Tesla demonstrated a robotic charger arm a few years ago.
Says here that the Tesla semi may do wireless charging.
If that technology becomes viable, you would simply drive over a charging plate.
We got free charging for life with our Model X. That program has been discontinued, but we’re grandfathered in.
Nonetheless, we’ve only used it once. We seldom drive more than 300 miles I guess.
Some are, some are not. We have two places we go that offer free charging, and one place that is as cheap as home charging. SeaTac airport has places to plug into a 120 volt outlet, which works fine if you’re on a trip for a few days or more. Others, as you note, are more expensive.
I think the plug in hybrid people use the Level 2 charges more, just to top off. They don’t actually need to charge. When I had my Volt I always tried to plug in when I was out and about. Just to keep my gas usage as low as possible. Now, I don’t worry about it at all and just plug in when I get home. (unless I’m at one of the free chargers, then I plug in just because it’s a bargain. )
I guess that was my question from above - if free charging were available at lamp-posts or parking meters in Manhattan, what’s to prevent someone just driving a block or two from home to charge, as opposed to doing that at home and presumably paying for it thru their home electric bill? Someone’s gotta pay for the voltage, right?
There are a lot of incentives with EVs: free parking in some areas, car tax exception and for charging there are subsidised and free charging. As you might expect, there is a smartphone ap for that.
We are still at the stage where the percentage of EVs on the road is a much smaller than ICE vehicles. Local governments are subsidising the charge costs and the private networks, employers, supermarkets and everyone that may offer charging are refining their business models. I doubt whether any EV charging network is making money at the moment. They are still building out their networks, it is a long term investment.
I am sure there are some very happy EV owners who have found free charging. But even when you pay it is a small fraction the cost of filling a tank with gasoline. Running costs are very low.
However, this happy time is unlikely to last as more and more drivers migrate to EVs. Especially since governments will be looking for a way to claw back the amount of tax money they lose on gasoline sales.
I think I shall try one of the car sharing schemes, they take care of the charging as well as all the other costs of owning a car. The last time I owned a car, it was a beautiful BMW gas guzzler and a complete money pit.
Nothing, except that parking spot you’re renting in your building for $1000/month (or whatever) is guaranteed available, and the street charging space probably has that white BMW in it again. If you wanted to fight for street parking you wouldn’t be renting the space, and the $4 cost of a full charge is trivial compared to the cost of the space.
That is an interesting point. Charging for an EV is a great deal cheaper than fuelling an ICE car. Maintenance costs, another recurring expense, is also minimal compared to an ICE car. Once the purchase price of EVs comes down, this reduced cost of ownership will make motoring much more affordable. So more cars?
However they both need parking space and in cities, parking space is at a premium. It is a major revenue earner for both public and private land owners. Charging facilities will be an optional extra, but the prices will be moderated by the cost of electricity. Drivers will keep their car batteries topped up by charging wherever is cheapest. City centre charging will be mainly for commercial vehicles that don’t operate from a depot. Some charging hubs will be dedicated for EV taxis.
Parking spaces are eminently taxable and I think this will only increase and become more automated. We may see the end of the ‘parking warden’ and their battle of wits with motorists. In the busy parts of London, the parking regulations are often confusing and opaque. Local governments employ armies of wardens to give out tickets for errant parking. The car pounds are busy with motorists paying mightily to get their cars back. There are cameras everywhere that can recognise number plates and sent fines to registered vehicle owners.
A modern EV is rather more than a battery on wheels, they have sophisticated computers on board. If an EV can talk to a charging station and a driver pay for a charge via an app. Then it does not take a great leap of the imagination to conclude that it will soon be able to know where it is parked and who to pay. It may not even be necessary to put little Bluetooth or RFID chips into the parking places. The latest generation of GPS chips can resolve down to 1metre. It has the potential to make the use of road space and parking space efficient. Just book a parking place with or without charging from you app. Then set off confident that it will be waiting for you and available. Different prices for different times of day, according to demand.
Whether you think this is a good thing depends on how much the current state of driving in big cities suits your temperament.
I think it will happen first in cities that are already tightly controlled by an omnipotent city government. That would be Singapore, maybe. Or one of the Chinese cities. New York or London or Paris? Not so much.
I would say more sprawl. All of the trends pushing us forward right now are anti-city. High speed internet, work from home, lower energy transportation, plus the skyrocketing price of city real estate and crazy city government working hard to eliminate parking, putting in bike lanes and removing street parking and car lanes, etc.
The future may be one of a net migration out of the cities and into suburbs, exurbs and rural areas. Away from big cities and towards smaller ones. Rooftop solar, electric cars, efficient package delivery and satellite internet mean you can live in a nicer home in a nicer area for less money than a small apartment in a city core. Video conferencing means you no longer need to clump workers together in offices.
What’s the point of living in a giant, crowded city, when your co-workers are calling in from their beautiful ranch house in Colorado or their 2500 square foot house in the suburbs?
I tend to agree with this for the most part. Perhaps dense, urban cores will end-up being car-free zones, except for an army of autonomous livery-type EVs and busses, eliminating the need for providing expensive public infrastructure upgrades for private car operators.
Some people like living in a giant, crowded city, with many movie theaters, stage theaters, opera houses, museums, restaurants of all kinds and frequent events. And at the same time, in giant, crowded cities, one can live quite happily even without owning a private car.
There’s a poster here who is happy to live in the mountains in Colorado, where he needs a large vehicle to clear the snow from his driveway and a four-wheel drive vehicle to get anywhere. On the other hand, that would not appeal to me.
Central city land is so valuable precisely because so many people want to live there. If they didn’t, prices would crater. We actually did see prices in some large cities go down in the 70s and 80s, even some into the 90s. If you had prescience you could’ve made yourself a very rich person if you knew how crazy prices were going to soar in the late 00s and 2010s in those same cities, and obviously had the capital and time to spare to invest.
Nobody goes to the cities anymore. They’re too crowded.
Prices are now coming down in cities relative to suburbs and rural real estate, and there is net migration out of them.
Manhattan offices are currently 28% occupied, with only 9% full-time.
The biggest increases in real estate prices have been happening in smaller cities and suburbs. The weakest real estate right now is city apartments and condos. The largest increases have been in suburban single-family dwellings.
The conditions that made cities so expensice no longer obtain. And in the meantime, the increase in violence and homelessness in the major cities is driving even more people away.
Covid was a huge factor in the spike of people leaving the cities. But some of those changes, like work from home, are going to be permanent for many workers and lead to permanent redistributions of workers. The coming widespread availability of rural high speed internet is going to increase the desirability of moving out of the city cores.
Sure some people will still want to live in cities. More power to them. But an increasing number of people are choosing otherwise.
Great; perhaps the big cities will become more affordable to those of use who would like to live there.
Why would you expect lamp-post or parking-meter charging to be free? There are already simple apps, like the apps you can use to pay for parking, to change users for charging.
My whole foods has a couple of free charging spots, because they want to look green. But all the municipal-owned charging spots near me require the driver to pay for a charge.
Yeah! What are they thinking, providing clean, cheap, and efficient transportation options to anyone other than car owners? That’s CRAZY! It’ll never work.
On the topic at hand, I have an EV and live in a dense city with no off-street parking. I charge at work (that is, when I do drive in and not cycle in like a crazy person) and can charge 30% of my battery for $1, thanks to my employer’s subsidy. Charging at work handles about 95+% of my charging needs.
Can you think of a reason why this might be a temporary circumstance?
I think this is generally overstated and a weak analysis on a few fronts.
It is accurate that as per 2021 real estate data, since Covid hit, median listing prices which have increased in both large metro areas and in other areas, large metro areas saw smaller increases than the national average. Average listing prices were up 8.6% in 2020 and only 5.4% in large metros.
This is where I think you’re overstating things–when central city properties were in some cases 15x per square feet what a rural property could command, a growth rate differential in median listing prices of +3%-10% in favor of locations outside of large metros is not really a major watershed shift. It still means that per square foot central city properties are tremendously more valuable. That isn’t based on some kind of past historical thing, that’s based on current demand, if there was a major reckoning afoot in central city property valuations, we would not be seeing such real estate grow median listing prices a few points slower than average, we’d be seeing large real declines in listing prices, which we are not seeing.
The claim that the “conditions that made cities so expensive no longer obtain” is simply not accurate at all. If that was true, again, the price per square foot per average listing in cities would actually be lowering, which is not occurring. In fact they are still many multiples of typical listings in rural and suburban areas. The desire to be close to bars, shops, sports events, cultural events etc is a strong one. Cities are geographically very small, the total portion of people who live in the “urban core” as it is defined, has actually never been as big as many people think (definitional issues abound, but of urban populations–which in demographer terms suburbs and metro areas in general are all considered urban, in many cases less than 35% of the population has been in the urban core in many metro areas, and this is common across the country)–so some wonder how urban core real estate prices have remained so much higher than suburban and rural when relatively speaking more people live in the suburbs (and have lived in the suburbs for many years)–but part of it is because scarcity of urban core land is just much, much higher. The urban core of many metro areas is incredibly small. The urban core of San Francisco is like 46 sq. miles, and around 875,000 people live there–packing in at 18,634 people per square mile.
Sugar Land, Texas, an affluent suburban community of Houston, is slightly smaller than San Francisco’s urban core (at 42 sq. mile), and houses 78,000 people–at a density of 2,927 per sq. mile, a good 6x less dense than San Francisco’s urban core. This basic math and geography situation is why even if more people live in the suburbs urban core areas remain so expensive–there are just a lot of people who want to live in them, and they are very small.
I’ve mentioned it a few times now, but it should be more fully acknowledged–the suburbs outgrew the urban core for something like 50 straight years, that actually is not covid related. In fact much talk of urban sprawl, cookie cutter suburbs etc was a political and cultural reaction to the simple reality that the suburbs have outgrown the cities considerably post-WW2. Many premier East Coast cities for example have either roughly the same, or smaller populations than they did at the end of WW2. New York City for example was sitting at around 7.5m population at the end of WWII, and is estimated to be around 8.5m now–a growth of only 13% in 75 years. The overall U.S. population has more than doubled–increasing 128% in that time span. New York is also one of the more successful large cities, several have actually lost population since WWII–Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Chicago–have all lost raw population since WWII. It’s actually false to really suggest you have identified a new or notable trend by saying cities have had negative net migration–point of fact that was the norm for much of the 20th century.
2000-2020 (pre-Covid) was notable in part because that trend was being “bucked” in many cities (but not all), we actually were seeing, particularly among people in the “key” working age demographic of 25 to 44 year olds, increasingly moving to cities, this phenomenon is one thing that massively juiced the real estate markets of urban cores in the last 20 years.
What’s interesting is that in many cases even after 50 straight years of declining population, urban core real estate plots were still higher valued per square foot than many comparable suburban or rural plots even in many Rust Belt cities which were doing poor economically. Again, this is why it’s dramatically overstated to suggest there is some grand realignment occurring, for one, stagnation or decreasing population in the urban core has been relatively common for 75 years, and while covid-19 has definitely seen more young people choosing to settle in suburbs or rural areas, the actual numbers and sustainability of this are far too limited to really establish if we’re seeing a reversal in the last 20 years trend where an influx of 25-44 year olds into urban cores was driving up serious spikes in real estate prices. Further still–even if it is the end of that trend, the urban core real estate is still growing in price, and starts from a position of such high valuation versus suburban and rural plots, that nothing short of extreme and titanic shifts in relative valuations would meaningfully alter the balance of valuation between urban core and suburban/rural property.
Bloomberg has a good write-up too on how some elements of the net-migration of people out of cities is being a good bit overstated, and often isn’t really a move away from urbanism at all. For example many people who have moved from the San Francisco Bay Area have relocated to less expensive metro areas like Sacramento (there is a couple in the header of the Bloomberg report that did just that.) That is certainly an outflow out of an expensive metro area, but it’s a move to another metro area, not a move out of urbanism completely.
Bloomberg is generally always paywalled so I doubt most can read this, but I will link to it just in case: Where Americans Are Moving (bloomberg.com)
Bloomberg’s data is based on USPS change of address data. Something interesting they found is that while around 3% of the population migrating during covid is higher than in previous years, it is actually at historic lows versus previous times in American history. The “Great Migration” of blacks from the black belt of the U.S. South for example was more than an order of magnitude bigger migratory trend.
Based on USPS change of address data 84% of post-covid moves have been within the same metro area. 7.5% have been within the same state, 6% moved to another top metro area, and 0.28% moved out of a metro area completely. Seems much more like a shuffling around various types of urban areas than a massive outflow into the countryside.
Quoted in the Bloomberg article is Stephen Whitaker, a policy economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland,
I think that is fairly telling in a few ones. For one, it is entirely unsurprising that a phenomenon mostly centered around San Francisco and New York would get disproportionate interest in the media, and even be confused for a broad national trend. Much of our media is headquartered in New York, and San Francisco is one of the cultural centers of the American progressives and the media that serves them. It is completely unsurprising that a phenomenon that appears to be disproportionately affecting just those two cities, would get pumped up to seem more than it is.
Bloomberg also helpfully points out the trend actually isn’t new and isn’t covid originated–but it likely is covid exacerbated. The majority of the metro areas that had a negative outflow ratio during covid had a negative outflow ratio pre-covid as well (including San Francisco and New York), what covid did was in many cases increased the outflow ratio.
Bloomberg’s data also shows in the most recent months, San Francisco and New York are already seeing this trend taper off, which suggests it may have been a relatively short-lived phenomenon to begin with.
It’s accessible. And an interesting read. Thanks for sharing.
I was responding to Procustus seeking the free charging, but yes I understand there are/will be apps that manage fees for charging.