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Comment by noirbot | Hacker News Reader

Yea, one of the current ironies is that the folks most able to use/charge an environmentally friendly car are the people living in environmentally unfriendly single-family homes. I've yet to see an apartment complex with more than 2-3 charging points for a building of hundreds of units, and plenty of older condo/apartment housing stock can't even easily retrofit chargers into the lot without spending tens of thousands of dollars on it, assuming your local power system supports it.

Having to drive five to ten miles and wait for most of an hour to charge is just a bad experience.

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As number of electric cars increase converting parking lots to charging stations will increase as well. Though I think currently just like we have incentives for cars we need incentives for businesses to install chargers specially for chargers with solar backend to speed up the change as more chargers are built more people will move to electric as it gets more convenient.

China this year reached $10k car with BYD introducing its $10k cars with sodium ion batteries, these are not like previous cheap cars which were practically golf carts. With the prices of batteries and solar electricity falling 10%-12% a year on avg I think electric cars are going to take over a lot faster than people are expecting. Main reason being cost ice cars are almost 3 times as expensive to run today as an electric car already. It will be 5-8 times in 5-8 years.

I have friends who own EVs without access to home charging who charge at the grocery store once a week while shopping. The car is done charging before they’re done shopping for groceries.

The trick is to distribute chargers everywhere, because your car is going to be parked somewhere long enough to charge unless you’re a taxi or some other high utilization use case. Most will charge at home and or work, but some cannot.

Yea, it's what I'd have to do, I suppose, but it would mean driving to a grocery store 2-3 times further away, and my average trip to the store these days is only 10-20 minutes which I doubt is long enough for a full charge.

My office and home don't have chargers and probably won't for a while, so I'd essentially have to make a special trip out on the weekends to charge my car while I get lunch nearby or something.

For an L3 charger, 20 minutes is a lot. If you are 20%, it should get you to 70% or so, it takes longer to go from 70 to 100% given how battery charging works.

Indeed! I literally just charged a long range model y at a 250kw Supercharger from ~20% to ~80% in 17 minutes (per Teslascope) this morning after towing a ride on trencher back to the rental shop. Was done before I had finished using the rest room and getting a coffee at the grocery store.

Ya, I think people really underestimate how fast L3 charging is, especially for cars running on empty. But not all grocery stores have L3 chargers, and they can get really busy in holiday weekends. I plan my trips around these, but I wish they had more capacity.

Tried this while in Hawaii with a rental EV (with no charging at my hotel) and it did not work at all. Hawaii is one of the states with the most EV's per person and there's frequently chargers in places like malls and grocery stores (whole foods and target in particular). However, because there's so many EV's, all of these chargers are always in use, and there are usually lines or people waiting around to snag a spot as soon as it becomes available. It was a massive inconvenience and put me off of EVs for the near future: I'd either need an sfh or to be somewhere that figures out public charging when more than a tiny fraction of the total vehicles on the road are electric.

Yea, I feel like this is also likely an issue. You can't let yourself run too low because you can't for-sure get a charger quickly if you don't have one at home. I regularly run down to a sub 10-mile range and less than a half-gallon of gas in my ICE car now because I live by a couple gas stations, so I'm never more than a couple minutes away from being able to fill my car.

If I had to drive around for a while to find an open charging spot, I'd have to be more opportunistic about where/when I charge to stay ahead on it.

This. It's weird that EV owners do virtue signaling from their house and commute by car everyday, while condo people can't afford EV and don't commute by car. Slow EV charger at condo parking is what every govt should invest, instead of huge subsidy for vehicle.

I'm an EV person. Some of us commute by bike.

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