My problem is renting apartments. If you ask the strata or the building managers about charging points in the carpark, they look at you like you're speaking Klingon.
This is true of even very recently completed buildings in well-off areas of relatively wealthy western countries. Heck, I just walked past three Teslas in my building's car park, one of which is new and wasn't there last week!
Do people... not plan ahead? Do architects not read the news? Are they from another planet where electricity delivery is not a problem that architects have to deal with in building design?
Mind you, I got the exact same dumbfounded stare from people when talking to cafe managers and gym owners about the impending COVID lockdowns back in February 2020: "Lock...down...? You think so? Really? Here?" (Don't think IT is spared from this, I get the same vacant expression when I talk to network engineers about IPv4 exhaustion and the need for IPv6.)
On a more practical note, I have business idea that might interest the YC News crowd: The main problem raised by building managers I spoke to was that it was "too hard" to solve charge-back and the like. Wiring is "easy", that's just a matter of calling out contractor, but organising the billing of the tenant and then splitting the revenue between the various parties involved is more work for them than it is worth, because it is complex to set up but initially there may be only a couple of electric cars generating very little revenue. An "electric charging billing" cloud service that manages everything with low overheads might sell well...
A staggering amount of buildings are built to code, and nothing more. If code says that there needs to be 1.5 parking spaces per bedroom for the complex, and the complex has 80 bedrooms, you can bet there will be 120 parking spots.
Apartment managers will be dragged kicking and screaming into offering chargers for cars. The best way to get chargers into apartment buildings is going to be a local mandate that they have a charger per X units.
I disagree with this. Retro installs maybe, yes. But new construction, which I consult heavily on, most of the developers I work with are motivated to install them. They’re revenue sources and attract the kind of tenants they want occupying their new building.
The answer to retro installs (which is always about money anyway) is to not force the hand of property owners, but make the install cost a no brainer with tax rebates and subsidies. Regulation in this regard would just cause negative effects I think, IF it ever passed a public vote (Cali maybe, but not much of the rest of the country).
My city is building tons of new apartments clearly meant for commuters to the nearby big cities and exactly zero of them have EV chargers despite being the most expensive apartments in town. I'm not holding my breath that new construction will do this all that soon, either.
I agree it's probably not so bad even for retrofits - 70% of housing in the US is SFH or a duplex (https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/housing-statistics). Getting a charging solution for those units seems achievable. I'm also willing to bet that multifamily housing is generally massively over represented in blue cities, which might be able to require/incentives retrofits. That's a huge marketable population to start buying electric vehicles and normalize them. I suspect that by the time there is significant used electric market there will also be enough market and political demand to figure out the multi-family situation.
Subsidies are the way to do this. The government should be highly motivated to spur transition to EVs for carbon emissions, and what is holding back almost everyone except Tesla is charging infrastructure.
Cities where concentrated apartments reside have the double whammy of pointless carbon emissions in traffic jams and smog.
Identifying lobbying groups with common interest in this would lead me to the mainline auto industry, especially GM and Ford. They need a charging infrastructure build pronto to compete with Tesla and its Supercharger network. This would probably be related, since city drivers are younger and more likely to buy an EV.
Such is American Politics that you have to lobby the lobbying groups to get anything done.
I was looking at a few new apartment in london that are just completing construction. The amount of charging points I personally was able to find is big fat zero.
With the rare exception for when the expected marketing value of having those spots or tax subsidies make installing them appear to have a positive value.
The exception that definitely proves the rule. Until it's mandatory in new construction it won't even start to become normal.
I'm curious how street parking is supposed to work, that photo is hilarious but I imagine that on the streets of Boston where you'll get hit with a bat over trying to save a parking spot (or trying to use a saved parking spot, it's Boston in the winter).
I have the feeling you're going to see better adoption in suburbs and lower density urban areas first because the range doesn't need to be so high but it's also not impossible to have a consistent parking space (or garage or driveway) that you can invest in improving. I'd probably have to get a special variance from the city to install an outlet in the sidewalk...
A bit off topic, but your example of parking spots probably isn't the best. There's been some calls to lower the kinda ludicrous parking requirements mandated by local authorities
If the efforts to reduce parking requirements succeed, you can be sure that more units will be built with no parking lots at all (Profit$). We are seeing this in Portland where 20 unit apartment buildings are getting built with zero parking (or maybe 10 spaces available for additional rent). The end result, for now at least, is 30-40 more cars parked in the surrounding streets.
I lived in London where new buildings are required to be zero parking - the thinking is that the roads are already congested enough and so anything that encourages bringing more cars in is bad for the city. It's a pretty good approach IMO, though I guess you need to combine it with something like Tokyo's rule that you can't buy a car unless you can show you have a parking space to register it to.
Right, and this is typically in the form of a planning condition where residents waive their right to cheap on-street parking (ie: no resident’s parking permits). Smaller Central London buildings typically wouldn’t provide off-street parking anyway, there just isn’t space!
Large, luxury developments often do still provide parking facilities, even in Central London. Transport for London sometimes makes attempts to get these reduced in size or eliminated, but hasn’t always succeeded.
London transition should focus on running a good, reliable system at low cost. London isn't the worst in the world, but they seem to be trying to be the most expensive.
The planning goal seems to be focused on a future where remote vehicles are summoned to convey the inhabitant 'on demand' from what I've heard. Permissions based travel with costs associated for emissions etc...
> If the efforts to reduce parking requirements succeed, you can be sure that more units will be built with no parking lots at all
I'm having trouble seeing the problem here. :)
Y'know what's even better for the environment than electric cars? No cars! I realize that living in California without a car is going to be difficult, but if you can manage it, you shouldn't have to pay for other people's parking spaces.
Can confirm, I lived in one of those apartments, now I'm very happy in a suburb. It's nice to be able to haul groceries to your place without walking 4 blocks from the car for each load.
Typically in such neighborhoods in Europe the grocery store is no further than 4 blocks away, so you just walk and don't use a car. It works since the store doesn't have parking minimums either so don't take a lot of space, even if it is a fairly large one.
Carrying 35kg of groceries sucks. Especially when it rains. Personally, I drive 2km to a larger store with underground parking instead of visiting the store two blocks away.
People don't carry around 35kg of groceries each time they go to the local supermarket. They buy a tiny bit of what they need each day, walking back from home/school, since it takes so little time and often it's on the way, anyway.
I've had a frustrating form of this conversation with so many Americans. The concept of buying less than 40L of soda at a time, because presumably they drink many liters per day, is hard to overcome for some.
They literally will not believe that it is possible to but a days worth of groceries every day, and get fresh, quality food.
But the more people saying that it can be done, and is a superior way to shop, the more likely we will convince them finally.
You're really comparing apples to oranges because the majority of Americans don't live within reasonable walking distance to a grocery store to begin with. Depending on where you live, it's not uncommon to take 15-20+ minutes to drive to the closest store.
With the return trip time + parking, you can see how it's much more sensible to plan your shopping ahead of time to optimize for the fewest amount of trips possible.
Even if you currently live in a borderline walkable area, there's a solid chance you grew up in an area where driving to the store was a norm and thus contributes to the decision to walk vs drive.
Agreed on the design of most grocery store in the US. Most people can't stop in quick on a normal daily walk, because the inherent space-inefficiency of cars means a long detour to hit multiple stops, whereas with walking it's an easy in-and-out grab.
However, even when patiently explaining this difference, it is a mental leap too far to consider any change. Not only is it the physical design of the stores and car-only infrastructure, a lot of it has to do with package sizing and pricing structure, as another poster pointed out; smaller quantities get massive markups in US stores, for no good reason other than once they've got you in a store, you're fairly captive and they want to extract the maximum amount of money from you so that you don't end up elsewhere.
Until people experience it, and realize that having a five person family is no challenge at all for this style of life, it's hard to give them the picture.
In most American cities, going to the grocery store is kind of a pain. You have to drive somewhere, usually at least a mile or two. You have to find some place to park and walk across a huge parking lot. The store itself will be huge, if you're just getting three things you have to trek all the way across the store to retrieve them. And the lines at the checkout can be bad.
As I mentioned in another comment, I had the opportunity to live for a year in a very walkable neighborhood, with an excellent grocery store. It was convenient, it was small, the food was high quality, checkout was lightning fast. I found myself going there nearly every day and it was wonderful.
But once I needed to move back to a more car-centered city, the idea of doing this became once again unthinkable. Far too big of a chore to do daily.
Indeed, for a year I had the chance to live five minutes' walk from an excellent grocery store. It was right across the street from the yoga studio where I practiced, and on my way between home and work. There were lots of automated checkouts and the store was very efficiently run.
Previously, the idea of going to the grocery store every day had sounded like terrible tedium -- but I found myself doing it and it was wonderful.
There’s usually also the option of having stuff delivered. The heaviest items are drinks and getting those delivered has the additional benefit of getting them brought to the doorstep. Costs a bit more, but not owning a car offsets that easily. Friends just call a cab for their monthly large shopping.
Some people have a couple of kids, and need more groceries that can be done that way. Some times there is this thing called "inclement weather" which means it rains 2-3 days in a row and makes doing this miserable. Or you work a double shift and are too tired to get groceries, or you work 2nd shift and everything is closed on the way back except convenience stores. Or you get sick and can't actually go out to get food for a few days.
There's so much of a bubble here sometimes. Narrow minded...dude, not everyone is a single, childless, wealthy knowledge worker that can waste their time to do this.
I have kids and deal with inclement weather - it’s been a mix of rain and snow for most of the last couple of days. Granted, I’m a knowledge worker, but shops are open until midnight in the neighborhood and worst case, both of the large supermarket chains here deliver until late with prearranged slots.
For the majority of (urban) people it’s definitely manageable. More than 50% of all households in central Berlin own no car, numbers rising.
I used to own a car, and the tipping point from “I can’t do that” to “no problem to do that” was selling the car. It’s an acquired habit for most of us. I now own an umbrella and a good waterproof jacket instead.
I have kids. I know a lot of people that have kids. Again, narrow mindedness.
You don't just go to buy STRICTLY what you need today. You buy something like 10% over each time. Within several weeks of shopping you'll have a full fridge, heck, even a full pantry.
Then you only need to top up when you go each day. And I'm being generous, you can go every 2-3 days, even.
There are comfortable solution, you need two things:
1. An environment that helps (most European cities).
2. A bit of planning/flexibility/smarts.
If you don't have 1. you're dead in the water, from the start. If you don't have 2., well... get them :-)
It's going to be very hard to apply that mandate to existing construction. I feel like the best way to move forward is for charging companies like EVgo or Chargepoint (or a new HN company!) to approach building owners, install pay per use chargers for free, and offer the building owners a 10% cut of the charging revenue.
> A staggering amount of buildings are built to code
A staggering amount of buildings are also NOT built to code. My smoke detector failed and isn't getting replaced for a whole week. My heater makes scraping noises every time it starts and maintainence thinks it's normal. Smack in the middle of Silicon Valley.
But this is the best of what I could afford. It's decent. It's clean. Everything else I saw at my budget was worse. One apartment I saw was $2400 for a 1-bedroom and had the toilet paper holder was bolted to the wall right above a red hot heating element recessed in the wall with a grill. Needless to say I didn't rent there.
Want an apartment that is built to code? It'll cost you $3000 or more.
The valley is well known for not building enough, thus allowing this to happen. You can find apartments like that in any city, but it will be the bad part of town and rent will be in the 500 range.
housing in the US is just not that great for the thing right in the center of the national psyche: cookie cutter designs with no attention to the environment, low-quality constructions, apartments with zero soundproofing (no wonder everyone wants a house) and then the laws that force people to keep antiquated structures around for way longer than reasonable.
Why are people so numbskulled to downvote this - A guy sharing his firsthand experience? Let me guess, everyone on HN in SV lives in a fancy multistorey condo overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge? /s
I'm in China where everybody rides ebikes and my building has a free for all parking space where 2/3rds of the parks have no chargers and the spots with charge ports all have qr codes you scan and pay with wechat to turn the port on.
Here in The Netherlands, we get charged about 0.33 euro per kWh (= 0.40 US$), and that's for overnight charging of cars, where you typically draw no more than 11 kW.
How does that compare to your household €/kWh? I appreciate there's a value-add, just seems a lot compared to mine (£0.12something).
I suppose if expect to pay roughly a day's standing charge, plus the kWh used. I'd rather pay for it like that than roll it together and have my overnight charge subsidise someone else's 30min top-up.
WeChat is just how things are paid for here, obviously the solution would not rely on WeChat in any other country. In Australia you'd just tap your credit card.
Of course it is easy. You can just pay with a credit card or mobile payment etc. like is already done when paying for parking. Even easier, the charging around where I live you have an account and a card and you just swipe and charge and the bank transfers the money monthly. Solved many years ago. The only thing that isn't all the way solved is the massive drain charging lots of cars at the same time can induce.
An electrobike is a substantially lower electrical load than an electrocar. Many existing residential buildings can't handle adding a EV charging spot per unit (probably needs a 100A breaker each).
A Tesla gets about 3 miles from 1kWh. Average car in the UK does 140 miles a week, or 50kWh, or about 1kW of constant draw for 8 hours a night, or 4 amps. That's not an excessive amount compared with peak morning usage when everyones showers and dishwashers are starting.
The four-amp draw in your calculations provides the user a 12-mile operating radius each day. Somewhat to my original point: an electrobike is a much lower load than an electrocar!
This might be acceptable on average; theory in practice are the same in theory, but in practice they differ. A real-world user will require the ability to fully charge his electrocar on occasion, which means the fullbore 240V connection and a 100A breaker (potentially a 50A breaker depending on vehicle).
Assuming that every user follows average patterns will break the system.
Taking this idea out further, it speaks to infrastructure upgrades that will be necessary in order to power all of these electrocars. Estimates vary by region, power generation from automobiles as a fraction of total is somewhere between 10% and 30%, which exceeds both the spare capacity of the electric grid in aggregate, as well as often exceeding local transmission capabilities.
All-in-all, the costs of electrocar adoption are nonlinear: the first few percent of the population who adopt don't have to deal with the structural problems: a 100-unit condominium building can add two or three 240V chargers, the local grid can handle a handful of vehicles. At scale, however, major infrastructure upgrades will be required.
One of my cars does 30 miles a day and is in the driveway from 1600-0730, so needs 10kwH in 15 hours, or a draw of 700W. 10 years ago the lights in my house drew about 700W.
The other car does 6 miles 3 times a week and is in the driveway almost all the time.
Sure, there are whales that do 300 miles a week, but that's not most people.
Looking at a sample of about 13 million vehicles that passed MOT tests in both 2018 and 2019, and thus reported the milage
Lets assume that's all commuting over 5 days a week, 47 weeks a year. That means in an average 12 hour night:
20% of cars would need less than 11 miles of charge, or 4kWh -- 350W
Another 20% of cars would need less than 21 miles of charge, or 7kWh -- 600W
Another 20% of cars would need less than 10kWh -- 850W
Another 20% of cars would need less than 15kWh -- 1.25kW
Another 15% of cars would need 24kWh -- 2kW
All of that is less than a kettle, an average 13A plug is more than enough.
Now if those mileages include many people doing long distance drives at weekends and not regular commuting, the actual top-up needed every night isn't anywhere near as much. Some cars will do lots of miles at the weekend and need to draw the full 3kW out of a standard socket, sure. My kettle doesn't have an issue with doing that. For every car needing that full charge on a Sunday and during the rest of the week, there's a dozen that don't. OK, your battery might be down to 10% on Sunday night, but then you charge it to 20% for Monday morning, drop to 17% after your commute, charge to 27% Tuesday, and so on.
100A, or even 60A, house breakers aren't going to have an issue with keeping 95% of cars topped up, so you're at the next level. On the rare occasion you need to fully recharge really quickly, go to a specialist location with a 20kW+ charger. The data shows that most people won't need that most of the time.
Looking at newer cars -- ones made in 2016 (and thus having first MOT in 2019), you'd think they'd have a higher mileage. And they do, median is 8400, and 80%ile is 13,300, 95% 22700 -- about 30% higher in each bracket, but that's still well within a home charge range, even for the 95%ile, and only 1 in 4 cars are new enough to be in that category, so median mileage of all cars would be under 7,000 miles a year range.
You're right there's a grid level problem -- the dip in power generation in the UK overnight is about 10GW, which could sustain about 14 million cars - not too great when there's more than twice that needing power.
Assuming that in a given area cars are distributed fairly evenly as above, with some cars needing 24kWh a night, but others needing 4kWh, the average overnight draw would still only be 700W, that doesn't feel like it's going to trip neighbourhood substations, but further upstream could be problems.
Commutes in your United Kingdom are much shorter than commutes in the United States. Average USA mileage is 13,500 miles, close to your 90th percentile.
It seems like your intuitions are correct for your country, and mine are correct for mine.
Widespread charging points in newly constructed parking areas will happen when required by building code and enforced by local governments; and likely not one minute before.
The construction industry is brutally competiive and cost-centric; things are included because they are required or because of customer demand, almost never just because they are a good idea.
Construction companies (on average) don't look further than the point of sale. It doesn't matter if a poorly chosen element of design in an apartment building will potentially affect thousands of people over the course of decades, the incentive/risk structure just doesn't exist to make forward thinking decisions.
Its basically got to be in the building code or (almost) no one will do it.
I can relate to that kind of frustration but at the end of the day nobody plans ahead further. For various reasons, to be fair not even EV consumers and producers look much further speaking of ecological risks from the supply chain. It's a gamble anyway, hoping that EVs will not only look great on the surface. But that depends also on scientific progress, production and engineering capabilities.
On the other hand if EVs gets serious mass adoption outside of Scandinavia, I bet upgradeability of building infrastructure will become a topic and companies will make money by selling some sort of upgrade solution for properties.
> Do people... not plan ahead? Do architects not read the news?
Neither the architect, nor the developer, nor the landlord are the beneficiaries of charger infrastructure. They aren't going to spend money on it until they absolutely have to.
Given the decade of record-low vacancy rates in coastal metros, if a lack of an electric charger is a deal-breaker for you, they will shrug their shoulders, and move on to the next applicant. To them, you are the product, not the customer - the customer is the bank that underwrites their loans, that they use to buy/build more properties, backed by cashflow from tenants.
They certainly aren't going to put dollars down today, to meet demand that will come a decade from now. The entire business model of being a residential landlord is spending every penny you have on acquiring more property to lease - not making long-term investments into existing property.
If you're looking for someone to blame, blame cheap availability of credit, or your local municipality for not updating their building codes to require electric chargers [1].
[1] The reason they haven't updated their building codes is because in my experience, 8 times out of 10, municipal politics is completely dominated by landlords and developers. Those groups of people are the most affected by municipal law, so they have a huge vested interest in making sure government is looking out for their financial interests.
> Do people... not plan ahead? Do architects not read the news?
They do read the news, but there's still plenty of news that EV is still largely powered by coal and also something about lithium mining (while never ever talking about other minig issues, particularly oil), therefore we should use hydrogen (which will need more electricity, but we skip over that) or synthetic fuels (which will need crazy amounts of electricity, but we won't mention that) and that'll be the future.
Of course you can read the other news, the ones that correctly point out that between EV, hydrogen and synfuels EV has the vast advantage of being much more efficient, and that will never change, because physics. But you can pick and choose your news, and if you would prefer the news that tell you nothing changes you may just decide to trust those.
My problem is renting apartments. If you ask the strata or the building managers about charging points in the carpark, they look at you like you're speaking Klingon.
There is legislation on your side in California now. It's even called "right to charge!"
Despite that law, it can still be difficult to get a charger installed if the property owner or HOA is against it. In some cases the electrical work requires trenching across a parking lot to a carport, or upgrading the electrical system in a parking garage. Those costs need to be borne by the tenants if they are exercising their rights under this law.
How do people with gas cars handle living in apartments without gasoline lines? They go to a gas station. So the tipping point is when you can take a 300-mile range car and quick-charge it in 5 - 10 minutes. Or when it is profitable enough to have charging ports at destinations (parking garages in the cities, credit-card swipe charging outlets at the mall, chargers at the office, etc).
Quick charging is a just in case solution and probably shouldn’t be relied on. It’s more efficient and likely much easier on the battery to slow charge it overnight.
The problem with that is that in many places (i.e. most European cities) you don't have a dedicated parking spot, so to park overnight you would need to put charging spots on every street every five meters.
Those exist in the Netherlands too, but the problem is that those spots are now _exclusive_ to EVs. An ICE car is not allowed to park there. I live in an area where >95% of parking spots are occupied on a given night. The current approach is, at least for the time being, only making it worse.
For those people it's a matter of buying a number of chargers that they can choose between.
They can limit access to those chargers to the people living in the building or allow anyone to use them and make some money by selling the electricity. You can even have access control depending on the time of day.
Another benefit is that you get load balancing when many people are charging at the same time.
Private chargers are only a good idea if you there's only a few living spaces.
I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. Workplaces (if they come back) will get charging first. More chargers will be added to apartments, fast charging will improve.
This is certainly location-dependent. I just went through an apartment search in San Francisco where one of my requirements was electric car charging. Yes of course SF is tech-forward, but most buildings are fifty years or older which makes installation of a charger non-trivial. I just signed a lease for an apartment that doesn’t have a car charger, but the property manager added an amendment which stipulated that one will be installed in a few months, otherwise I’m free to break from the lease. I’d say about half of the property managers I talked to across about 15 tours were amenable to it.
I had to pay a large (too large) an amount to purchase an extra parking space when I bought my condo. I personally didn't need the space all the time, but guests to the condo didn't have to hunt for parking on the street in an area with busy nightlife. I figured that when I sold the condo the parking space would raise the value of the condo, maybe not enough to make up for the cost but enough to be worth having the parking spot and it's convenience.
It turned out that in the building there were owners of units with two cars but only one space that wanted to rent unused parking spots. I didn't do this but there were posting where condo owners could find people to pay for the right to use otherwise unused parking.
All this seems a bit off topic, but couldn't electric chargers be handled the same way. Pay for the cost of a charger to be installed in one's designated parking spot and "resell" the improvement to the next condo owner. One could even allow others to use the charger while being reimbursed for the electricity. Of course being the owner of a unit in a condo building isn't the same as leasing an apartment and dealing with a large company that owns the apartment building.
I've random workers from a restaurant nearby parking in my unused space (in a private enclosing) all the time. And my parking space even require a special card to use.
It would be nice if they offered to pay.
I reported them to the police, but I haven't heard about them fining them and they don't stop using it.
A neighbour used the parking space once and my landlord that was passing by reported her and she got a fine.
What I can't stand about the police here in UK is that it's so inconsistent.
Having a charger I get charged for would be an absolute nightmare.
As others have mentioned, Teslas charge at their fast chargers (and getting faster all the time) spread around the area. Other cars can do the same, or at workplaces.
Some new building codes now mandate that the parking be charging ready, so they have to put the conduit under the pavement, but they don’t need to wire it right away. So that’s a first step to simplifying a retro-install.
I do think apartment parking will eventually be retrofitted. The charging networks could easily have a apartment product—or license their network access to a manufacturer. So you would just use your charging network app or card as when charging around town. There are also products like Evercharge that split the power from a single circuit across several plugged in cars (optimizing power usage and reducing the need
for conduits and wiring).
The various EV promoters have been tackling this issue for a while, something like the Electric Auto Association may have people or resources to help convince an apartment owner.
I wonder: shouldn’t a grid with lots of solar incentivize workplace charging (day-time use of peak generation), and a grid with wind majority incentivize home charging (night-time use of peak generation)? Maybe
> This is true of even very recently completed buildings in well-off areas of relatively wealthy western countries
In the UK planning guidelines say that charging stations have to be provided, have done for a while
110. Within this context, applications for development should:
...
(e) be designed to enable charging of plug-in and other ultra-low emission vehicles in safe, accessible and convenient locations.
Locally planning permissions in my area (I'm a local councillor and have to view them all) for new houses have come with power for some years
The larger problem we'll see as we move away from petrol based cars is people in old terraces that park on narrow streets. The options are
1) Remove parking space to put in chargers
2) Remove footpath to put in chargers (won't pass muster in my council area at the moment, fortunatly)
3) Not do anything until after new petrol cars are banned and hope that something magically comes along
So no one has said this yet, but a lot of people charge their cars at work. I don't know if you're in the US but in my experience this seems like a east coast phenomenon. Lots of electric chargers in bay area, seattle and generally urban areas on the west coast.
"Lots" is still relative though. A large employer near me has something like 50 chargers available in their lot. Of course, on a normal workday, 8,000 cars are being parked there. If 4,000 of those employees start driving electrics, I'm not sure it would be possible to accommodate them.
Do you really need 4,000 chargers though? I don't think so.
Between charging at home and charging at work, it shouldn't be necessary to occupy the charger every single time you pull in. Maybe once or twice a week, depending on your commute. A long range Model 3 has as much range as your average gasoline vehicle... how often do most people fill that up?
Seems to me if 4000 employees go electric and you can slow charge anywhere from 5-30 miles' worth of power per hour at a worst case scenario and up to 44 at the best, then it stands to reason not everyone has to plug in every single day. In fact, I'd argue most folks would only need to charge up once a week, and for those with very short commutes, once every 2-3 weeks.
I think 250-500 chargers for 4000 vehicles would likely be sufficient to keep everyone charged up and moving around.
Pre-pandemic I was commuting to a large bay area employer. About a ~hundred or so chargers in the parking lots.
The choices were to either arrive very, very early (<8am) or you missed it. Then had to wait until around 4+pm when the early risers started to leave and move the car to a charging spot.
I mostly left after 7pm so it was ok but on days when I had to go at 5pm it was a big problem, didn't have time to get enough charge to get back home.
Also, there's not enough power available to feed all the chargers simultaneously. So when all chargers are used and charging, the power delivery dropped to ~1.5kW. As cars started to get full and stopped drawing power only then power delivery would rise later in the day. So there's no way to install a thousand+ more chargers, there's not enough power delivery available.
I don’t know how anyone is so casual about this. If a charger is only available half the time, I have to plan as if it weren’t there, and then what good is it?
I can run my gas tank down below 1/4 because the Bay Area is littered with 24 hour gas stations; I never have to wait a day to get gas. I’m considering a PHEV, but I can’t buy a BEV until a large majority of apartments (or maybe employers, after WFH ends) have that kind of reliable charging whenever I might need it.
To be honest I'm not casual about it, it's always very stressful if I have to drive the electric car!
I'm ok driving the e-car to work if I know for sure I can stay there until well past 7pm. If there's any chance I might need to leave before 7pm I want to drive my other (not electric) car.
On the few days where I need to leave early and can't drive the gasoline car (because wife needs it), I spend all afternoon stressing about it and walking to the parking lot every 30 minutes to look for empty spots to get the charging started ASAP so I can get home. Not fun.
Imo, this is the single biggest argument that can still be validly made to prevent the mass adoption of EVs.
People, for the most part, are easy to convince when it comes to buying expensive products that promise to reduce the amount of stress in their lives. Not so much for products that they are told will do the opposite though.
I could imagine an opportunity here too. Some places have a bulk buy or business rate for electricity that is cheaper. If a car park has 8k spaces and a meaningful number were electric, it may even justify battery storage to get off peak rates (this may be a stretch), with the employer splitting the saving with staff or pocketing the lot.
I don't see why it would be a big deal. First, my employer doesn't buy me gas so I don't see why they'd charge my EV. Expecting this to be the norm may have unintended side effects. Second, power outlets in parking lots are reasonably common in colder cities so that people can plug in their bloc heaters. You don't need a fancy fast charger if you're going to be at work all day.
On the other hand its pretty easy to retrofit car parks with chargers if there is demand for it. My building (which, to be fair, is a new construction highrise in seattle) has ~15% of its carpark with charging capacity and I suspect they could add more if needed.
Tesla has also recently added wi-fi to their existing chargers, and will facilitate payment processing:
> With a growing number of Tesla cars on the road, a Wall Connector can pay for itself over time. Property managers will soon be able to set the price of charging sessions while Tesla handles payments automatically and securely – with no monthly fees. [1]
This is a model similar to what chargepoint offers, though I suspect it will have lower fees as their main goal is to sell more cars.
Perhaps not but we are at the point now where it is not economically viable to buy new IPv4 blocks. Many smaller (and more recently established ISPs) ISPs have given up on buying IPv4 addresses and are now running CG-NAT behind the handful of IPv4 addresses they still own. Even big (especially older) ISPs with large IPv4 blocks are experimenting with CG-NAT (e.g. I know one large ISP who is doing it only for wireless broadband probably because it's a easy test market). Either they're looking at selling part of their blocks (since they could operate out of smaller blocks with CG-NAT if they downsized) or they are genuinely predicting that they will eventually run out of space in their existing blocks--and these blocks are huge.
My ISP runs CGNAT, and they published a report in 2019 predicting that: "Even with CGNAT, we will still exhaust our current IPv4 space in September 2021."
One part of it is that in many urban areas, the intent is to reduce the number of cars, not necessarily provide accommodation for them (gas or electric.)
Glad I stumbled upon your post. The problem is you have all the best ideas and there is only one of you in the world to go around. I will point people to your posts from now on when they have menial solutions to modern problems and hopefully they are self aware enough to get a swift jolt of what the best way to move forward in life looks like.
It seems like car sharing should sort this out. Uber, car share schemes, self-driving cars...the trend seems towards less ownership and more short term use. Having a car sit around for 22 hours a day is a massive waste. These schemes suit cities, exactly where parking is a problem.
What makes it especially weird is that (at least for now - while electric cars are still expensive) putting in chargers will make a big competitive advantage, and a very right kind of it - by attracting wealthier, more responsible tenants that make building a good image, attracting other better tenants and driving up prices... It's a big win for any building.
There are some large drawbacks with the large structure needed to swap the batteries though. Not sure if it'll be that successful in places where people mostly have single family homes.
I think the market has already solved this with companies like E-on and the like solving all the complexity for both public and private charging stations. Perhaps there is still an open market opportunity for this in your local market for entrepreneurs to fill.
The market hasn't solved jack untill they have actually installed enough chargers to support at least 50% EV ownership. Untill then the jury is still out, so please don't claim that the probelm is solved and we can rest easy because 'muh market'
Let me clarify that the “solved problem” I was referring to was that of the complexity for the building owners if they thought the only solution was to roll their own charging and billing solution.
It is so incredibly varied as well. Some municipalities, like Burnaby, are leading the charge (pun intended) requiring all new buildings to have stalls wired for EVSEs.
Here in East Palo Alto there are a number of charging stations at the shopping mall. I don't know what the markup is compared to a home charging station.
Lithium mining outrage is a sham. What about the many, many more tons of iron ore, aluminum ore, copper ore, etc., that we're mining? Lithium mining is just a tiny fraction of those.
We're producing ~7800 million tons (!!!) of coal per year.
You're either nitpicking for who knows what reason, or it's a bad faith argument.
Yes, lithium mining is bad for the environment. Yes, it probably sucks to be living in a lithium mining town. Yes, lithium is still the least bad alternative we have. Yes, people in those lithium mining towns should be compensated better and their lives should be improved.
There is nothing we can do as humanity, to absolutely, definitely, not harm someone or something. Life is a compromise and lithium is a huge step up from where we are now.
If you're saying otherwise, then go look up documentaries about coal mining, fracking & shale oil in general.
TL;DR: Lithium mining sucks but not mining any lithium sucks more. In parallel to mining more and more lithium, we should improve the mining process and also improve the lives of communities affected by lithium mining.
This is true of even very recently completed buildings in well-off areas of relatively wealthy western countries. Heck, I just walked past three Teslas in my building's car park, one of which is new and wasn't there last week!
Do people... not plan ahead? Do architects not read the news? Are they from another planet where electricity delivery is not a problem that architects have to deal with in building design?
Mind you, I got the exact same dumbfounded stare from people when talking to cafe managers and gym owners about the impending COVID lockdowns back in February 2020: "Lock...down...? You think so? Really? Here?" (Don't think IT is spared from this, I get the same vacant expression when I talk to network engineers about IPv4 exhaustion and the need for IPv6.)
On a more practical note, I have business idea that might interest the YC News crowd: The main problem raised by building managers I spoke to was that it was "too hard" to solve charge-back and the like. Wiring is "easy", that's just a matter of calling out contractor, but organising the billing of the tenant and then splitting the revenue between the various parties involved is more work for them than it is worth, because it is complex to set up but initially there may be only a couple of electric cars generating very little revenue. An "electric charging billing" cloud service that manages everything with low overheads might sell well...