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Comment by iso1631 | Hacker News Reader

> Basically an EV only makes sense if you own a house and can get your own charger.

New houses in the UK have required chargers as part of planning permission for 5 years. Most people have, or can have, a 3KW socket installed in their driveway, very cheaply (like 2-3 tanks of fuel)

73% of cars in the UK are parked on private property overnight. Most cars do under 8,000 miles a year, or 160 miles a week, 77% of cars passing an MOT in 2019 did under 10,000 miles/year, or 200 miles a week.

At 5 miles per KWh, that's 15mph of charging, or 200 miles in one overnight charge.

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> 73% of cars in the UK are parked on private property overnight.

Define "private property". Is a private, shared (like in tens/hundred of vehicles shared) parking a "private property" by this statistic?

I found a study [1] based on the results of a survey (2021) from the European Union that states:

> Several conclusions can be derived in terms of the significance of driving patterns in relation to the potential use/substitution of a larger portion of the car fleet with electric drive vehicles. In particular, the average distance that is daily driven in 6 members states ranges from an average of 40 km (UK) to an average of 80 km (Poland). Such distances can be comfortably covered by battery electric vehicles that are currently already available on the market. Further R&D improvements in battery systems could ensure that the “range anxiety” factor is minimized. Considering the long recharging time of the energy storage systems of an EDV, the duration of the parking profiles is a good indicator for the estimation of potential recharge time availability. In our survey it has been revealed that the parking time after the last trip of a day amounts to more than 16 hours per day. This duration is more than sufficient to comply with the potential need for a full slow recharge of an average EDV battery. Also, almost 10% of the drivers in the survey park in a private garage or their home, places where a recharging point could easily be installed. The active parking time, defined as the parking periods between which the car is used during a day for several purposes, amounts to 6 hours.

[1] http://publications.europa.eu/resource/genpub/PUB_LDNA25627E...

When you say "in their driveway", you are already excluding everyone who doesn't have a driveway. I can recall maybe two or three people I know who have their own driveways.

If the GP's statistics are correct, how does your anecdote changes anything? More than 70% of all car owners is a very viable market.

73% parking on private property doesn’t mean 73% have their own driveway, and it was only mentioned that it’s cheap to install a charger in a fairly recent driveway.

I suppose GP’s question is how does that 73% figure change when you look at people who can realistically have a charger installed in their parking spot.

"More than 70%" does not mean "More than 70% have their own driveway". Apartments don't have driveways and underground garages are often hard to retrofit.

I used to live in a block of flats with, I was a director of the management company. We nominally had 1 parking space each, but it wasn't allocated.

We looked into putting in outside sockets, it was fairly low cost, the difficulty would be apportioning the metering as we didn't have allocated parking spaces, but with allocated parking spaces it's not a problem.

On my own housing estate in a typical British town almost every house has a drive. Those with two cars and just one drive that park 1 car on the drive and one on the street, but that's fine, just swap them occasionally (or better yet get rid of the extra car)

I can't think of seeing underground parking anywhere in the UK, other than commercial ones in cities like NCP etc.

> "the difficulty would be apportioning the metering as we didn't have allocated parking spaces"

There are already various technical solutions to this. Most chargers now days are "connected" - ie have a WiFi chip or cellular modem built in to the charging unit. Identification/billing can be apportioned via a RFID card or app interface.

In future, "Plug & Charge" will make it possible for the vehicles to securely identify themselves to the charger for automatic billing, doing away with the need for an app or RFID.

If cost of the chargers is an issue (ie you want a large number of outlets but it's initially split between only a few EV owners who are willing to pay for them), then consider something like Ubitricity (ubitricity.com) where the outlets are "dumb" and the billing smarts are built into the cable which EV owners purchase.

>>> Most cars do under 8,000 miles a year, or 160 miles a week

It's not a useful stat - the only useful one is how many journeys per year can I not do in an electric vehicle in the UK with one 30 minute stop or about 15 mins of charging.

I think the answer is very few because the UK is small, but averages don't really cut it when you plan a drive to Scotland and can't get there without 2 extra hours of delay compared to a petrol vehicle.

I wouldn't drive 500 miles in my corsa either, I'd rent a car more suited for the task

There are large city areas with no off-street parking.

I'm currently sitting in a terraced house in East London.

37% of cars in urban areas are parked on the street. There's a whole separate question about why so many people in urban areas have cars of course.

The direction of travel is that it will be uneconomical to keep a petrol car in London in 10 years time, even if they were still available for sale, so it's fairly meaningless. People will have to adapt.

" People will have to adapt"

I think that's a particularly unhelpful way of framing it, when actually we are trying to help people adapt new technology.

"it will be uneconomical to keep a petrol car in London in 10 years time"

Just means that people will hold on to their old cars, because they can't plug them in - and be a bit poorer. Now, if "people will have to adapt" means that there needs to be a massive effort to provide in-street charging infrastructure, you might be right.

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