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Comment by thehappypm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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