Not disputing you, but I’m curious how that works in practice.
IOW, if I’m renting a detached single family house with a modern-sized service panel then adding a charger is pretty cheap: run a few feet of conduit and wire, plus whatever the charger device itself costs. Easy Peasy.
But … If the house would need upgraded ampacity from the utility pole through a new and upgraded breaker panel, the cost is much more. In each case is that 100% on the tenant? If so, the latter case is going to leave the landlord a very nice bit of free improvement when they move out.
Lots of apartments have tenant parking, but not tenant-assigned spaces. It’s all scramble parking. So now as tenant I want to install a charger which means it has to be put near a particular space and now I want that particular space to be for my exclusive use. How’s that work?
I used to run a condo. 150 units, 150 per-unit assigned parking spaces plus ~50 unassigned guest / 2nd car / overflow spaces. The building had the open ampacity to install some level 2 chargers. But nowhere near 150 of them. If we had a similar law in FL (we do not), do the first few chargers use up the existing spare ampacity at no cost, but the next person who wants a charger is saddled with a $100K upgrade to our whole utility power infrastructure? We on the Board were wrassling with this exact problem when I moved on.
I don’t have the answers to all of your questions, and I do believe that you are right that in some cases the price would be prohibitively expensive, unless maybe a bunch of residents banded together to ask and pay for the upgrades at the same time.
However, one nitpick: Florida does in fact have a right of charge law, according to Google. Statute 718.113. not sure why it didn’t apply in your situation, but I’m sure both the FL and CA law have limitations.
Maybe some sort of scheme could be put in place to incentivize driving smaller and/or more efficient vehicles. I mean, clearly people aren’t interested in tiny little Honda Fit type cars, but there’s no real reason they need a 350 hp three-row SUV for them and their two kids either. I would imagine a little push/pull might convince people to go for smaller and/or less engined vehicles.
Also, there needs to be regulation on hybrids; having been in the market for a new vehicle, I’ve noticed a lot of the manufacturers aren’t trying to maximize economy, so much as give drivers a seriously powerful vehicle, and then use hybrid tech to pull fuel economy back into the normal range. To me, this seems sort of counter to the spirit of hybrids- the point shouldn’t be that you can get a 400 hp engine that gets 24 mpg combined, but rather that you can get a 250 that gets 40 combined or something along those lines.
I just said production is the most important thing, not the only thing.
Several automakers are on highly unsustainable trajectories. They’re selling their cars at a massive loss, and thus have an incentive to sell as few as possible.
Of course Tesla operated at a loss for a while as well, but they were starting from scratch. It feels like Ford, etc. should have been starting from a more favorable point.
Some will figure it out and some won’t. Regardless, if EVs are going to sell purely on their merits, they need to be priced comparably so that for people that don’t value the other advantages EVs have (noise, performance, fuel-at-home, etc.), they still win on price.
But yeah, we could be doing a lot better when it comes to apartment charging infrastructure.
Service on an EV should be limited to software upgrades, tire replacement and eventually differential fluid if it has one. We’re had a couple updates on our Lyriq and I wish GM would get their tech act together and push the OTA like Tesla and not have to leave it at the dealer for a day.
You’re being misled by their classification. Most people drive a “light truck” as their primary passenger vehicle:
and light-duty trucks, including sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks, and minivans.
That accounts for 37% of the 29%. “Cars” is another 20%.
And even aside from that, I again can’t emphasize enough the awfulness of any argument that goes something like “this is only worth 5%, so it’s not worth dealing with”.
I genuinely can’t get into the mindset of anyone that thinks even 1% is a small improvement for a large-scale problem like climate change, let alone 5% or 25%. Many of those 1%s will be a very hard fight. So we should welcome (and pursue vigorously) the easy ones like electrified ground transportation.
Aviation is easily 100x as hard as ground transportation. Aside from power generation, which is already decarbonizing almost as quickly as possible, ground transportation really is the lowest-hanging fruit there is.
The big one is going to be replacing the battery. Honestly my biggest concern as far as that goes is if the US actually opens up Chinese EV sales and then tarrif/bans compatible batteries by the time they’d need replacing. That or if it’s crap software that does something really bad and you’re waiting forever to get your car back.
But yeah other than that pure EVs have way less moving parts and won’t require as much regular maintenance as ICEs. Plug ins might be the worst of both worlds however.
If you are reasonably careful about your charging habits, battery replacement shouldn’t be an issue. Plus, in the US EVs have an 8 year warranty on the battery. I just watched a video showing that if you limit your DC fast charging (a little) you are looking at thousands of cycles before the battery degrades 20%. If the Lyriq has 250 miles of range at 300,000 miles, I’d say that’s ok. And it would make great backup storage if the car itself is shot.
I suspect that the need for Level 2 chargers in apartment parking is overestimated. Many (most?) EV owners can get by on Level 1 charging overnight, so I imagine an EV-ready 100-space parking garage might have 50 120 volt outlets plus 5 240 volt chargers.
I’d day “some.” At 3 miles of charge per hour, it’s not uncommon for my car to tell me I have 50 or more hours to go if I plug into 120 outlet. While it’s true I don’t need to be “full” every day, I like the quick fill up with a L2. (in fact, I only plug in 2 or 3 times per week, the way I currently drive).
That’s a plug-in hybrid, and there are several on the market. The downside is that now you have two fully functional propulsion systems; giving you the downsides of both. You’re carrying around an unused gas engine much of the time which requires all the normal maintenance, and you have heavy batteries and charging infrastructure that aren’t needed for most conventional hybrids. There are applications for them, but it’s not optimal.
Setting aside the legit issues identified by @Procrustus just above …
In a typical garage or bedroom you can have multiple 15A standard outlets on a single 15A circuit breaker. The NEC places some limit on how many, but it’s a bunch more than 1 outlet per 15A breaker. Because the standard use case is that a) most loads are less than 15A, b) most loads are intermittent not continuous, and c) multiple simultaneous high draw loads are very rare.
But I did learn in my last residence that the microwave, and the toaster, and the coffeemaker while actively boiling water was too much for the single 15A circuit. Any two were fine, but not all three. Once the coffeemaker had stopped boiling and was just running the hotplate then all 3 were fine together. Barely.
For the case of a dedicated EV parking area none of the standard use case things are true. It’s more like my kitchen problem.
50 15A outlets that each drive an L1 charger will each need 15A of service. 50 * 15 = 750 amps input to the service panel. Those are big cables and big breakers. Why the difference? Because if 50 EVs are parking there then all 50 chargers will be drawing nearly their full 15A capacity during the complete overnight charging interval.
Even if all the L1 chargers were “smart” and cooperating to manage their total load, the fact of the matter is that L1 charge rate and the entire overnight is just barely enough KwH for many common EV use case scenarios. They can’t “timeshare” their loads since they all need to run nearly full blast nearly all night to achieve a full charge by their owner’s desired morning departure time.
Maybe I’m overly biased by our use case: we have 2 EVs but can only charge 1 at a time from the same 120 v breaker. Yet this is still more than enough to meet our needs. Our daily miles driven is probably below average.
While true, this logic doesn’t extend to L2 chargers. That is, while it’s reasonable to conclude that the average load on those 120 V @ 15 A chargers will be quite high (and probably needs to be sized for continuous use), the same is not true for a 240 V @ 50 A charger. Those really will benefit from load-sharing and the like.
People drive about 40 miles a day on average. That varies based on the person and the day, but when you get to parking garage sizes you can start to depend on the law of large numbers. And so they’ll need about 10 kWh each. 500 kWh for those 50 people overnight can be served by roughly a 200 A feed with smart management. You’d want more than that in practice of course, but either way it’s way lower than the 50 A * 50 people = 2500 A that you might naively think.
Agree completely that L2 opens the possibility to timeshare and so reduce peak ampacity. Because, as you calculate, the total KwH needed overnight can be delivered at 50A in less than the full 8 to 10 hours of parked time.
Ref @Capn_Carl’s comment about daily mileage, I wonder how much of the SDMB’s perceptions are shaped by many / most of us being retired?
Now that I’m retired, maybe 20% of days I drive zero miles. Some other days days it’s 4, and some days it’s 120. Back when I was working I would not pass the gas station near the house with less than 120 miles in my tank. Because using all that up was real easy to do on a work day, or on an especially busy off day.
“Dumping” has a precise definition.
If China was dumping these vehicles into the US market then the US manufacturers could seek protection under WTO protocols for punitive tariffs. And if there was evidence of this happening you could bet with certainty that US Auto would be all over it like seagulls chasing chips.
The US and other WTO signatories maintain a register of these products and, guess what … electric vehicles from China aren’t on it. This might change, of course, but I would expect US Auto have already flown that kite and been rebuffed.
At this point in time the fear of US Auto is that China is offering into the US market electric vehicles below the price they can compete, even with the US’s routine levels of tariff barriers. Which isn’t dumping.
But that’s one of the issues mentioned upthread - these EVs are all small cars - a market the US auto makers have abandoned - there is presently no US-made competition for these cars. No matter what the price, it does not seem it would hurt US auto makers at all (unless people flock to small cars instead of buying a US-made vehicle). I suspect what some have mentioned here about the Chinese government somehow getting janky software installed on these products as something to do with the situation.
You don’t think that the Chinese manufacturers will move on to designing and selling large vehicles for the US market just as the Japanese and Korean manufacturers did?
There have been plenty of these. They all sell very poorly. The Nissan Leaf has been around since 2010, having a range of ~100 miles at the time. It was the best selling EV of its time, but peaked at around 30k units/year in the US. You can buy a used one for about 5 grand today.
Lots of people claim they want a tiny, low-range EV but it’s not borne out in practice. They want cars with a “normal” size and range. Frankly, I think most of the people saying this (not you specifically, but the masses) continue to be influenced by the environmental ideas of the 80s that to achieve more efficiency we all must drive tiny shitboxes.
Of course, at the other end of the spectrum are all the people claiming they need 1000 miles of range or some other absurdity. There’s no need for those, either.
~300 miles is the sweet spot, but the battery to achieve that is still fairly expensive, so those cars hit roughly a mid-luxury segment. Cutting features doesn’t help as much as you’d want right now.
My sister’s plug-in hybrid EV doesn’t have a gas engine so much as a gas generator. When it’s running on gasoline the gas is being used to generate electricity, not actually propel the car. The generated electricity is then used for propulsion. So… not quite as many moving parts as a conventional ICE.
You’re coordinating between 2 users/vehicles. Where I currently live there are 20 units and about 60 people. Granted, some are retirees and some of us work oddball shifts, but that’s a much more complicated cooperation equation that what you’re looking at.