is a charge though? Gas stations can fill a tank of gas in a few minutes.

The problem is filling a gas powered car takes minutes so you can easily fit it into your day - charging a Tesla is probably closer to 30 for a decent range top up.

The former can be done on the way to work, as can the latter, but the latter requires a bigger shift in behaviour to achieve.

Yes, it's not the end of the world, but to pretend there's zero problem ignores reality somewhat.

Yeah, I can see guys with Teslas and extension cords on electric reels that plug into your external outlet and charge, then burn off they see your lights go on...

Once cars get smart enough to actually drive on their own, your car can sneak off to the nearest charging station while you are at work or sleeping at home.

So what do we do for the 50 years between now and then?

Run a gas-powered generator in the back seat?

We've had an EV for about 6 months now -- no way to charge at home. I will admit to being a special case, in that I have no problems at all charging the car, but the experience has led to some insights.

First, why I'm a special case. I live in Japan. Compared to Canada (and I assume most of the US), the charger situation here is amazing. We've done a fair few road trips now and it seems like no matter where we go, there is a fast charger within 2-5 km. At least 25% of the rest stops on the highway have them. A large percentage of "michi no eki" (Road station -- essentially farmers markets) have them -- to the point where the other day we were on a road trip and were very surprised to see a michi no eki that didn't didn't have one. Family Mart convenience store often has one (something like 1 in 10, I would guess). Aeon (big shopping mall) has one or two (and often 15-20 200V chargers) and every Nissan and Mitsubishi dealership has one.

This is really the future, I think. It costs millions to make a gas station. It costs thousands to put in a fast charger. You can put one anywhere because we already have the electrical infrastructure in place. I know several restaurants that have put them in.

At the moment, there is way more infrastructure than demand, so I very rarely have to wait. If, for some reason I do, then I drive 2km the road and charge there. It's hard to know if this will get better or worse as things scale up, but for the moment it's pretty good.

I'm also in a good situation in that I work from home. When I want to charge the car (a couple of times a week), I drive to the Family Mart, plug in, pick up a few groceries and then work for 30 minutes to an hour. They have a table (with power, even) for people to work at. It's air conditioned. It's so convenient, it's crazy.

However, it's the same thing when we travel. Our car only has a 30 kWh range, so we have to stop relatively frequently. But since there are chargers all over the place, we just stop and walk around. We often end up buying small things, or having a snack. We've seen so many amazing things since we got the EV because we're forced to stop and hang out in the small towns.

I think people are going to cash in on this. You are going to see small towns with parking lots with validated charging. People are going to drive by, stop, pick up a few things and carry on. Already the rest stops in Japan are absolutely geared for this: the have souvenir stores, restaurants and even things like clothing stores.

I think this is going to be a thing because compared to a gas station, it's cheap and it's also really nice. I thought I would dread charging the car. It's actually one of the best parts of my week. I get out and meet people. I slow down a bit. I get some shopping done.

Canada is kind of a difficult problem because it has 25x the land area and 1/4 the population of Japan. It's going to be tough. Also, they don't have any particular reason for someone to invest money in the infrastructure. Nissan and Mitsubishi are doubtlessly scared stiff of the time when Toyota and Honda enter the market. They want to own that charging infrastructure -- so they are going crazy right now. But I think it's actually inevitable, so if you have a fair amount of capital and are looking for a long term investment, I think this is a good one.

Xez we cz CT f az

I think this points out the elephant in the room: why are so many people in supposedly high income cities not able to buy properties? This is an issue that needs to be solved hand in hand with pollution: less travel, less need for a car, and more living outside overcrowded cities means more living space. So how can we move more jobs to suburbs, where people can work at nearby or home locations and can afford more living space? I seriously struggle understanding why at least tech jobs are so centered around crowded cities, when these could really be located in tech clusters or tech cities on the outskirts.

Where do garage orphans plug in their cars? Same place lounge orphans plug in their TVs. They are probably both not bothered since they are watching youtube videos on the underground on the way to the pub. Times are a changin.

This is somewhat orthogonal. In my building (where people generally own their condo units, though I'm renting), there's no access to charging in the building's garage.

Yes, theoretically people could get the HOA to install charging stations or do something to make the situation better, but... well, there is still no way to charge an EV in my building's garage. Either the demand isn't there, or the HOA has refused to pay for any upgrades.

If they price it right, it could be revenue opportunity or net $0 amenity.

This is my hangup too, and it crosses over into the craze around building high density housing in California.

I don’t want high density housing. I don’t think anyone does. I want a yard for my dogs to play, for my wife to nurture the garden she has always wanted, for fruit trees, a garage where I can work on my car, etc...

We have so much land all around this country and no one is using it.

Historically people placed business like buildings around town centres, as these were easy to reach. Lawyers, accountants, doctors and so on were supposed to be within walking distance. But these days this is becoming less and less practical, as everyone including back office employees, software developers, analysts, and other non customer non reach essential staff is crammed in those places. I seriously think planning should be made such way that any non essential business activity should be done outside cities. Downtown areas should be focused on face to face essential staff and the rest of the city on life focused businesses (restaurants, cinemas, and so on). The cities are planned at the moment is archaic.

Why would you think no one wants high density housing.

Like, I don't want a backyard nor a garage or a car. But I am stuck with the lifestyle.

Unless you live in a very small community the downside of this is horrible traffic.

This; suburbs don't scale.

disclaimer: I charge my car in my suburban driveway

That is based on the assumption that jobs MUST be downtown, thus all traffic converging towards that area.

Jobs aren't downtown in the Bay area... Traffic is awful and if you change jobs you might need to move.

8.6 million New Yorkers humbly disagree.

Staten Island and the western halves of Queens and Brooklyn are not what I would call "high density". I don't think the northern part of the Bronx would count, either.

Well that’s true… but for the purposes of this discussion, I think any residence that doesn’t have a garage qualifies.

More like 4.3 million. A lot of people don't feel strongly about density. They just live wherever makes the most sense based on the pros and cons. This is why people move out of the city when they have to raise a family.

Many people without families don't see the need for a yard/garage/garden when they live on their own and can take public transit in a high-density area. These people value proximity to bars/restaurants/experiences and are okay with trading off space for a shorter commute more things to within their nearby surroundings.

I don’t want high density housing. But I want things that require high density housing: the ability to walk to lots of places and good public transportation when I want to go farther.

I’ve compromised on an expensive lower density location which has a bit of that. I’m happy with it, but plenty of people will make those compromises differently.

It would be great if we could all live in big houses with big yards and have stores and restaurants down the street, but basic economics and geometry means you can’t.

> We have so much land all around this country and no one is using it.

As the old real estate mantra goes, "Location, Location, Location!"

Of course you can buy a house with a yard and a large garage, but can you buy it on a regionally-adjusted salary and be reasonably close to a town and your workplace? Locality is still important for the vast majority of jobs, even in this age when the capability to telecommute is here.

I think the key contributor to this asymmetry is the scarcity of the human attention. People remember a handful of cities/towns which they associate with prosperity, despite the fact/possibility that far more areas are also prosperous. It's the same reason that a few dozen universities at the top of the rankings thrive, while perfectly decent schools just below them struggle to attract applicants.

Whether the issue at mind is red/blue state or rural/urban, Americans have become more risk-averse when it comes to moving to different regions.

I know that a lot of property owners are out of touch, but "I don't think anyone wants high-density housing" is really at another level. Time for you to take your fingers out of your ears.

Living in a city is nice when you’re young. Here in SFBA you see lots of people living in the city and commuting to the suburbs to work at bigtech campuses. Weird huh?

But it makes sense. Population density increases convenience. I have 2 amazing corner stores on my block. The movie theatre is 2 blocks away, there’s many good bars and restaurants within a 4 block radius. Major grocery store (TJ) is 3 blocks away. And my apartment building has a wonderful very secure garage and a package concierge so nothing ever gets stolen. If I can’t find something within a walkable radius, a cheap bicycle share gets me to almost anything my heart desires within 15 minutes.

And I’m meant to trade all that for what? A yard? A garage? Needing my car every time I want to run an errand? Pfft

I remember living in Menlo Park and it was hell. Everything is so far away that you need a car just to grab something quick from the store.

Guess what I’m saying is that we should find ways to reduce the need for cars, not to make sure everyone has somewhere to park and charge theirs. I think high density housing in mixed residential/business areas is the best solution.

Living in the city was great in my 20s. Now that I'm past 35 and have a family, having a private backyard to ourselves is a lot more appealing than dealing with loud people in commodified, crowded restaurants and movie theaters. My family is quite neurodivergent and everyone has sensory processing issues anyway. The city is simply too noisy, too active, too high pressure for us.

It's unfortunate that in the US, backyards and car dependence go together.

Because people are willing to work for wages that can't buy them the shittiest home within a reasonable commute to their office.

If people were more willing to die, unionize, or advocate for a mediocre life, this wouldn't happen.

If you're working for less than it takes to buy the shittiest home in your city, you are exacerbating inequality and thus making the world worse. Better to sit on the sidewalk until you're dead.

> If you're working for less than it takes to buy the shittiest home in your city, you are exacerbating inequality and thus making the world worse. Better to sit on the sidewalk until you're dead.

I'm not normally one for this term, but this has to be the pinnacle of blaming the victim.

True, but it's also a historical reality that in the early 20th century that's exactly what happened to usher in labor laws that we enjoy today.

Disagree.

I consider it a mass delusion that everyone seems to think you either live in the Big City(tm) or your life doesn't matter.

IMO it's the opposite. Living in a pokey flat that's not yours is giving up your dignity. Even in SF or London or whatever.

>why are so many people in supposedly high income cities not able to buy properties?

Housing costs seem to scale to the maximum that the population can pay, and people are willing to accept housing which is a little less than they think they need for a little more than they think they can afford. Generations of this have people growing up wanting what is "normal" and accepting a little less, each generation's normal is a little less while costing the same.

The only thing that can be done about this is removing the third parties making money off of that trend – each generation of homes is a little smaller for the same amount of (inflation or whatever adjusted) money and the difference is getting sucked into the financial and real estate sectors giving far more profits than useful work done.

Or we can just wait for peak-population to pass and an enormous crash where there will be far more housing than people and buying a house will be a money-losing venture you do because you want the space for yourself and not as an investment.

Actually, houses are getting larger by square footage over time, although not sure about lot size.

And peak population won't necessarily create a housing crash everywhere. As long as urbanization continues, it could just slow the growth of cities.

Houses are only getting larger for (often enormous) suburban houses in new developments, not for apartments or redeveloped houses in existing neighborhoods.

The pressure against urbanization is going to continue growing as long as the quality of life (esp apartment size) decreases in urbanized areas.

I have lived in a few excellent urban neighborhoods with very strange demographics resulting from the lack of variety in housing sizes. You saw very many young people and a lesser but solid presence of long-present middle age to elderly people but no families with children older than a year or two.

The neighborhoods were very livable until you had children and needed space, then you either had to be earning way above average salary or live packed in like sardines because the fancy new construction was only small apartments.

Funny, I was thinking something similar but from a completely different direction — the problem, IMO, isn’t that people in cities can't afford to buy garages, but that they want cars at all.

The problem that these “garage orphans” don’t get is that society doesn’t owe anyone a free parking space. When one can’t afford car payments, or insurance, or gasoline, they aren’t allowed to simply go out and take it; but for some reason, we give away precious space to people who can’t afford garages.

There’s a whole book on this topic, for anyone who’s interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking

> The problem that these “garage orphans” don’t get is that society doesn’t owe anyone a free parking space

Nobody owes anyone anything. But a lot of things in the society exist because "We would rather live in the world where X rather than in the world where X isn't". Car ownership is a societal norm in US, so most people are going to buy and own cars, at least for a while longer. And people are going to park these cars somewhere, whether you like it or not. I would rather we had regulated street parking than unregulated free for all.

Unregulated free-for-all is kind of what we have, though, in NYC at least. People double-park with impunity, drivers leave cars on sidewalks, and the worst offenders are the NYPD, the very people who are supposed to enforce these regulations.

We could trade subsidized parking for…

- bus and bike lanes

- garbage bins (the trash situation here is just humiliating)

- inducement for the city and state to fix the subways

- cleaner air

- loading zones for shops and deliveries (Fedex and UPS have a crazy deal with the city for near-immunity from traffic fines)

Yeah, I know, I'm dreaming, but I just don't see how the status quo is sustainable. Electric cars won't solve most of these problems.

> Unregulated free-for-all is kind of what we have

As a person who paid a few thousand dollars in NYC parking tickets over the past two decades or so, I respectfully disagree with this assessment :)

It's not about buying property. Residential street parking is used by residents, not just visitors. Those cars can't charge whether you own your place or not. Meanwhile, the car in the garage can charge whether you're owning or renting.

There's a few big reasons, at least in tech.

One is that your investors may want you to start your business somewhere close by, especially if they want to be involved in your business.

Another is that you need to start your business somewhere where you can acquire employees - if there are very few software engineers in an area already, you now need to convince people to move to your area for work. That's kind of a bad value proposition for employees because they need to relocate their lives to move somewhere that has only a single employer they could realistically work at. Usually the people running these businesses also are motivated by doing this to save money, so you might also be making about half of what you would in a big city.

Further, being in a big city has a lot of benefits from infrastructure and network effects. It is easier to acquire some of your first customers if they are close by. You have international airports which allow you to travel the world more easily than somewhere with an airport that only feeds into a hub. Your employees will appreciate having the ability to work at other places should their employer fail/they get fired/etc. so it's easier to convince people to move there.

What should be done, but which almost never is done, is that employers in small cities should start paying truly competitively with those in big cities. If your target employee could make 300k in NYC or the Bay Area, pay them that much in the cheaper city. Make the cost of living difference actually become a real perk, rather than a way to be miserly with how you pay employees.

> I think this points out the elephant in the room: why are so many people in supposedly high income cities not able to buy properties?

I own & live in an apartment on the top floor of a 3 floor walk-up in a busy metropolitan city. There is perhaps one single person on our street that has a "garage". Everyone else parks on the street. The "not able to buy property" argument here seems like a red herring.

>>why are so many people in supposedly high income cities not able to buy properties?

There's plenty of properties which are super high-end and which don't come with their own parking space(terraced houses on popular streets in the UK can go for millions and yet you won't get your own parking space - just a parking permit to park on the street, but there is no guarantee it will be in front of your own house).

I think the argument going is that if you live in a city core, you don't need a car, so most places don't have parking.

> I seriously struggle understanding why at least tech jobs are so centered around crowded cities

Because major (FAANG et al) tech companies are cross-invested with rental/housing businesses[0]. This means that concurrent increases in rent and salary have no effect; employees make 1000$/yr more but pay 1000$/yr more in rent, company('s shareholders) makes 1M$/yr of extra rent but pays 1M$/yr more in salary. Except when the employee tries to switch jobs they're under incresed time pressure (before they run out of savings and can't afford rent), and all of the tech companies benefit from their hiring candidates having less leverage. Note that this doesn't require any communication between companies; each company can see that the situation benefits them based solely on public information, and cross-investment means each company loses nothing by hiking rent and salary simultaneously.

0: Either directly owning them or, more covertly, by most of their shareholders also owning housing stocks.

Another way to look at it is: why people are prioritizing buying a nice car over property?

I live in a shitty 1 bedroom apartment, and 3 of my neighbors (with identical apartments) have Mercedes.

This story reveals an underlying problem, DC charges are still too slow compared to gas stations. You can fill a gas car en less than 5 minutes, compare to Level 3 charges that still requires an hour. This causes a severe convenience problem for electric cars. if you are running out of gas and still need to use the car, you can quickly solve the problem at a gas station; with electric cars what if you still need the car? (You had a pretty busy day), you are no good for more than 6 hours while the car charges.

Certainly, it will be a good business opportunity for the company who figures out how to take charge time to gas station levels.

In Condominiums, metered charges could be installed in each appartment parking lot. For those who don't have a garage or parking lots, small public charging stations could be used, although the charging time problem would need to be solved.

Extension cord.

How about this: We stop giving people free (or almost free) parking lots in public space?

This is why we need standard, swappable battery packs. You pull into a "filling station" and a robot pulls your used pack and pops in a new one. 5 minutes, in and out.

Sad thing is, this isn't a new idea. People just don't seem to want it.

People just don't seem to want it.

People right now feel that the advantages of batteries integrated throughout the chassis are greater.

Yeah standard swappable batteries are nice but as we can see in the cell phone and laptop world, they're very restrictive on design choices. And since EVs are very sensitive to weight and aerodynamics, coupled with the fact that EV makers are trying to put as many batteries into the car as they can, there's just no way to make a one-size-fits-all battery that works for every car.

You'd either need to trade off battery density (which means EV range concerns are amplified) or trade off weight and aerodynamics (which means EV range concerns are amplified).

No general consumer EV maker is going to reduce the total range on their spec sheet just to make it easier to swap a battery that also fits several other cars that they don't make. It's not a smart marketing decision.

> You'd either need to trade off battery density (which means EV range concerns are amplified)

So, instead of being able to go 300 miles before charging for an hour, I could go 225 but change it out in 5 minutes. I'll take the latter thank you.

Yes, that's why I mentioned the spec sheet. It doesn't matter all the additional benefits you might get if customers are looking at just one number: range.

What about liability ? My car catches fire with a swapped battery. Whose fault is it? Or a less deadly but more probable “I only got 20mi range when it told me 200”

Sounds like shocking possibilities.

That type of solution likely will start with company owned fleet vehicles until a critical mass of electric vehicles in the general public is reached at which point there will be enough demand for electric vehicles to make the cost of infrastructure for battery swapping viable.

That adds a huge expense to and already expensive proposition.

Hopefully one day flow batteries [1] will be efficient enough where you can pull into an electrolyte station and swap out your discharged (liquid) electrolyte for charged electrolyte.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery

One of the reasons is that batteries are expensive, and can be damaged/degraded. If I have a nice battery that I've treated well, and I swap it at the swap station for a different one, I would be unhappy if I got a totally worn-out battery.

The idea is that you don’t really own it. The company doing the swapping has it in their best interest to make sure you don’t get a dud. Like gas stations; if you get bad gas at one you take your business elsewhere next time.

My personal opinion is that for cars may be asking too much from the manufacturer to invest, unless they come together and do a consortium thing (like the SD card standardization).

Else, it does make sense for slow, light electric vehicles (SLEVs) such as e-scooters, e-motorcycles, e-bikes to reduce the range anxiety when the users take the SLEVs out, as form factor can be more easily adapted.

> Right now, the bulk of public stations in Canada are Level 2 (there are nearly 3,500 of them), But to get a full charge, you’ll have to leave your car there for hours, and many of the country’s chargers are clustered in major urban centres like Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. Even if you live in a city where many chargers exist, there might not be one located conveniently close to where you live.

That's okay, Trudeau will invest in this area by running a few copper wires along the trans-mountain pipeline expansion.

Did you know a huge part of the cost of operating an electric subway is the delays involved in getting a dollars from every person who gets on through a slow down called the fare box. Another is a stooge whose only task is to open/close doors. Another stooge starts and stop the cars. In Toronto these stooges get about $50 US per hour for salary, pension and various benefits. That is $150 an hour. Elevators were like that years ago. They had operators, and in a fully automatic elevator, they would ask you what floor and push that button. Then they fired them. End of the earth is looming said their union. Ho-hum said thje world. We need fully self driving subway cars, with fitted electic doors on the cars and on the track - just like the doors that stop you falling down the shaft on an elevator. That way subway operating costs would fall by 60% or more. WE also need fully tracked packaging. Buy a wrapped chocolate bar and they know who paid for it, and you pay a25 cent wrapper deposit. Toss away the box and they know who tossed it = fee for you. Dispose properly and the candy wrapper deposit is scanned and paid to you. We are going to have to deal with our trash. This applies to all trash, even on the high seas. The UN, after 20 years, needs to declare coal burning plants and act of war against mankind = cruise missile to destroy it. Cars must all be electric in 20 years. Any after that confiscated unless converted to batteries. No excuses. It is as stark as it can be. Do this or the world dies!!!

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