That is the big 'if' for the majority of population in European cities. Pretty convenient for suburbs though.

Yep, having to charge them at public charging stations is pretty shitty, takes a long time, and a lot of time they're not available to use.

I used to work in a large business building a few years ago, and they had 4 charging stations right next to the main entrance, and having an electric car then was great... the "plebs" would have to park behind the building or in the garage under, and you'd have priority parking infront. Then, the number of electic cars rose to above 4 there, and first 4 that came, parked there, connected the chargers and went to work. If you came 5th, there was nothing you could do, except maybe if you knew one of those 4, politely ask them to move their car during lunch, so you can charge yours too.. but most of the people left their car there until end of work at 3-5h in the afternoon.

Ive charged plenty of times on road trips on both the Tesla and Electrify America networks. Charge time is usually under 20-30 at places and times I’d already be stopping to use the bathroom and stretch my legs.

In regards to the chargers in your work garage: most modern charge systems let you set idle fees. If you install anything worthwhile you could easily configure it so people have to move after their car has been sitting fully charged for an hour.

Plenty of apartment buildings don't have a dedicated powerpoint per parking spot.

This can be fixed but in the meantime it is a significant cost for the building. And you bet that early adopters putting in regular powerpoints will be trumped by later installs of dedicated, secured charging stations.

I am not jumping to an EV any time soon.

> And you bet that early adopters putting in regular powerpoints

A 110V AC outlet is completely inappropriate and inadequate for charging a BEV; for example, it would take three days of nonstop charging to charge my car from a 110V outlet.

BEV automakers include the 110V adapter as an emergency stopgap more than anything else - I suppose they intend it to be used to help you get to a DC charger: but even assuming I'm no more than 100mi from a Supercharger then I still need to be plugged-in to 110V for at least 24 hours to get the 30kWh level I'd need to travel 100mi - and who is going to let someone borrow a days' worth of 1-2kWh electricity like that?

Could an apartment building even support say 50% or 75% of a typical sized apartments buildings parking garage's worth of 'supercharger' like installs? Later on times a whole cities worth of apartment buildings.

I'm not familiar with this field but I'd imagine this would take some special arrangement with the power companies. But so far that seems to be the only solution at the moment.

Without apartment buildings offering this I don't see how it could be widely deployed without changing how cities are built and transportation is deployed. Even if all the buildings offloaded to external Uber-style autonomous fleets they need to be charged somewhere and at a massive volume. And in my city 90% of new housin development for the last two decades seems to be on apartment buildings.

Preface: DC fast-charging is "Level 3". A 240V ("clothes dryer connector" in the US) or hardwired wall-connector is "Level 2" and in the US is typically 15-50A - if you have a modern home with plenty of free 'leccy panel spots then you can do 90A. A slow 110V or low-amperage 240V (for outside North America) is considered "Level 1". The supply of DC fast chargers is not open to the public at all: only Tesla and a tiny number of third-parties maintain Level 3 infrastructure, and they all require outhouse-sized transformer units for each car space, separate from the car-connector part.

---------

Level 3 / DC fast-charging is not intended for long-term and repetitive use: it's only intended for road-trips and that's it - that's because DC fast-charging is bad for your battery.

I primarily charge at home using my 90A wall-connector - but I still rate-limit the charging to ~60A to help conserve the health of my battery-pack. Not that it matters much: since Covid and WFH my driving has dropped drastically, from ~30,000mi/yr to less than 5,000mi in 2020, and less than 1,000mi so far in 2021. (I got my Model X in 2018 and it's still got under 20,000 miles on it, lol).

But you raise an excellent point about apartment complexes and parking-lots not being able to feed dozens or more charging spaces. Yes, it's a problem, and no, I don't see a viable long-term solution.

Other than apartments, cities like London, etc, have built car charger ports into streetlamps so people with street-parking can charge their car at Level 2 speeds using that pre-existing infrastructure - I'm unsure to what extent it's a public-private-partnership vs. public, but the opportunity to profit from car-charging infrastructure means pushing the cost-per-mile up above the cost of gasoline/petrol - which undermines the economic-and-environmental benefits of BEVs (especially when you consider the dreaded fuel-tax on petrol will eventually be extended to electricity if governments don't introduce usage-based road taxes). It'll be mess, methinks.

Also, everything is terrible.

> if you have a modern home with plenty of free 'leccy panel spots then you can do 90A.

How so? J1772 itself maxes out at 80A, and I don't even know of any production EVs that support that: most max out at 48A or lower. And even for Tesla's connector, the highest I've ever seen (which isn't even offered anymore) was 72A.

> And even for Tesla's connector, the highest I've ever seen (which isn't even offered anymore) was 72A.

The wall-connector in my garage has a 90A sticker put on it by the state-licensed electrician who installed it - and I can drag the rate-limit slider in my car's UI up to (and beyond) 90A. I'd take a picture and post it to show you, but HN is famously text-only.

Yes. In the South of the United States most apartments have individual aircon units with a 40-60A 240v draw that run nearly around the clock during the summer. It would not be unreasonable to imagine simply doubling the service to an apartment building and running a large deployment of level 2 destination chargers.

Yes, it would be unreasonable. Electrical equipment doesn't scale proportionally to power levels. It might cost 10 times as much to install a 480V connection than it does to install a 240V connection.

OTOH, plenty of people are getting along fine with 120V. Yes it would take days to charge from zero. But the average person drives 37 miles a day, and a 120V plugin can replenish 37 miles overnight.

I wanted to buy a Tesla and I asked my apartment building management about getting a charging spot. They have 12 spots already (it's a 150 unit building), and they're all taken...and they can't install more unless they run new lines direct from a power station 2 miles away and install $100k of equipment to receive it. So they said no.

Now maybe that is bad planning on their part, but I'd bet they're far from the only building in town that didn't build to accommodate a rapid growth in EVs.

I agree that apartments are CURRENTLY a problem.

But we're talking about a centralized high-density residential building vs sprawled out suburbia. It HAS to be easier to setup electrical charging en masse in an apartment building.

Once your downtown hi-rise loses market competitiveness b/c you DON'T have charging, it will change VERY quickly. The charging infrastructure will be a capital outlay with depreciation and there is about a 99% chance there will be some decent government and utility subsidies that come with it.

I agree none of that (the market force or the subsidies) exist currently, but I'm guessing in three years it will be happening.