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Comment by tredre3 | Hacker News Reader

> This article paints a false image of EV life.

Do you genuinely believe that everybody owns a house and/or have a dedicated parking spot with an accessible charger?

There are 82 million single-family homes in America, and this does not include parking spots available at employer parking lots where chargers are provided, nor condos where you can run an EV charger circuit to the parking spot. Airport parking and other long dwell parking can supply 120V 20A circuits, which is more than sufficient for more than a day of parking.

Everyone else can fast DC charge (~20 min 0-80%) at the grocery store or Walmart, or at traditional travel stops during road trips. Electricity is ubiquitous, chargers can be everywhere.

In the USA, in public areas where there are 120v 15a or 20a outlet -- I 100% guarantee that if you had more than one oaf with an EV charging from those plugs at the same time you'd pop a circuit breaker. Those plugs are almost always for convenient maintenance of the site and share several outlets to a single circuit breaker -- if 2 thieves tried to steal power at the same time they'd overload the circuit.

Public EV charging is going to need to be much better than it is currently; part of that means having lots of public EVSEs that properly share a common backhaul without popping their breakers, and it also means figuring out how to bill people for the power they need.

I've been able to get by solely with my EV for 6 years, and it's only occasionally been a minor inconvenience (mostly having to spend 20-30 minutes charging per 3ish hours driving on long distance trips); I've had to wait for charger capacity only when foolish enough to drive into or out of an eclipse totality path, and even then I was forced to wait a total of 20 minutes before getting a charging stall.

I'm lucky -- I also have access (10 months out of the year) to a parking place with a dedicated 240v/20a charger. For 2 months of the year I charge at a L3 station when I go grocery shopping; (in those 2 months I also have access to L1 charging and a dedicated parking spot but it's more convenient to charge at the grocery store.)

In North America, non-tesla L3 charging seems to be managed by organizations mostly dedicated to making people foolish enough to buy a non-tesla EVs miserable.

L3 charging, btw, is really exotic, or at least really heavy duty technology -- you can't trivially drop 8 stalls of 400v / 200a just anywhere; many of the tesla superchargers near where I live have local power generation facilities (big natural gas fuel cell setups) to do peak shaving.

Largely I agree with you -- electricity is everywhere, and it should be possible to make L2 evse plugs available to 20-30% of street parking spots and put L3 charging in lots more places than it is. It's not trivial but it also isn't insurmountable.

Just because you have a single family home does not mean you can install a charger circuit. Not every single family home has driveway. Half the houses on my street lack a driveway/ (The two houses on the east side of mine were built in 1898 and didn't need a driveway.) There is street parking only on one side of the street, as well; so, running a cord from the house could mean crossing the street with it.

Or at work.

I know about 7 EV owners. All have single family homes and garages; none have home charging.

Have you talked to them about it? All in it is usually under $1k to get one installed and would be cheaper in the long run and better on the battery.

> All in it is usually under $1k to get one installed.

Where I'm at (outside of Philly) $1K is the bottom end. Depending on the distance from the panel, access to the garage and the house service it can be lots more. I had mine done (panel on the other end of the house) and it was $2200

It's common but rarely necessary for people to get the largest circuit they can imagine rather than evaluate cost / benefit clearly.

I have a 240v / 20a plug next to my drive way. It cost $300 for the electrician work and $150 for the EVSE. It uses inexpensive romex, didn't require me to beef up my house's 100a service, and 95% of the time recharges the car overnight. On the rare situations where I get home from a long drive late in the evening, with the car under 10%, and drive it the very next morning, the car will have not gotten back to the "normal" charge level, but it's still perfectly usable for 99% of driving requirements... And if I'm in a rare situation where I need to charge it more than I'd get from an overnight drive I can L3 charge it.

Sure, if you're putting 200 miles a day on the car consistently, or if you've got several EVs, or if you've got a huge price difference in your "time of use" power metering contract, having a big pipe between the car and the grid is helpful.

But just as often, spending more than $500 for an EVSE hookup is just not going to be a good way to spend money. Do it if it makes you feel more comfortable, but it's rarely necessary.

Can you plug an EV into a wall outlet? I imagine it will charge extremely slowly, but isn't there a way to do that?

You can, but it's quite slow to charge within the confines an an ordinary outlet.

I have primarily supercharged my 2018 Model S (100kw) over ~140k miles and only have 8% battery degradation.

That assumes the battery degradation number calculation is 1) accurate and 2) isn't lying as to not discourage people without access to regular slow charging from buying their cars.

Provided by a third party, not Tesla.

You mean a third-party is giving you that number? How do they obtain/calculate it? Do they just read a data parameter via the car's diagnostics port? If so the lying argument applies just as well.

And you might have less degradation if you had L2 charged it primarily.

The evidence does not support this when scoped to Tesla battery packs.

https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/impacts-of-fast-charg...

Roughly where in the world do you live that garages don't have power?

An ordinary 120v/15a household circuit can only provide about 2 miles of charge per hour. I run an unusually car-lite lifestyle for an American and that wouldn't do it even for me.

You need an electrician to run a new 240v circuit and, in many cases, a new main service for the house to accommodate it.

Depends on your car. If you have a particularly inefficient/large EV then maybe, but if your car can do 3mi/kwh then you’ll get a little over 3 miles of charge per hour. That doesn’t sound like much but it’ll get you 36 miles in 12 hours, so could work for short commutes or if you have a hybrid WFH position it’d almost certainly be fine.

I only ever charge on 120V personally and have no problem, though anyone who was going to buy an EV planning on charging that way should run the numbers with the EV they’re looking at. ABRP can do a pretty good job of it.

What puzzles me is how these people can stay and live with these conditions. Adding an extra outlet isn't hard to DIY and them owning the home means there isn't anything preventing them from doing so.

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