Comment by jajko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jajko | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Not really. Living in Switzerland, colleague has Model S, and over whole night plugged in his house he can charge only around 9km/h. That basically covers his commute but he can't build up charge for the weekend if he started week empty. Not even going into the fact that most folks here live in apartments and not standalone houses, and charging situation there is usually terrible and overhead of owning electric car is significant.

That sucks tremendously (on top of other tesla-related suck like extremely expensive OEM replacement parts that nobody else can service), and considering we talk about Switzerland here (and expensive well developed part of it), other countries are not that better off if at all.

As a backup, non-critical second car, why not if you feel like an early adopter and paying >40k for a function a used 5k car can perform even better. Main family car? No thank you, maybe for half the cost but probably even that's too much in this decade.

Is it that expensive to get an electric car charger installed?

I just got two installed for $800, and the charger itself is $420 each. Even if a circuit panel had to be upgraded and some wire needed to be run, surely it is only a couple thousand extra at most.

Seems like you might have a case of SV myopia. The idea that $1640 plus “a few thousand extra” to be able to drive a very expensive vehicle would be not “that expensive” is pretty out of touch.

Electric vehicles are not “very” expensive, even in Europe, and it’s a capital expense. That charger is going to be useful for decades to come.

And if electric vehicles pencil out in the US to equal cost of gas cars including oil changes and all that, then surely they do in Europe with their higher gas costs.

Can you put numbers to not very expensive? Looking at vw for their ev equivalents, for me personally, it qualifies as very expensive (without subsidies)

I tried to find new gas vs electric car sale prices in a couple European countries, but I couldn’t easily find a reputable source.

With how active European governments are on legislation to curb carbon emissions, I assumed the proposition of a new electric vehicle to a new gas vehicle would be at least as good as the US (over the lifetime of the car, higher initial cost for EV, but lower maintenance costs).

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/europe...

Of course, this only applies to people with a home with a space to park and charge their car, and whose everyday destinations are mostly within an hour.

Edit: looks like small diesel cars are still available in Europe, so taking those as the base option, I can see how an EV would be expensive. This option doesn’t exist in the US, though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1bfhpnl/does_it_ma...

Not OP but my power company gave me $1500, I only had to pay like $300 in total. There's currently (or, was, as may be the case in a few days) a ton of credits/assistance.

That was for two chargers, not one. And normal outlets give plenty of range overnight, it’s just a luxury to be able to charge faster when you want.

A new 200A electrical panel costs $5000-6000 to be installed with a permit in SV. If you want to run 50A wire for an L2 charger that might be $1000-2000 more. Getting close to $10000, so I'd say it is fairly expensive.

That’s just SV, though, you would’ve paid <1/3 that elsewhere.

Or just run an extension cord from your dryer outlet with a splitter. $100 and done.

Interesting, we got that charging speed off of a normal US 1.5kw outlet (120v, 12 amps). Don’t most European standard outlets put out more than that?

If the numbers I find online for tesla power usage is correct, that would indicate that she charges with around 1.8 kW. But most homes should have little problem supplying the double (16 ampere with 230v = 3.680kW). But maybe she is stuck with 10 ampere?

But even with 9km/h I am surprised that's not enough, does she really drive more than 108km a day?

(this is not to take away from her experience, I am just surprised)

Europe has higher voltage, 230, so should go faster than charging from 120V.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com