CA should give the rental property owners an economic incentive to preemptively install the infrastructure. It's a very real barrier to adoption when you can't assume your next apartment will be able to charge your car immediately upon move-in.
Your apartment does provide you with a minimum standard of infrastructure to run electrical appliances however, and it's not ridiculous or unbelievable for you to expect it.
I think what you're missing is EVs have turned the automobile into another consumer electronics appliance. It's an oversized smartphone on wheels, surveillance features and all.
My apartment doesn't provide a hookup for my MIG/TIG welder, and I'd be hard pressed to say whether more people own welders or EVs. Besides, more people drive gas powered cars, and like you conveniently ignored, very few apartments provide on-site gas pumps either.
How many Americans have EVs is largely irrelevant. We're talking about California, and the figure of interest would be current and future California tenants having personal automobiles. This is about faciliating a future of widespread EV adoption in California.
If tenants can reliably expect @home charging, even if it's just at a relatively low-current overnight pace, it turns the EV ownership story into substantially better than ICE vehicles.
You're arguing as if we shouldn't be exceeding the quality and convenience of the existing ICE vehicle ownership experience. The whole point is EVs enable a better situation because electricity isn't gasoline, and you can (and already do) have it dispensed out of your outlets at home.
Without taking advantage of this difference, unless we get EVs that can charge in a matter of minutes at the "pump", I'm afraid they won't substantially displace ICEs.
Are you saying that since there's an agenda to reduce vehicle ownership altogether we shouldn't reduce barriers to EV ownership? That will only result in more ICE vehicle ownership, which is an absolute disaster from a climate change environmental crisis mode perspective.
A significant factor with vehicles is they have a long servicable lifetime. Every year we drag on with people buying ICE vehicles instead of EVs is followed by decades of those additional ICE vehicles burning fossil fuels.
Do you think we can achieve accessible alternative transportation solutions sooner than we can get hookups installed in all the already electrified rentals for EVs already available on the market? I don't think so.
The problem is it costs $500 for the meter plus labor (add another $1k for the charger and labor to hook the charger to the meter).
So, we can discuss who is best incentivized to cover the fixed installation costs, but the "free gas" argument is irrelevant -- you just add the dedicated meter to your account.
We're getting enough solar on the grid that every spring we choose not to generate massive amounts of otherwise free electricity during the day.
Rather than having stationary grid storage, dumping that the cars of people who are at work will provide a huge amount of grid flexibility.
I'm not a huge fan of parking requirements in code, but it's a simple addition to require chargers for X% of the spots. The second part of the challenge is getting payment structures in place.
Ideally utilities would be pushing forward with their own scheme so that charging would go directly to your usual utility bill. That way there's no middleman taking an extra 30% - 100% cut on the cost of the electricity, it reuses a convenient billing channel, and it also lets the utility start to do demand response to manage their oversupply of renewables.
But utilities are both too short-sighted and boneheaded to realize that this could be a major win for them. They ought to be paying more attention because increased efficiency is decreasing demand for prior electricity loads.
It's a major investment in infrastructure, this is the reality of EVs.
I don't know how street parking gets handled at all, it almost requires wireless charging through the asphalt activated by simply parking over it.
edit:
At least until car batteries can be recharged as quickly as a gas tank is filled, then this is largely a non-issue. We're not there yet are we?
Now who do I have to nag to get laws passed compelling landlords to install charging infrastructure for tenants?
This is my main barrier to replacing my antique with an EV; most of the rentals I'm likely to occupy will not have access to charging.