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.
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).
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.
This a huge problem. They mainly want to install them to gouge people. To attract people it needs done at cost.
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...
https://up.codes/viewer/california/ca-green-code-2016/chapte...
I think the requirements should be higher, but this is a start.
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.
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.
https://www.vox.com/2014/6/27/5849280/why-free-parking-is-ba...
Which doesn't require that every single unit has parking.
> you ensure the parking problem becomes someone else's problem
It just becomes an attribute on the listing. This house has 3 bedrooms and parking. This house has 2 bedrooms and no parking.
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.
Carrying 2-5-6-7-8-10kg is quite easy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 :-)
Thankfully, I intervened when great grand parent comment said the above.
Ba-dum-tss?
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 $3000 or more.
This is an easy problem to solve.
Here in The Netherlands, we get charged about 0.33 euro per kWh (= 0.40 US$), and that's for overnight charging of cars, where you typically draw no more than 11 kW.
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.
My household electricity is about 30% cheaper so it's a pretty good deal.
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.
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
Percentiles 20%: 2700 40%: 4800 50%: 6000 60%: 7000 80%: 10500 90%: 14000 95%: 17000
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.
It seems like your intuitions are correct for your country, and mine are correct for mine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is legislation on your side in California now. It's even called "right to charge!"
They'll figure it out when start losing leases.
The task is possible, but gargantuan.
How is that making it worse?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/national-planning-policy-framewo...
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
chargepoint, blink, evgo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_network
My (US-based) experience:
- chargepoint is a good service - people own the chargers, but they can be public or private.
- blink is a terrible service - people own the chargers but in my experience the fast public ones are always broken.
- evgo is a good service - they own the chargers but will install high-kw fast chargers and slow chargers at every location.
> 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.
* [1] https://www.tesla.com/commercial-charging
* https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/02/tesla-launching-commerc...
As long as there is a free market to buy/sell addresses, we'll never run out of them.
That's about half a year away!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrgH07lwfVM
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.
But this is far from the norm, unfortunately.
It does not destroy the Earth. It rearranges the furniture. Drastically
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.
There is no "do A or do nothing at all". It's always "do A or do B". So there is always an opportunity cost.
Do you think people living near coal mines or fracking sites or whatever have it any better?
Do you think that if we didn't mine lithium we'd all become noble savages* again and live in peace with nature?
The objective is to minimize harm, choose the lesser of two evils.
* This is a myth, by the way.
We're producing 77.000 tons of lithium a year.
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...