For those of us who live in apartment buildings and don't have a garage where we can install such things, then what?
To me this has always been the biggest obstacle of an electric car.
To me this has always been the biggest obstacle of an electric car.
Why? In the frozen north its, maybe not customary, but not overly unusual, to have parking spots wired for engine block and battery heaters. Theres a whole cultural thing of not blocking other peoples access, a legal framework of not blocking sidewalks, when its OK to share, or not share, someones extension cord, stuff like that. Its just not a serious issue. The cost of one parking spot was rolled into my bachelor pad, but when space was available I could get another spot for $25/mo or whatever it was, surely a charger spot would have some minor additional costs, but chargers are pretty cheap compared to land and pavement and buildings.
I guess the only technological limitation I can think of is service drop size, if you wire up 200 parking stalls at 25 KW each you're probably going to have to upgrade the service drop or implement something "interesting" involving partial charge rates. Presumably someone will start shipping an apartment charger that can bluetooth pair with its neighboring chargers and cooperate such that the total average draw of the entire lot never exceeds 100 KW or something like that. 100 KW is a drop in the bucket for an apartment building, thats like 1000 watts worth of TVs or lights in each of 100 apartments. Dinner time on a hot summer night is a large multiple of that draw.
House service drops used to be just 60 amps a few decades ago and now 200 is pretty standard... if you think service drop upgrades for a house are expensive, imagine the cost of an entire apartment building upgrade LOL. Of course this may be a short term thing... solar panels may mean apartments will be net producers while the sun is up, soon enough.
Personally, I charge at the city parking garage a block away.
So yes, it does work. And that's the owning a house case. There's also the "renting an apartment at a modern complex" case.
Would it surprise you as well to learn that "SF engineer" isn't the only job in the world that pays a high salary? In Houston for instance, I know dozens of people who earn comparable amounts from engineering in the medical and energy companies. And don't get me started on the consultancies that support them (megabucks) or salespeople paid on commission (ultrabucks). It's actually one of the biggest obstacles to our startup community here: luring good people away from their low-risk, high-salary position in energy, medicine and finance.
But when your mortgage is only $1k/mo and then you have to spend another $1k/mo on a car (before insurance or "fuel" or anything else) you might start to wonder.
I've got a Subaru and I figure that car will cost me about $1500/year for the car and another $200/mo for fuel. That's $400/mo insured and everything versus the $1100-$1200 for the Tesla.
Look I'm not saying it's IMPOSSIBLE for people to buy electric cars. But the idea that somehow all the millenials who have generally been screwed by not buying real estate before interest rates went to zero are going to find the cash to start buying electric cars seems pretty laughable to me.
Will some do it? For sure! If you can pull down six figures somewhere with a reasonable cost of living it's totally doable. But there aren't too many places where you can make six figures without everything else costing more too.
EDIT: I live in flyover country. Always have. I'm talking from experience, not how I perceive things from my golden throne on the west coast.
One point I make is the Tesla is luxo-sport car. Costs a lot new like any other sporty car. So the cost of a new Tesla vs a used gasoline power car isn't really a fair comparison. Looking on Craigslist, you can get a used Nissan Leaf $10k, cost per mile is $0.035. One can run numbers but the cost of ownership is probably $300/mo.
Problematical in places like SF is the lack of parking and thus lack of charging. Though large numbers of people do have or rent garages. In Suburbs a problem can be many people have long commutes that exceed the range of an electric car.
Interestingly a friend just threw down for one of those million dollar homes in SF and is considering an electric car to avoid having to ride the google bus. I'll be interested in how it works our for him. I do have another friend that lives in Oakland, he has a leaf seems to like it.
I guess that's kind-of my point. If millenials can't afford to buy houses they're probably not buying luxo-sports cars. It's not that a Tesla is a bad idea, it's just that the idea that millions of young people with no real assets are going to buy them is a fantasy.
I would suggest that it's roughly as silly as saying pretty soon all the millenials are going to be driving 5 and 7 series BMWs. Not unless those cars come down in price by 80%-90% or everyone somehow magically gets rich AND there's no inflation.
Sure you do. I could expect at absolute most a 25% pay raise if I moved to CA. Its not worth it. The ratio in cost of living might be 10:1 but the ratio in income is more like 5:4 or so.
Housing affordability is a major problem in almost every developed country.
Sometimes it doesn't feel that way, at least according to people here on HN. I live in an apartment block which looks like this (https://www.google.com/search?q=bucharest+communist+flats&bi...), where normal people have actually starting physical fights, with fists and police intervention, over parking spots situated between those buildings, there's no way you could, I don't know, somehow charge your car when you live on the 7th floor.
For me this is is one of the big advantages of hydrogen cars i.e. you use them exactly the same as your existing car.
(Those who do have more money and often garage their car, so they'll add charging to long term garages as demand increases.)
In an environment where people only use cars for special trips, not for day-to-day activities, the longer range of gasoline might end up being a bigger advantage than it is for current-day Americans.
Much of a future hydrogen distribution network already exists (we have transportation companies, gas stations etc) all of whom would be more than happy to add a new technology. Just like they have done already with LPG.
The market demanded it, landlords provided it. Keep in mind landlords are in the business of finding ways to deploy capital to increase their rental incomes. That's why they upgrade kitchens and floors - because they can raise rent. Much like air conditioning once was, having an electric car charger certainly seems like an amenity you can charge for.
Except that you can't, because hydrogen tanks can store very little of it(a lead 70kg bottle can store only 1kg of hydrogen), and hydrogen slowly leaks out through any container you could possibly put it into, so after 4-5 weeks of the car standing still you have an empty tank.
If you live in the SF Bay Area: https://us.drive-now.com/
Note: I live in an apartment less than 2 miles from the nearest supercharger in Los Angeles and only 8 miles from work. So, the range is never a problem.
There are cases where users, (ab)using them as you do, got a request to reduce their usage. I guess you didn't trigger any flags.