I do not. I was never taught that as a rule, and i use my turn signal to communicate with other drivers, not to tell the car not to beep at me.
Drivers on the highway can see that cars are approaching on the side and will need to merge. And there’s no mystery about when they’ll do that, there’s really no choice. I honestly have no idea if anyone signals in that situation, it’s certainly not a thing i look for.
Signaling every move is effortless and a huge courtesy to other drivers and pedestrians. Why not?
Apartments.com, and probably other search tools, allow you to filter for apartments with EV charging.
In the radius I’m looking at, I get 8741 results without the filter and 1382 with the filter. So it’s only about 16% at the moment. But there are so many apartments that there are still plenty available. Depending on the locale.
Just did a search on Apartments . com for 25 mile radius on my location.
ZERO apartments with EV charging.
Expanding to 50 miles… ONE. In the Gold Coast of Chicago with rent for a 1 bedroom with EV charging over 5,000 per month.
So… location location location
Sheesh. That is pretty bad. The future is here but isn’t evenly distributed, as they say.
At least in California, using your turn signal when merging is required.
Merging
Highway traffic has the right-of-way. For more information, see Right-of-Way Rules: Who Goes First in Section 7. When you enter a highway, you will need to:
- Be in the proper lane on the on-ramp.
- Be at or near the speed of traffic.
- Merge into highway traffic when safe to do so. Do not stop unless absolutely necessary.
- Merge into a space large enough for your vehicle to safely join the lane.
- Use your mirrors and turn signals.
- Turn your head quickly to look over your shoulder before changing lanes or merging into traffic.
- Make sure you can stop safely by leaving three seconds of space between you and the vehicle in front of you.
- Do not cross over any solid lines when merging. If you need to cross several lanes, signal and cross them one at a time. Check your blind spots for vehicles, motorcyclists, bicyclists, and pedestrians each time.
A building does not need a dedicated charger, just a garage with a wall outlet. Been working for me for 2 years.
Agreed. As I mentioned earlier, a full-blown L2 charger is usually not necessary and the 40-50 miles you get from overnight charging on a standard outlet is usually enough.
But an apartment complex still needs some system for ensuring outlets are available, and probably charging residents for usage. If the landlord is friendly you could probably work out some ad-hoc system, maybe giving an odometer reading once a month and paying based on a nominal conversion, like 5 cents a mile.
The challenge at most “garden style” 1 to 3 story spread out suburban apartments is that all parking is outdoors, 20-50 feet from the nearest building, and parking spaces are not assigned to tenants; it’s all scramble.
Even if the landlord magicked a 15A outlet to each spot, users would need to plug their personal charger into the outlet at their spot du jour. And hope it wasn’t stolen overnight.
Is totally unassigned parking common in Florida? I rarely see it in CA. I don’t think I’ve heard the phrase “garden style” apartments, but the low-rise complexes here almost always have assigned (numbered) covered parking. You could put in a small lockbox at each one where the user could store their portable charger.
The EVs I’m familiar with have a lock on their chargers that’s engaged while charging to prevent anyone from unplugging and stealing.
The resulting outcry from the necessary increase in rents (wether or not you own an EV) to cover this added infrastructure would result in, to quote Dickens, “A Chorus of Scalded Cats”.
I don’t see it happening.
I made sure there was a garage available before I bought my car, AND that the landlords were clear that I intended to plug in an EV every night. They were fine with it.
The building manager said the management company was going to do a viability study on putting in charging stations.
Because I have a suspicious nature, I think that “You can rent a garage at the regular price, charge at level 1 any time you are parked, and there is no extra cost for the electricity you use” is the management’s answer to prospective tenants with EVs, so that they can avoid putting in charging stations, and the logistics hassles, until they actually are losing money overall on the garages.
The cost to the company is not just the chargers, but the cost of policing them, and right now, in Indiana, there is some hostility to efforts to green, so if there are what are perceived as parking spots that only EVs can use, there could be problems. There are still people hostile to handicapped parking.
Then, there are the logistics, like enforcing, say, 4-hr charging during the day, so no one parks there at 5:30pm Friday, and leaves their car until Sunday morning.
Mine has that as an option. And mine is pretty much bottom of the line, albeit, a 2023.
Just charge it to the owner. I see on Amazon that weatherproof EV lockboxes cost like $120. As long as they pay for the electricity and infrastructure, there shouldn’t be a problem.
Well, maybe not everyone is equally rational…
Ahhh.. Like a Tariff. Some other sucker pays it, and it never gets passed down. Yeah… That’s The Ticket!
Sometimes I forget not everywhere is so fucking cold you need to plug in a block heater for your car to start - every apartment parking spot around here already has a standard plugin. Of course, the battery drain from said weather can also make things difficult.
I’m not sure what you mean. If the EV owner wants a plug, they can pay for it. No one’s getting cheated with that deal.
Maybe I misunderstand. Charge which owner? Of the car or the apartments?
But people move, now and then.
My brother has owned two Teslas since 2015, a model S which he still has and a model Y he’s using as his current daily driver. A year ago when Hertz was flogging off its EV fleet he suggested I buy a Tesla with about 80,000 miles on it for several thousand more than an almost new Bolt but I opted for the latter.
When I was showing off the Bolt to him I was pointing out that at half the MSRP it just didn’t have the features his two Teslas did, like mechanical door latches instead of solenoids,* icons for pedestrian and traffic warnings instead of animation, and a bar graph for power consumption over distance instead of a scrolling real-time graph.
Looking around he did comment the fit and finish was a lot better than even his two-year old Y, never mind the ten-year old S. I pointed out that while feeling its way through the EV aspects, GM has been designing cabins and assembling autos for over a hundred years so they have that part down cold. Tesla might have a leg up on the former but they’re also still learning about the latter.
When people in the parking lot ask how I like an EV and would I suggest they look into getting one my first question is how easy is it where they live to get at least 120v to the car for charging. If the answer is no I recommend a hybrid instead.
*Except the hatch.
Charge the EV owner. They can take the box with them when they leave if they want. But either way, a few hundred bucks isn’t going to break the bank.