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Comment by eulers_secret | Hacker News Reader

Another adoption hurdle: A lot of folks live in apartments as well.

I've accepted I won't be going electric until I buy a house. There is no way my complex will install chargers, until it's required somehow. No garages here. House prices are hovering around $500,000 in my area. With a traditional mortgage, 20% down is a lot to save up (100K).

This has made electric cars a unique form of social signaling: It basically states "I'm a homeowner!" (or can afford house rental, which is also very expensive... or went with an FHA loan/can afford that mortgage payment)

There are some apartments that have charging ports, but they're very high-end, with rents comparable to a single-family detached house anyways. They're also very rare in my area. Sure you can charge at whatever ports are available (not many here), but (IMO) it just doesn't make much sense to go electric and not have the ability to charge your car at home.

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Doesn't your city provide charging points on street parking? That's quite common in European cities, both in residential areas and public parking near shops.

Used to even be the case in Amsterdam that you didn't have to pay for parking if you were paying for charging. But they quickly changed that because charging isn't nearly as profitable as the parking fees.

I live in a smallish suburb, and unfortunately, they do not provide street chargers (I'm also signed up for the city's newsletter and there is never discussion about it).

I checked where chargers are located in my area, and it's mostly gas stations and some shop chargers in the more posh suburb a few miles away. None of my local grocery stores have chargers. The posh stores are too expensive for me to shop at continually - I can't/won't afford to shop at whole foods for my normal food... but they have chargers.

Even if they were provided, I (and most others here) don't park on the street - but in the lot attached to my apartment (built in the late 80's). I'm also lucky I don't pay for parking (or rather it's part of my inexpensive rent).

You could look at home chargers around you and strike up a friendship.

Although, certainly if you rack up hundreds of miles every day it won’t work that well.

That said, isn’t part of the allure of apartments being close to your destinations? Walking to the park, a 1-mile trip to the grocery, etc.

Don’t know where OP is located but there are plenty of apartments located in low density areas where that’s impractical.

> That said, isn’t part of the allure of apartments being close to your destinations? Walking to the park, a 1-mile trip to the grocery, etc.

It can be, but there is another reason to chose living in an apartment: It's cheap. I live here because it's inexpensive (< $1000/mo) and I can save that large down payment quicker.

My apartment is not convenient: 45 minutes from my work, 15 minutes from an affordable grocery store. But there is a very nice park within walking distance.

> You could look at home chargers around you and strike up a friendship.

This is true, I could. But that's a lot less convenient than buying another hybrid when the time comes. Gasoline is 5 minutes away, refueling is fast, and I only need to do it every other week.

It's true, but of course, a solvable problem, and one everyone is aware of. Chargers have grown massively in the last few years along highway routes, but expansion in the number of fast chargers available to renters (within cities, at shopping centers and apartments, etc.) is already where the major players are focusing now. And Biden's admin stated they want half a million more chargers in the USA (which is an order of magnitude more than currently exist), so we can expect this to improve quickly. You may not, in other words, have to wait until you buy a house.

The effort involved in using public chargers as your only/primary source is pretty high. It's not a quick detour, but something you need to plan your day around (plan to spend a while at a store near the charge, etc). And then you may get there and find out someone has beaten you to it. With just three people in line, each charging for 45m, that's a >2h wait! IMO you have to be really committed and highly value the fact that your car is electric, to put up with this.

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