Remember when we didn't have enough electricity for electric cars?
Same issue with EV rollout. EVs are great if you have a single family home and a few grand to spend on outfitting a fast charger. Most apartment renters however are shit out of luck. I mean it has been how many years now of EV cars on the road and virtually no sweeping buildout of EV chargers in apartment complexes that I can see at least. There was a push for like maybe a half dozen token ev charging spots in new parking garage construction but that has been it for years in terms of that scale, a sort of nicety not something you can bank on having when you go to one of these garages. Street parking EV hookup has also not been rolling out at any serious scale. There is 1 single ev street parking spot in my neighborhood; they put it in years ago and nothing more has been built since.
I know someone with an EV in an apartment without a hookup for them, and charging it is a legitimate constant chore as they have to plan to go somewhere offsite to do it. Frequently they can't take the EV and have to resort to the gas car because the EV is at 20% charge or something.
I think what we are seeing with EVs is akin to general K shaped economy phenomenon. The rich and rich government leadership assume rollout must be going well, since they can charge conveniently at their house and they see many other Teslas in the parking lot of the country club or the luxury shopping center. Never mind actually considering how a renter's experience might be different, and renters are the bulk of our cities.
I had a car-purchase decision a few years ago, and ultimately I had to choose based on the housing I had, not the housing I wish I had. It was frustrating to hear a lot of "you can just X" from folks who couldn't seem to imagine an apartment or chaotic street-parking.
I would find that irritating as it’s still time consuming - slow charging at home suits me, but as you say, requires a suitable home.
We need enough high speed chargers in the right places. The average American drives 37 miles per day. That pencils out to less than 30 minutes of charging per week using current high speed standards (which will continue to drop). Your friend could take their car at 20% if they knew that they could charge quickly at their destination.
We don't need a fast charger for every car anymore than we need a gas pump for every car. When I got my EV, I thought I would need to hire an electrician to put in a fast charger. After a week of just running the 1.5 kw slow charger I realized that was fine. Even using just that charger I am able to get 43 miles of range on my 10 hour overnight charge in an SUV. If you told me I was never allowed to charge at home, I would still use an EV. Parking at the charger while I shop once a week is fine. Most people with EVs that I talk to have the same feeling. Charger anxiety ends up being a non issue except for outliers that drive a lot, or in bursty patterns.
We need to have enough high speed chargers in spots where people spend at least 30 minutes per week, and that will cover the huge majority of driving.
Put high speed chargers at malls, grocery store and workplaces and it doesn't matter if you have a charger at home, you can just charge when your car is parked away from home.
I'm not even sure it's that big of a buildout that's needed. Where I am, there are far more public chargers (level 2 or better) than gas pumps. If I want to charge my car while I'm out and about, its pretty hard to find a commercial district where I would have to be more than 2 blocks from a charger (and I live in rural Canada).
This feels like a political problem (and maybe consumer perception) a lot more than an intractable one.
If you have a charger or as many chargers at your apartment for the number of electric cars you know you are going to be able to charge with certainty.
If you have some small number of chargers at work do you know that you are going to be able to charge? Are you going to go into work park at the charging spot for 30 minutes then play musical chairs with your coworkers instead of working or are you going to park for 9 hours then leave at approx the same time as others ensuring that exactly 5 cars get charged per week despite being able to theoretically charge 336 per week in 3O minute blocks.
Regarding trips to the grocery store. Did you spend 30 minutes in a parking lot of a grocery store or mall this week? I haven't this month and even so you can't be sure that one of a small number of spots are actually available.
Currently plug in vehicles are what 1.9% of cars on the road. A relatively small number of spots scattered here and there is enough for this to work better than expected but trying to scale this begins to get pretty stupid pretty fast.
What does this look like with 1 in 3 cars? At 2 in 3 cars? How does it look like when you try to put enough chargers in the place where people incidentally land for extended periods of time instead of just putting them in lots of homes and apartments?
These are solved problems. It is a case of social and political will (or lack thereof) at this point.
> Regarding trips to the grocery store. Did you spend 30 minutes in a parking lot of a grocery store or mall this week?
Yes. Have you not parked your car in a single place for longer than 30 minutes besides your house? It doesn't have to be a grocery store. It can be literally anywhere that you drive your car that has a power line (its actually pretty hard to find a place where this isn't true). The regional district parks near me offer free 7kw chargers for up to 2 hours. Because our province is a net overproducer of green energy, this is very cheap for the district. Never once had an issue getting a spot. My gym has them too, all new hotels in the province, the hospital, banks, gas stations, Costco, etc. Again, this is all in a small rural Canadian town. It really is a matter of will.
> Currently plug in vehicles are what 1.9% of cars on the road. A relatively small number of spots scattered here and there is enough for this to work better than expected but trying to scale this begins to get pretty stupid pretty fast.
Only in luddite and backward countries. Most modern, and even less developed countries have figured out how to do this without "getting stupid".
> What does this look like with 1 in 3 cars? At 2 in 3 cars? How does it look like when you try to put enough chargers in the place where people incidentally land for extended periods of time instead of just putting them in lots of homes and apartments?
It looks like a problem that a huge number of countries consider to be solved.
See, we can apply the same brand of defeatism to anything.
I drive a new EV in the Boston metro, I do not need to drive most days. Charging without an in-home charger is a massive pain even with Superchargers within 20 minutes drive and a 300 mile range.
A trip to the super charger takes about 1.5 hours assuming its available when I arrive, I can only make the trip when the car needs charging or I am wasting time and energy. The exact time I will need to make this 1.5 hour trip work is variable. It depends on battery conditions, traffic conditions, and what I need to do. I cannot assume that the car will be charged when I need it to be - if I need to depart on Friday evening, or unexpectedly needed to get groceries during the week - I am obliged to spend the 1.5 hours at that moment.
To avoid these problems, I generally need to charge the car when it has ~30-40% and for battery protection I can only charge to 80%. Turning a car rated for 310 miles range into one with ~100-120 miles of usable range and a 1.5 hour weekly maintenance schedule. That range could be further reduced to 50-70 miles in winter conditions. The stalls at charging station charge by the minute, so you can't exactly wonder off.
With a reliable home charger, these problems mostly go away, even a slow 5kw charger should charge the car overnight - and a typical tesla installation delivers 11kw. A renter with no ability to plugin and charge overnight will have a tough time with an EV compared to a gas car.
If you have to drive 20 minutes to find one in a tier 1 city, you are living in a country that is pretty backwards by modern standards.
In my small rural Canadian town I have to drive farther to get to a gas station than I do to get to a high speed charger. I've also never been skunked on getting a charger. My math works fine here. It works fine in China, and Nepal too. Is Boston still not electrified? Because lack of a grid would be constraint, but otherwise its a very easy problem to solve.
I feel bad that it is made to be so hard for you to do what many, many millions of people around the world are able to manage with ease.
I live in a far less wealthy place than you and it isn't an issue here. Nepal has it figured out, so does China.
Sounds like California should work on catching up to Nepal, or Portugal, or Ireland, or China, or any of the many other places that have this problem solved.
Basically, as far as I can tell, you can take 10 amps off lots of places in an ordinary modern house, but to get 32 amps for a "proper" EV charger you probably need to go back to where the power supply enters the house and start there afresh with new and rather more expensive equipment and cables.
(US readers note that I'm talking about GB where domestic wiring is all 230 V.)
> After a week of just running the 1.5 kw slow charger I realized that was fine.
Wait, did you tell that you were using EV charger at home actually? I'm confused by the wording.
240v medium charging often needs a wall mount charger, though can plug into a dryer/oven outlet. More expensive but meets the needs of everyone.
Shortsighted defeatism is not compelling.
I'm actually considering EV as my next car, and due to some legal BS and my own mistakes I will likely need to quickly sell my ICE car at a loss next year and buy something in replacement, which I otherwise wouldn't do for at least five to ten more years, my car is just fine for me. But without ability to charge my car at home, EV is an absolute non-starter and out of the question, I will likely get a hybrid Corolla instead. Taking vacations at a gas station or walking for an hour there and back or paying for an expensive public transport twice for every charging is not my dream really.
If you have a good fast charger network available you don’t really need to have a 240v charger or even a charger at all.
And by "slowly," I mean: Somewhere in the realm of 2-5 miles per hour. It's not fast at all.
But that's compatible with many lifestyles, wherein: The car is probably just sitting there at home for 12 or more hours per day, anyway.
If the round-trip commute is 30 miles, and the car gains just 3 miles per hour while plugged in, and it gets plugged in for 12 hours per day, then: It gains 36 miles per day, and the daily-commute part of driving it is completely covered by a regular outlet.
(Which still doesn't address the conundrum that many apartment dwellers face, but it would've helped me at most of the apartments I've lived in: Ground floor, and parking right outside of my place. I'd have just used an extension cord and the landlord wouldn't have said a word, except maybe to have a chat about how I like the car.)
Really, when is the last time we overhauled our built environment and actually followed through with a comprehensive plan in the west? We couldn't even finish the interstate highway system in a time when we had seemingly great alignment towards it along with far cheaper costs. Public housing failed too. Broadband access failed. Cell service is still pretty spotty and unreliable.
Starlink satellite cellular service is available pretty much everywhere now.
I don't know about better, but it's what we've got. The problem is a shortage of housing, and the government building housing solves for that because the public market has been shown to be incompetent at that.
Why would someone build cheap houses that would net them the same profit in 10 years as building luxury houses that would in 5 years? Especially if the people on top investing the capital only deal with the accounting books and not actual customers and their desires.
If you only get allowed to build 1 house, of course you will target the best demographic.
You cant lower prices without flooding the market with competing goods.
When I talk about spotty coverage I mean, verizon says I have an LTE connection, and yet I get served with dialup tier experience. Not always, but often. This has been the case for the probably 15 years I've had a mobile data plan. I experience this nowhere near anywhere remote, in the heart of large cities even.
- Friction to evict for cause.
People are less willing to engage in action against tenants when it is difficult or expensive to evict. This is often less about well meaning protections for tenants and surprisingly more about reasonable process in county. If it takes 6 months to get on the docket to get the process started this is going to be more important than what you have to do when you get there.
- Financial cost and immediacy of impact.
Most places lose tenants at end of term and can find at least some new suckers. Turning your place into a shithole may take years to fully show its impact and in a tight housing market it may still be muffled by the sheer number of poor bastards who need somewhere to sleep.
- Incentive structure and distance from decision makers.
If throwing out the bums requires work pain and risk only from the peons who manage the place for the owners and failure to do so only hurts residents and owners then one may find that these enforcement actions never happen. A bureaucracy further increases distance between actors and decision makers.
If you consider these factors you might rightly conclude that a government project is maximally situated to fail at removing bad actors. Friction to evict those in need is going to be higher than almost anywhere else, front line workers are there for long term career trajectory, have little real power nor incentive and nobody but the residents really feels the pain. If you are running a house of last resort your vacancy rate is going to be low even if its a bad place to live.
None of this makes it impossible to run projects correctly it represents increased risk not destiny.
There’s a good tech connections series on this. Slow home charging has been doable for quite a while.
Which is exactly why techbros think its obvious and most regular people aren't buying.
For the ones that need upgrades, we’re talking extension-cord-level technology.
When any spots exist the electrical system would never tolerate more than a few people plugging in at once.
For instance if you picked 3 50 unit complexes you would would find that 3 cars were situated to charge out of the 200 to 300 owned.
At present like 2% of cars owned not sold are electric to get to a much higher penetration that is desirable we need better charging.
You don't live in a statistically valid sample of homes our current attachment only works now because 49 out of 50 cars run on gas.
Light poles are being tapped in the neighborhood for EV and surveillance already.
The great thing about the utility market is that they don’t need your permission to invest. They’ll do it when it becomes profitable, i.e. already.
Are you the same guy who poo-pooed digital photography in 2000? Sounds like it.
https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicle-registration
CA has also invested heavily in charging with 18000 fast charging stations and still only convinced a tiny minority to go electric even with the government partially buying rich kids cars.
With decreasing subsidies, sales already fell off a cliff its way less than 1 in 3 new cars and 1 in 20 existing even in the electric car capital of the US.
We need more mass transit, more telecommuting, cheaper housing in cities, more electric cars, and more charging stations especially in apartments along with more cheap electric vehicles even if they end up being made in china. We want the same thing I am just not delusional enough to believe we've already arrived.
This is in the Bay Area, fwiw.
We ended up in an apartment without any way to charge, so for now we're dealing with supercharging -- and just recently found a nearby condo complex (1/3mi walk) with 19 completely free chargepoints. But yeah, this is Menlo Park, so we have 5 superchargers within a few miles.
Sure, there might sometime be a chicken-and-egg problem initially, but saying a new but proven technology is totally unusable because it does not have infrastructure everywhere seems kinda weird to me. The infrastructure will catch up as usage grows.
Until free/at cost car charging is provided at work when the sun shines you're just moving the place where combustion happens.
This may be a worth while trade in downtowns where the main form of car pollution is engine exhaust at an average of 20mph.
Electricity generation is almost always much, much cleaner than burning fuel in an internal combustion engine, and has been since long before EVs became available.
I think you may need to reset some of your assumptions. :)
The future is not evenly distributed and the outliers matter little.
>Electricity generation is almost always much, much cleaner than burning fuel in an internal combustion engine, and has been since long before EVs became available.
Depends entirely on your assumptions about where you draw the line for emissions from second and third order effects.
Saudi oil is so easy to get out of the ground that compared to coal it's practically green.
That's with only about 5% of cars being electric.
We've consumed nearly all of the slack in transmission capacity.
I'm expecting transmission costs to balloon.
Edit: also, the problem with charging vehicles isn’t really home owner cars, it’s tractor-trailers.