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Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

Do you have charging where you live? (Private garage or parking spot?) All you really need is charging where you live, and charging along highways. I have literally never gone to any of the chargers within 30 miles of my house.

Hardest part is for apartment buildings. No big incentive to install chargers for public use.

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No, There is no charging anywhere "near" my home. I park in an uncovered open apartment parking lot.

Same thing for at work.

And checking the charging maps shows very few options anywhere near me and the few places that do only have a couple plugs. Would be annoying to find it's in use by the time I get there so I would have to wait for them and then me.

Is it feasible to have charging installed at your home or office? To reiterate what GP said, I basically never charge anywhere except at home (currently in a private carport that I got a charger installed at, previously in an apartment building with a single shared charger for ~50 spots, 4-5 EVs).

I don’t really see how I could convince my apartment or the company I work for to install chargers any time soon.

Sure maybe in years it will be common enough, but that’s my entire point. It doesn’t seem common at all around me yet, and I’m not going to buy an EV before charging is reasonably available.

Some jurisdictions are going to start mandating this for large car parks. The transition is definitely going to be very uneven; the closer you are to the centre of a big city with an air quality problem, the sooner it will arrive.

Sure, but you're missing the point that you yourself just made: "are going to start", as in, they haven't yet. Most people are not going to buy an EV today without a reasonable charging solution, banking on the idea that situation will fix itself at some point in the hopefully-not-to-distant future.

Yeah, it's always been a chicken-and-egg transition problem. There's always a least convenient link in the chain. Hence all sorts of schemes to nudge people / subsidize early adopters so the cycle of "we don't need to solve charging because nobody has EVs"/"we can't have an EV because there's no charging" is broken.

Hence why I think it will expand outward from urban centres, motivated by e.g. ULEZ requirements.

Hawaii already has this rule for what it's worth. The issue there is that they have so many EV's on the road that these chargers are always in use and have lines (and aren't really that fast to begin with). Having experienced that, I still wouldn't get an EV without a guaranteed place to charge at home.

Sounds like you live in the middle of nowhere. I live in what people consider the middle of no where and there are a number of Tesla charging stations near me.

I don’t live in the middle of nowhere.

I live in Wisconsin between Madison and Milwaukee.

That is basically the middle of nowhere in the United states.

I live 10 kilometers from the center of Stockholm in a dense suburb with a population of 55 000 (Stockholm is a small center core with lots and lots of suburbs).

There are perhaps 20 chargers in total in the entire suburb. Maybe 8 of them are fast chargers. There are another 20 in neighbouring suburbs.

And no, it's not an American suburb with single family homes. It's an European suburb with apartment complexes.

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