A lot of them didn't buy them. There are a lot of Uber/Lyft drivers up there and many use the Hertz Uber rental program (https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/vehicle-solutions/hertz/tes...). I'd guess that most of these would use superchargers as their idle lots to top up between rides.

I'd guess that this usually works pretty well, but with winter and a higher than normal number of broken chargers, those became more congested than normal, and this usage pattern will lead to it getting steadily worse throughout the day.

From what I heard, a lot of those chargers weren't broken. What happened in Chicago was that Tesla drivers plugged in, and the car didn't immediately start charging because it had to warm the battery first. So they did the universal signal for a broken charger and left the cord dangling rather than hooking it. It then froze.

IIRC on a Tesla the car screen displays that it's warming the battery, but the app on the phone doesn't. The phone screen just says that it's charging with 0 amps.

I've heard of a lot of that happening too. Tesla nav was also reporting a decent number of stalls out of order, so there were some outages as well.

TBH, it sounds like a lot of things going wrong (or even just weird) at once. In every report that I saw, there were at least some cars sitting unplugged in front of stalls with noone in them. Even if those were broken, when they get fixed they might need to tow cars to make them usable again!

You are definitely right though. Someone with a cold soaked battery could easily think the charger isn't supplying current, when it is really just running the battery heater for 30+ minutes first.

> IIRC on a Tesla the car screen displays that it's warming the battery, but the app on the phone doesn't. The phone screen just says that it's charging with 0 amps.

This isn't quite accurate. The Tesla app on iOS at least shows the battery preconditioning.

They do have a place to charge their cars. There are charging places all over the place, and possibly at their work.

They just don't have one at home. That's going to become even more common as not every single parking spot can be turned into a charging space.

That's the funny part I don't understand. We want EVs to become mainstream but all apartment/condo dwellers should magically have a personal charging station.

And there's the assumption that everyone with a house has a place where they can charge an EV. My neighborhood was laid out prior to 1900. (Several houses, including mine, were built in 1900 or earlier.) Many houses don't have a driveway (or a place to build one). The streets are one-way, in order to allow parking on the north side of the street. Many people cannot even park in front of their house.

Or an electrical outlet within reach. “Charging station” makes it sound inordinately expensive. An outlet is all they need and is already hard enough that there’s no need to make it sound harder than it is.

That's not exactly accurate. Pick a car - say a Mustang Mach-e: a standard 15A outlet is going to charge at 4miles/hr. Say you get home a 6pm, never go anywhere, and leave it plugged in overnight - that's 48 miles of range. If you're talking dead of winter in Chicago in negative temps, assume half that.

Long story short: a 15A outlet really isn't going to get the job done for charging a car. Also you cannot just charge off a 15A outlet, you're going to need to run an extension cord within 15ft of the car give or take and plug in your charger there (you can't just plug a NEMA 5-15 plug into an EV).

That charger >> extension cord connection is going to need to be weatherproofed somehow. And oh, by the way, if you're in a big city good luck not getting your $500 charger stolen since there's probably no good way to secure it.

So yes, they are going to need an EV charger.

Not really, though. The average American drives 37 miles a day [1]. Your 48 miles overnight is more than enough 9 months out of the year even in a place like Chicago. A once a week trip to a faster charger or just a top-off when you're at a store / workplace that has chargers would cover the other 3 months. For places with less extreme winters than Chicago (the vast majority of US population centers), it's a non-issue.

[1] https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/average-miles-driven-per-year...

48 miles assumes 12 hours of charging every day, in 50 degree or warmer weather. You haven't covered how you're planning on securing the charger or getting power to it for someone that lives in an apartment.

I have multiple EVs in my household, I'm completely onboard. People acting like they're for everyone today are delusional with the current state of charging infrastructure in the US.

We've had the unfortunate need to use public charging a handful of times and almost every single time it has been an absolute nightmare. From non-working chargers to long lines (because of all the aforementioned people who only have access to public chargers). The only time it has been relatively painless was road trips when it's the middle of nowhere middle america because most folks that live there don't have EVs.

We’re not talking about apartments. The parent post specifically looked at having access to a standard outlet.

If you live in an apartment without an electrified garage then of course the BEV use case is less likely to work for you. And I totally agree on public chargers. Non-Tesla is a complete crapshoot and probably will be for several more years until the adoption curve forces the infrastructure to improve.

Buy Tesla and only Tesla and most if not all of this is solved. However for now “not for everyone” is certainly still true in many places.

There's also a little psychology at play. On an ICE car, a full tank shows up as 300+ miles of range, and 48 miles of range would be a strong prompt to most driver to get to a gas station, even if they only needed to drive another 15 miles. People dont like thinking they could be caught short.

People also like to think that their car can get them out of any personal jam, eg, if they need to take a family membership to the hospital, they will simply assume that their car is going to be the mode of transporter, and anything that makes them think that an EV might not be able to cut it in that hypothetical is going to be damaging for the EV transition.

You can still keep your car charged at 80 or 90 percent even if you only drive 35 miles a day in your daily commute. The charge you add each night can be toward the top of the range, instead of always staying at the bottom of the range.

Do people need 48 miles (or 24 miles if the charging is slow because of the temperature) of range every day? Genuine question, I don't know what driving in that area is like, i.e. nearest grocery story could be 10 miles?

It's not about "every day." It's about being able to hop in the car and just go at a moment's notice. Regardless of the distance. In an ICE car, that's a given. In an EV, it's murkier. Much murkier.

Has never been an issue in 4 years of ownership. We can leave at a moments notice any time and get across the country or adjoining countries if we want or need to.

24 miles because the vehicle is less efficient and the heater is in use. Charging with a 120V 12A charger is when cold is a different question. Attached garage? Probably not a big deal. Outside? You might use all the power available to heat the battery for charging, fail to meet the minimum temperature, and then not charge at all. You REALLY want more power for charging than that. Even just 240V 12A prevents the 0 charge even after 12 hours due to cold problem afaik.

48 miles a day is plenty for me, and the few weeks where it might be 24 miles a day, I just grab lunch once or twice in the week at the food court that has a few DC chargers available to top off.

The 15A charger that came with my car is weatherproofed and locks into place when connected to my car outside my apartment building. The rent I pay also pays for that overnight trickle charge, so a replacement charger would still cost less than I was previously spending in fueling up my Ford Fusion each year.

For the scenarios you describe a 220 outlet will work fine. Still no charger needed. I won’t go into cable locking solutions for the same reason we don’t need to go into gas station muggings. They distract from the key point, which is that a “charging station” is not needed.

Well, there is a narrative out there that the ICE is dead and everyone should be driving electric. The media always neglects to add the caveat that the electric future has arrived only for garage-owning suburbanites.

Yes, banning the sale of brand new non-EVs in a decade's time is often presented by people with an agenda as if everyone needs to switch to EVs overnight.

This is frankly silly though. In reality the EV sales will ramp over time and then ICEs age out of the fleet over multiple decades. And that's the timeline that is being attacked as insanely rushed.

I have seen and heard countless “range anxiety” stories in commercial and nonprofit media in the US, including many about how the issue specifically affects apartment-dwellers.