There are a lot of parallel actions that need to occur. Many many landlords will need to be forced by statute to provide charging facilities. For the many who only have street parking, their mobility and therefore economic productivity will be a problem unless the city and regional transportation dynamics also change. I don't see every lamppost becoming a charger, and there are more parking places than streetlights anyway.

Right, and landlords are not the only barrier either.

To accommodate the larger loads from charging EVs landlords will need larger grid hookups. They’re expensive and utilities don’t just give those out, they build them to sell you more electricity. If none of your tenants own EVs (yet), the utility will still want compensation for their investment regardless. Who provides that is not answered nationally, but by state utility commissions.

There’s lots of parties involved to answer the EV infrastructure question, electrical coops, investor owned utilities, property management companies, utility boards, local, state, and national governments. They all have vastly different incentives and electric car users need them all to walk in lock step to provide adequate EV infrastructure. I don’t see that happening without a serious public mandate, and visionary charismatic leadership.

By the concerns you raise, we need to note that "landlord" covers a lot of ground. There are owners of large buildings, and there are owners of one or two small apartment buildings, and there are owners of grandma's house rented out or one half of a two-family. Each has its own challenge.

Even as a property owner, the wife's car in the driveway put mine in the street.

This is such an understated point, especially on HN! EVs can be great for certain use cases and individuals but, as as renter, do not fit my situation at all.

EVs use energy much more effectively and can be charged from local renewables. The import of petrol and its distribution is also a massive headache in many places. What is likely needed though is a way to charge EVs ar just a couple of hundred watts, to not overload anything.

You need (at current market rates) something in excess of $10k in solar panels to be able to fully charge an EV, plus additional high power charging equipment so that you can get more than a few miles of charge per hour. The other generally available renewable is wind.

Wind generators look like prices are somewhere around a dollar per watt of maximum output once you get beyond low end ~400W outputs. So again you're looking at 10s of thousands of dollars in hardware.

Both Solar and Wind are not continuous generators, so you'll need batteries, which for a reasonable capacity you're looking at more than 10k.

There are micro hydro generators but they all require a reasonable head and flow, and the way they throw around generation figures I couldn't work out when they were talking maximum output vs cumulative output over a day, month, or year (TBF this is a common problem with all discussions I can find about home power generation).

Geothermal generators are out of the question, they're not generally available, and there's no real small scale story that generates power in "I have an EV" quantities that I can find.

Third-tier automakers will keep building ICE cars for developing markets.

Sure, but the point is that EV can be the main focus and ICE can be the 'legacy propulsion' division.

these companies have global supply chains across dozens of countries, multi year contracts with suppliers, many existing locations and tens, if not hundreds of thousands of employees. It's not a videogame, you can't just open a dropdown menu and declare you're now a different company.

Also of course the customers aren't there. EV sales in Japan is 2% of the market, 7% in the US, 15% in Europe and China. Makes no sense to drop everything and ignore 90% of your consumers.

That’s true, which is why countries are enacting new fossil fuel vehicle sales by future deadlines. It gives industry time to reconfigure but also doesn’t let them off the hook to deliver.

Nobody is saying to drop everything. I'm talking about the internal organization of the company.

The used vehicle market is robust. Those swathes can buy secondhand until their infrastructure is brought up to snuff.

Why would car companies leave money on the table like that by shutting out the majority of their customers? Seems like an awful business decision.

The used market will explode in price. It'll be a long time before infrastructure gets where it needs to go.

If I'm an automaker, I'm going to root for all of my competitors to drop internal combustion immediately and have it all to myself.

Even in that setting there's no need for ICE R&D. Just leave the last production line running to eternity.

Meanwhile the rest of the company is free to do the switch.

There are probably a half dozen platforms that we could declare 'good enough' and stop all major R&D in. Maybe some changes to the interior/self driving systems as those are being researched for EVs anyway. Maybe some minor tweaks to the internals as issues are identified at scale. The design and production is good today, and it wouldn't be a major loss if they represent the height of consumer ICE while EVs take over.

A large reason why car manufactures update model lines is to comply with updating emissions, efficiency, and safety regulations. This is the environmental condition that forces major model refreshes.

You’re not going to believe me, but: you can literally just charge an electric car with a 120V outlet.

Generation capacity is also not a problem. The US used to double electricity generation every decade for like three or four decades in a row in the middle of the 20th century. A single doubling would be more than enough to power all electric cars, and there is no way we are going to switch all of them over to electric immediately. It would take 10 years from today if literally not a single new gasoline vehicle was sold in the US and EVs magically boosted production today to compensate. Oh even incredibly optimistically, you’re talking about two decades to transition which is much more time than needed to produce enough electricity. This is not at all the showstopper that folks on the internet claim it is with even a cursory look at historical data.

In fact, electric companies need the additional demand to help justify and pay for building out new clean electricity production. The extra electric demand is essential for preventing a cost spiral as we transition to clean electricity. But again, that is sort of the opposite of what every commentator on the Internet says.

> You’re not going to believe me, but: you can literally just charge an electric car with a 120V outlet.

This is probably not viable for the majority of people. The median commute in the USA is 41 miles round trip. Depending on city/highway miles and driving style, you're looking at 10-14kWh that you need to replace. On a 120v outlet you're looking at 1kW-1.5kW depending on EVSE and your house's wiring, so the window is going to be something like 7-14 hours of plug-in time just to offset your commute. Run some errands, go out for dinner with friends for a few hours, and the battery situation quickly gets dire for the average person (keep in mind that 50% of people have even longer commutes than that!)

(edit: 120v charging is also fairly inefficient, so your 1kw charger may only deliver 800w. I didn't incorporate this in my #s)

A lot of people with shorter distance commutes are also going to be in urban areas, where condos/apartments are more common and you can't just plug into a random 120v outlet safely/legally (some municipalities have legalized running extension cords across the sidewalk but I don't think this is scalable- imagine an apartment building with 100 extension cords running from the street into people's windows).

I think we're a long way from EVs being usable for everyone (although I think EVs are also viable for a lot more situations than people expect- it's just dependent on factors like proximity to L2/L3 charging, whether or not you can charge at work, etc)

You’re at home 12-15 hours per day, and with all the pure BEvs you can get today, you can buffer over the weekend too. 1.2kW gets you 14.4-18kWh. 4 miles per kWh is common for Tesla’s most popular Model 3 and Model Y, and improvements are coming. So 58-72 miles per day and more on the weekend. Much more than enough for the average commute, and you can buffer 250-400 miles. And if you need more, just use Superchargers. Overall you’d STILL spend less time at fast chargers than typically used for gas stations.

Plus destination chargers and charging at work.

This works much better than you might think if you’ve never tried it yourself.

I think the real fun is when we get more than 50% of the way, because the remaining gas-powered things need to have refineries and distributio too, and I have not kept track of what the plastics and other oil-consuming industries will do when gasoline becomes less in demand.

Electric lawn mowers, weed whackers, etc have been around for decades. School buses, utility vehicles, farm equipment (some things that are diesel, too) will all need power. If your combine and harvester require diesel and unit economics drives the price of diesel through the roof, your food will cost somewhat more. As will the cost of delivery. What's the state of electrification of heavy machinery?

Operating cost of tractors and harvesters, etc, may fall dramatically, in fact, as battery powered operation is cheaper than diesel. Same for electric semi trucks.

Covid, a temporary vehicle disruption, caused used vehicles to appreciate in value instead of depreciate. The market is not very robust at all, unless you think paying above sticker price for a used car is something people can do. Keep in mind the people who would need to buy these are not the landlords who can install the infrastructure.

This wasn't unique to used vehicles -- new vehicle prices also spiked during the same time frame.

At roughly the same rate. The problem is far more people were hurt by used car prices than those of us fortunately well off enough to buy new cars.

I agree the used vehicle market is robust but the rest of your comment communicates extreme negativity. Will leave it at that.

Not my intention at all, and to be honest, I still don't see it. It's likely I'm not recognizing the full connotations of my phrasing (some of which was borrowed from the comment I was replying to). I've edited the comment to try to use more neutral phrasing.