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Comment by hkarthik | Hacker News Reader

A lot of folks in here in CA rent homes and apartments because the cost of living out here is so insane. You can't really get a 240V EV charger installed in your garage or driveway unless you own a home /w vehicle parking and can make such modifications. Having charging infrastructure nearby becomes very critical for anyone in this situation. Charging infrastructure has not kept up with the EVs that are now on the road.

A lot of folks also leased their EVs and got great deals on charging with the lease. As these leases have expired along with their charging discounts, it's not surprising that these folks are returning the cars and switching back to gas powered vehicles with better ROI.

More government incentives are needed to build charging infrastructure and make EV ownership more viable for people that don't own a single family home. Otherwise the EV revolution will be dead in the water.

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You don’t need 240V. 120V works just fine (and this is MORE true for large battery EVs than small), but landlords don’t let you do use them for charging your car.

What we need is for landlords to allow charging on 120V outlets. Normalize it. Actually mandate it be allowed. And cheaply, too. (Landlords would quickly discover affordable ways to accommodate charging.)

Yeah, I have a house and an ev in the Bay Area and have not bothered to install a 240V charger. There are cheap’ish EV’s now with a large enough battery for this. We have the Kia Niro and the battery is more than large enough for this.

For apartment complexes, they would just raise the rent for everyone to cover installation, maintenance, service fees, etc. even for the people who didn’t use them, turning them into a profit point.

And if they could raise rates more to get more profit, they would do it right now.

(But this is why we need EVERYONE to have EVs. At least plug in hybrids.)

Every new multi family I've seen in the SFBA since 2015 has had charging stations in the garage. Last building in RWC was ~50% of the stalls. SF was 25% or so. Every grocery store I've been at has had 1-5 EV charging stations. Most of the peninsula office complexes have charging at them. All of these are code requirements on new construction. Just takes time to turn things like EPA superfund sites into offices and apartments.

  Every new multi family I've seen in the SFBA since 2015 has had charging stations in the garage.

For every space?

Pretty much, and last tennant mix was about 20% EV, 80% ICE.

> Every new multi family I've seen in the SFBA since 2015 has had charging stations in the garage.

And it's a fight for your charging time, because there are like 100 teslas for 2 chargers.

Or the chargers or situated in the worst possible location way away from everything nearest charging station to where I live is in the bottom of a garage building connected to a mall that's dead and only open for a few hours a day what do you supposed to do chill out in the basement garage while your car charges?

> You can't really get a 240V EV charger installed in your garage or driveway unless you own a home

Not true, unless you specifically mean 240V.

> For residential leases signed, renewed or extend on or after July 1, 2015, landlords are required to approve a tenant’s written request to install an electric vehicle charging station at the tenant’s parking space if the tenant enters into a written agreement which includes...

https://www.kts-law.com/electric-vehicle-charging-stations-f...

Yes, he specifically means 240V because that's what's usually required for Level 2 charging unless you're 120V supports 20amps. You can get NEMA 5-20 outlets, but most apartments or rentals don't have them and only support 15 amps on a circuit.

It looks like a Model 3 that's driven less than 120 miles per day is feasible with level 1 charging.

Do you have an electric car and live in an apartment? Please try to use level 1 charging for a month and let us know if you want to continue doing so rather than just switch back to an ICE.

I used to live in an apartment and was able to charge my EV at work. There was no where for me to actually plug in my EV outside. I lived on the 2nd floor and could have just hung a cable out of apartment window to charge, but I wasn't interested in leaving my window open all day every day. During the first several months of the pandemic, I hardly used my EV, preferring my wife's ICE lest I have to take it to a charger near by and wait around for 30+ minutes to charge it.

It wasn't until I finally moved into a house a few months ago that I started using my EV again.

It's a very common experience on EV user groups to find people that planned on putting in 240V into their garages but never bother because they end up finding 120V to be sufficient. Yes, it takes 4 days to charge an empty battery, but if you're averaging under 50 miles a day, the 120V outlet will have you leaving with a full battery almost every morning.

This may not be ideal for those on Time-of-use plans with their energy provider, where energy costs more during certain times of the day than others.

For example, I've set my car to only charge in the middle of the night in order to get the best energy rate for such a large draw from the grid.

I still have yet to look into financing a Level 2 charger. I've proven that overnight Level 1 charger easily covers the range of my daily commutes for two of my last three jobs (and that third one was a longer commute than I was comfortable with anyway and am unlikely to repeat).

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