The last hotel I was in (this past weekend) had outlets outside the building; however, it’s illegal to park there & use them as that’s a fire lane. The hotel I’m currently in does not have access up against the building (other than the pickup/dropoff checkin/out covered area). While not insurmountable, add the cost to run power lines into the parking lot to create those charging posts.
Not all apartment buildings have garages. The one I used to live in had parking at the end of the building, illuminated from a few lights on the building. Most of the cars were physically parked away from the building. Again, the lot needs to be (partially) ripped up to be able to install electric under the paving.
This is true, but again is already standard procedure in much of Canada to provide for block heaters, where somehow apartments and hotels manage to operate.
Why on earth do you think that home charging “doesn’t work” if it can’t provide a full charge from empty in a single night? The point of home charging is to provide for normal daily driving, which in the US is on average 37 miles a day. A simple 240V outlet will easily get you far more than that.
You are in an incredibly unusual situation. The average person barely drives 400 miles in two weeks, let alone every day. And earlier you were talking about 1200 mile family drives in 16 hours (do you make the kids pee in a cup or what?). You keep talking about EVs being niche vehicles, but you seem to be using your own rare circumstances as evidence for this. Whereas in reality your driving habits are nothing like a typical American.
There another pattern that I see over and over from you and others. It basically goes like this:
I value the advantages that EVs offer at exactly zero
I value the advantages of my current ICE car at infinity
Although everyone applies their own personal weighting factors to various features, it’s obvious that these aren’t legitimate when the factors just happen to exactly coincide with the status quo. In other words, it’s a lack of imagination at work, not reasonable differences in preference.
The reality is that owners of long-range EVs virtually all love their cars. Tesla more than most, but really just about all of them.
Again, RV parks manage this without breaking the bank. They typically provide a NEMA 14-50 outlet, which can charge at a peak of 12 kW or 48 miles/hour (in practice, one should reduce this by ~25%). It’s just not a big deal. And cheaper the more of them you have.
He is thinking that EVERYone is like him. That EVERYone drives in excess of 200 miles/day for their jobs, and sometimes would regularly drive 700 miles/day.
So therefore, EV’s are “niche” in his books.
Yes, this kind of logic is pretty much what my complaint is about in the OP.
And also: the cherry picking of an insane figure for a charging station ($270,000??? WTF?) is just plain silly. Protip: if you have no idea about the subject at hand, maybe don’t post.
Or even the suggestion that apartments would have to spend “$6000 a pop” to install charging for tenants. Seriously? Where was this figure pulled out of? Maybe don’t just make shit up.
How about doing a quick google? Clipper Creek charger HCS-50 charges at 9.6 kW, which will give you 31 miles range in an hour. Cost you $635. Requires the same wiring as a stove.
Get home at 12:00 midnight and leave home at 8:00 am with 250 miles of range. Intelligent apartment building owners will be putting these in new construction NOW. Intelligent apartment building owners will be including these in retrofit and maintenance plans/budgets NOW (at least getting some in now, with plans for more later.)
But right. Keep on telling us it can’t be done. Or is too expensive (based on imaginary figures pulled out of the air)
Or keep on telling us that everyone MUST have a car that can go 700 miles a day, each and every day. Or can go through 12 feet of snow at -40.
You don’t need a full charge every night. You need to be able to charge more miles than you typically drive. The full capacity is just for unusual road trips.
I typically drive between 5 and 40 miles in a day. Maybe once or twice a month I drive 120 miles or so. If my other car were an ICE I could use on road trips, a mid-range EV would suit me just fine, with current technology.
And I had to have a lot of ducts run to install A/C in my house, as did owners of older hotels. Yeah, it’s not trivial. But it’s completely doable if there’s demand.
What do people with street parking do in Canada? I’d never thought about that. Is it not a thing there?
Even if it’s not hard to power parking lots, there’s still the supply/demand chicken/egg. People don’t want to buy EVs because they can’t charge them. Apartments don’t install plugs because it doesn’t currently make them money. At some penetration we should see movement by landlords, but I don’t know where that is. It could also be driven by policy.
I hypothesize that we’ll see more early adoption in multicar households. Assuming I could charge, and assuming we had two cars, my family’s need for two long-range cars is much less than it’s need for just one. Obviously YMMV.
To clarify more: rapid charging here means in 100 kW plus territory. With rare exceptions, that means Tesla Superchargers. Home charging of any kind is so gentle as to be completely inconsequential.
Actual user reports suggest that Supercharging does not cause problems in any measurable way. It’s a theoretical problem but it doesn’t seem to be borne out in practice. Tesla has limited charging speeds to 90 kW (still quite fast) for some older models when Supercharging is used frequently, but aside from that there seems to be no effect. I don’t believe new models have that limit. Heavy Supercharger users don’t report significant range degradation.
Gen3 Superchargers are in the process of being rolled out and go up to 250 kW on a Model 3. It doesn’t sustain that, though, and it’s virtually certain that Tesla has chosen their charge curve to be just short of the damage point. Perhaps they will limit the number of really fast charge cycles; we’ll have to see what they do.
For ordinary use, where most charging is done at home and Supercharging is done for road trips, battery damage is not worth thinking about at all.
Well, it varies. Most newer vehicles don’t absolutely have to have block heaters running to start at -30, so some people with only street parking just don’t plug in. Others run extension cords from their house out to the street. It’s against bylaws to run across the sidewalk, but some do anyways. Others string a long cord overhead to a tree on the curb as if it were a clothesline. This obviously doesn’t work if there are no trees on the curb, but neighbourhoods that are heavily reliant on street parking are almost always old neighbourhoods with trees along the street.
Obviously, the desirability of access to power for a block heater increases the desirability of off-street parking. And yes, it’s something you think about when choosing a place to live.
I explained this in my post. As an easy example let say you are one of the majority of people who road trip for vacations. Let’s say your vacation ends and you drive the 8 hours home from your vacation and further let’s say you are a normal person who wants to maximize their vacation time so you don’t get home until 10 or 11 at night. now you’re up for work and leave your house at 6 am the next morning. You only have a 300-mile charge and maybe your 40 miles of extra. That makes a lot of people uncomfortable, sure you’re not going to run out that day, but the benefit, that I’ve been told over and over again in this thread, is you start each day with a full charge.
I’m going to assume you’re not actually reading any of my sites. The average American drives for vacation 90% of the time and prefers to stay in a hotel at least 8 hours from home. It’s true my vacation is further than most Americans and I’m not advocating for anything that would actually meet my needs.
Averaging 80 MPH on a 75 MHP high way is normal speeds and leaves an hour for pee breaks. Typically, we leave after work on Friday (which furthers screws up the whole starting with a full charge with home charging) and drive from 5 or 6 pm until 10 am the next morning. We eat breakfast and dinner in the car and the kids typically don’t need to pee in the middle of the night so the three 20-minute breaks for gas/food/stretching is plenty.
But even if you take my brother in law who starts his vacation late Saturday morning and drives 8 hours and then grabs a hotel for 8 hours before starting out the next morning to get in Sunday around noon. He would need a 600-mile charge in 8 hours the same as the theoretical average person who drives 8 hours from their home to a hotel and then gets up the next morning to do something on their vacation. The second case is what I think will get wide spread acceptance. This isn’t every day it’s a twice annual vacation.
Yep, you definitely aren’t reading my posts. I’m going to buy an EV in the next two or three years. The R1T actually meets 90% of my needs. It can carry my family of 4. I can drive to the grandparent’s house and back without relying on a charge while I’m there. I can drive through 12" of snow and tow a trailer. The fact it is blazing fast is a fun perk. We will not be able to only have EVs so my wife’s car will stay an ICE and will be our car for all of our vacations. I am concerned about driving 196 miles to my in-laws for Thanksgiving when it doesn’t get above 0 then driving back home on Black Friday then out to my parents (66 miles) where we keep our dogs. Basically, I’ll have to add ~160 miles at 110v (15 amp) so at least 30 hours minimum charging at my in-laws to survive a simple Thanksgiving trip. But that is my use case not average.
I think you are wildly over-weighting your life. The average vacation is 314 miles one way and while lots of people don’t travel (61% travel less than 50 miles per year) the average person still manages to take 10 long distance trips per year with 9 of them being by car. Only urban poor take less than 4 long distance trips per year. Obviously, the daily use case is covered by EVs even in their current form. So why aren’t EVs ubiquitous? My opinion is there are two primary reasons; first is price and second is range anxiety for their occasional use cases.
It really is too bad you don’t bother to read sites. Maybe one more site will show that you have no idea what you’re talking about and maybe should stop posting. Now that is from 2013 and shows $100-175K per supercharger and apparently the costs have gone up dramatically at least according to Wiki.
Worst case scenario for DC fast chargers: $40,000 plus $51,000 install.
These are only found in major centers, or strategically placed along highways for long distance travel. That’s where they are needed. For people making long distance trips.
In two years of owning an EV, I have used a DC fast charger a total of 10 times. 7 times for long distance trips. 3 times just for shits and giggles to see how it works.
Wait, you recharged during long distance trips? That’s impossible. It would completely destroy Oredigger77’s position if that were a thing that were possible.
You mean the superchargers that Tesla normally doesn’t sell? Why would I care what it costs? Upthread I linked to a website listing for a generic (meaning can be used for cars other than Teslas) DC fast charger that costs about $40,000 and can charge two cars at the same time.
Quick question - how do EV batteries respond to high temperatures?
Here in Central Victoria, Australia, cold temperatures aren’t really a concern. It’ll dip below freezing a few times a month in winter, and that’s about it.
In the summer, however - and even in spring, like it is now - temps will routinely reach the mid-30s celsius, and there will be days up in the 40s*. How will the batteries respond to that?
As yet, EVs available in Australia don’t meet my use case/cost calculus, quite, but I’m keeping an eye on them.
*For fahrenheit thinkers, 35C is about 95F, and 40C is about 104F Today, in mid-spring, it’s predicted to reach 33C/91F. Summertime, daytime high temps will rarely be below 30ishC.
Your NYTimes cite is behind a paywall. It’s not clear what 8 hours actually means, but I’m almost certain it doesn’t mean 8*80 mph=640 miles as your trips would entail.
No he wouldn’t. Reasonable-cost EVs aren’t going to have 600 mile ranges anytime soon, anyway.
The way a 600 mile drive works today, in a Tesla, is this:
You start the day with a 300 mile range, because you told the car to charge to 100% last night.
You drive 250 miles or so and stop at a Supercharger. You walk to McDonalds or Starbucks for a bite to eat and a bathroom break. 25 minutes later you get back to your car, which has added 200 miles of range.
You drive another 200 miles and make another quick pit stop at a Supercharger. This time it’s only an 18 minute break; enough to grab a coffee and pee. The car has added 150 miles of range when you were gone.
You drive the final 150 miles to the hotel. You get there with 50 miles left; plenty of wiggle room. You plug into an L2 charger, which only takes 7 hours to go from 50->300 miles.
Repeat as necessary.
Overall, you spent <45 minutes charging on the road, and basically all of that was time you would have spent anyway on breaks. Even if you’re the type who only would have made a single 5 minute gas stop–well, who cares, that’s only 40 extra minutes out of 8 hours. Big deal.
That said, this does require that Superchargers be common on your usual routes. In California, that’s true. It may not be true where you are, and so the times might be longer if you have to go out of your way or stop earlier than you’d like. But more stations are going in all the time, and fairly soon we’ll also have non-Tesla fast chargers.