Hey there. Was just curious on your opinion on this…
How do you think EVs can become more accessible to people living in apartments at the like? I’d seriously consider an EV if I could charge it at night, but I can’t feasibly do that where I live. I’d have to drive over to a charging station and pay to charge my car for a few hours (unless you’re lucky enough to have a fast charging station nearby, but even then it takes orders of magnitude longer than filling up at the pump). I think it’s probably one of the bigger barriers to more widespread EV adoption imo and I don’t know of a great solution to it.
I live in semi-rural Quebec. I can either drive to a place about 5 minutes from my home and charge for a few dollars, takes about 5 hours. Park and rides also have charging stations so going to Montreal means I can charge during the work day. I only use my car like twice a week when I need to visit family or go to the office, so your mileage may vary.
The real solution for about 75% of people isn’t EV, it’s public transportation and proper bike infrastructure/bike shares/mixed use neighborhoods/density. That is especially true for people living in places dense enough to have apartments. An EV is nice, but it is a patch, not a fix. Not needing a car is the fix. Cities just can’t afford to have one car per 2-3 person.
Not needing a car would be ideal, but less likely for rural or semi-rural areas.
However
— if you have off street parking, we need to incent the owner/association to add chargers. Some of that will happen naturally as EV become more common, but that takes time
— the park-n-ride charger is a great start, but what if you could also top off at work, at groceries, at the shopping center, at theme parks: plug in everywhere you go? It could be slow charging, inexpensive, scalable, and not taking extra time beyond the primary reason you’re there: the goal could be to simply replace the charge used to get there
Oh some groceries have them. One even has a free setup. Just park there and recover like 5km worth of charge while doing groceries, but I forgot they exist because I don’t do my groceries in a car. Funny enough, the bicycle shop has a plug too. Government is paying part of the cost for home chargers but I just temporarily live in a friend’s basement so that’s not ideal for me.
So that’s a great start but they need to be everywhere. It will never be enough to charge an EV, but if it’s ubiquitous enough, you can change your goal from charging to simply replacing that used by the errand
Realistically most people don’t need to charge often, most of the time. I have a friend living in a townhouse where there are no chargers, who recently got a Tesla. During a normal week, with normal commuting and errands, he goes to a supercharger about once a week to top off. Yes, it’s not convenient or as cheap as home charging and he’s there for 30-60 minutes but it is doable
In the case of apartment or condo complexes, where there is off-street parking, they can have chargers. The question is how you incent them to. I think that requires two parts: government incentives to help reduce the costs, and demand. Once there is a sufficient number of BEVs on the road and they see more requests, they see they lose money without chargers, they will add them. While BEVs are rare, or they dint risk losing money, why would they spend their money?
I’m not sure how to handle places with street parking, but there are several possibilities. It‘s probably a matter of pursuing all of them, including transit alternatives , since none will be ideal
I’d say investments for public transportation infrastructure is needed, especially for high density areas. But you do make good points. We really need to move away from car-centric thinking.
Hey there. Was just curious on your opinion on this…
How do you think EVs can become more accessible to people living in apartments at the like? I’d seriously consider an EV if I could charge it at night, but I can’t feasibly do that where I live. I’d have to drive over to a charging station and pay to charge my car for a few hours (unless you’re lucky enough to have a fast charging station nearby, but even then it takes orders of magnitude longer than filling up at the pump). I think it’s probably one of the bigger barriers to more widespread EV adoption imo and I don’t know of a great solution to it.
I live in semi-rural Quebec. I can either drive to a place about 5 minutes from my home and charge for a few dollars, takes about 5 hours. Park and rides also have charging stations so going to Montreal means I can charge during the work day. I only use my car like twice a week when I need to visit family or go to the office, so your mileage may vary.
The real solution for about 75% of people isn’t EV, it’s public transportation and proper bike infrastructure/bike shares/mixed use neighborhoods/density. That is especially true for people living in places dense enough to have apartments. An EV is nice, but it is a patch, not a fix. Not needing a car is the fix. Cities just can’t afford to have one car per 2-3 person.
Not needing a car would be ideal, but less likely for rural or semi-rural areas.
However
— if you have off street parking, we need to incent the owner/association to add chargers. Some of that will happen naturally as EV become more common, but that takes time
— the park-n-ride charger is a great start, but what if you could also top off at work, at groceries, at the shopping center, at theme parks: plug in everywhere you go? It could be slow charging, inexpensive, scalable, and not taking extra time beyond the primary reason you’re there: the goal could be to simply replace the charge used to get there
Oh some groceries have them. One even has a free setup. Just park there and recover like 5km worth of charge while doing groceries, but I forgot they exist because I don’t do my groceries in a car. Funny enough, the bicycle shop has a plug too. Government is paying part of the cost for home chargers but I just temporarily live in a friend’s basement so that’s not ideal for me.
So that’s a great start but they need to be everywhere. It will never be enough to charge an EV, but if it’s ubiquitous enough, you can change your goal from charging to simply replacing that used by the errand
Realistically most people don’t need to charge often, most of the time. I have a friend living in a townhouse where there are no chargers, who recently got a Tesla. During a normal week, with normal commuting and errands, he goes to a supercharger about once a week to top off. Yes, it’s not convenient or as cheap as home charging and he’s there for 30-60 minutes but it is doable
In the case of apartment or condo complexes, where there is off-street parking, they can have chargers. The question is how you incent them to. I think that requires two parts: government incentives to help reduce the costs, and demand. Once there is a sufficient number of BEVs on the road and they see more requests, they see they lose money without chargers, they will add them. While BEVs are rare, or they dint risk losing money, why would they spend their money?
I’m not sure how to handle places with street parking, but there are several possibilities. It‘s probably a matter of pursuing all of them, including transit alternatives , since none will be ideal
I’d say investments for public transportation infrastructure is needed, especially for high density areas. But you do make good points. We really need to move away from car-centric thinking.