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I have an electric car in the US and a 60+mi/day commute. My new electric car is so so so much cheaper to operate. It's actually below half the cost of using my
by KirinDave 9y ago
I have an electric car in the US and a 60+mi/day commute. My new electric car is so so so much cheaper to operate. It's actually below half the cost of using my older but still quite efficient Prius.
It'll still take time for me to see savings over a car in the $20-$30k range. But in terms of daily operating costs for equivalent priced cars I'm there. Gas prices can only go up and electrical storage is on a downward trend.
- Aloha 9y agoYou must own a home? I live in a place that prides itself on being 'green' - but at-home charging stations for apartment dwellers are just a not-thing.
- greglindahl 9y agoSome parts of the bay area require new construction of homes and apartments to put in chargers, some apartment complexes have them, and there are a few chargers on the street and in public garages. It's all headed in the right direction.
- CalRobert 9y agoRequiring new apartments to have chargers is the wrong direction if you consider that it just increases costs for people who don't own automobiles (in my building of seven apartments one person owns a vehicle). Electric cars have a lot of advantages but they still have enormous negative externalities on cities.
- kalleboo 9y agoI'd be happy to pay a premium in cities if it meant all the cars were electric so the air was that much cleaner, even though I don't have a car of my own.
- CalRobert 9y agoSure, but is that a reason to force everyone else to do the same? The easier you make it to use a car in a dense place, the more people will do so, and the more people who walk and cycle will die.
- greglindahl 9y agoThe charger rule doesn't change the minimum number of parking spaces, and adding chargers for a small fraction of spaces is a tiny expense compared to the overall cost of parking spaces. You might want to spend your effort on the parking space rule instead of the extremely minor issue of electric chargers.
- CalRobert 9y agoI do - I just dislike the idea that the building should be forced to have any parking. My current building has none (as did my last one) and was more affordable for it.
- KirinDave 9y agoI rent a home right now (and I've rented a half house before). So yeah, that's a challenge. The other option (and I do this a lot) is to just go to whole foods and use their monster-fast chargers. You can do a whole car in just a few hours with an L3 charger, it's amazing. This is more expensive than using any kind of outlet, but so is gas. Please forgive the imposition, but if you live in the dense and expensive part of the city, you probably are best off simply not owning a car.
- walshemj 9y agoAnd you can fill a fuel tank with gas in 10 mins. Really wide spread adoption of electric vehicles will require a Nobel prize winning jump in battery tech. And governments will tax electric cars to make up for the loss of fuel duty.
- greglindahl 9y agoReally wide spread availability of home, apartment, and work chargers doesn't need a Nobel Prize. Plugging and unplugging takes a few seconds, and having cars with big batteries plugged in a lot is a great way to store "excess" solar and wind energy.
- walshemj 9y agoits the required energy density that need the break through and how do you retro fit chargers to a high story apartment block?
- mythrwy 9y ago10 minutes? 3 minutes. I think widespread electric vehicle adaption will happen due to price but you have a very valid point on recharge time. Basically your car is unusable if low and being recharged and there is nothing you can do about it. Unless swapping heavy batteries becomes practical.
- organsnyder 9y ago
- gdudeman 9y agoI plug my car into a normal outlet and drag a cord across the sidewalk (my neighborhood is single family), so it depends. If there is an outlet near where you park your car, you may have everything you need for a charging station.
- brewdad 9y agoI hope your insurance is up to date. That sounds like a trip hazard litigation waiting to happen.
- jdietrich 9y ago> at-home charging stations for apartment dwellers are just a not-thing Not yet. The technology is absolutely ready, it's just stuck at the chicken-and-egg stage in most places. Anywhere you can fit a parking meter, you can fit an EV charger. Rolec produce a street light with a built-in EV charger. On-street EV charging is ready and waiting for the demand. I think it's almost inevitable that every parking space will eventually have an EV charger. http://www.rolecserv.com/ev-charging/product/EV-Charging-Street-Light http://www.rolecserv.com/ev-charging/product/EV-Charging-Str...
- gambiting 9y agoIn British cities, majority of people live in houses like this: https://imgur.com/a/14eXV https://imgur.com/a/14eXV How do you propose they charge their cars? On some nights you can fit 20 cars on each side. On others, 10 cars. Sometimes you can park right in front of your house, sometimes you have to park two streets away because there was no room on yours. Do we just install a charging point ever ~10 meters? If yes, who is going to pay for the absolutely enormous cost of ripping out every single street in the UK to put the necessary cables down? Won't it be an eyesore? How about vandalism and damaged cables?
- Const-me 9y ago> who is going to pay for the absolutely enormous cost of ripping out every single street in the UK to put the necessary cables down? Same questions could have been asked about fiber optics, cable TV, electricity, telephones, water and sewers. Yet we have that infrastructure. Also, some people believe by the time that future will come many people would opt out of buying cars, in favor of driverless taxis. These don’t need to stay parked in residential areas.
- gambiting 9y agoSure, but right now the electric cars are entering the market by storm - and soon we will run out of places to charge them. Those odd few places around the city centre that offer charging are not longer enough. This is a problem that needs to be solved long before autonomous vehicles are even a thing(not to mention that many people will still prefer to own a car)
- hyperbovine 9y agoActually, every new condo complex in the East Bay seems to feature a half dozen of these.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- BoorishBears 9y agoMy apartment building has charging ports in the underground parking, a lot of garages/parking lots have them these days
- gwbas1c 9y agoTwo apartments that I lived in had easy access to an outlet in the carport. Not ideal, but enough if you do about 12k miles a year and park 10 hours a day.
- megablast 9y agoTo be really green, don't own a car at all. Lets not pretend we are being green by buying an electric car. Green is riding a bike.
- heartsucker 9y agoDon't let perfect be the enemy of good. Some people can't not own a car and just bike everywhere or take public transit.
- Broken_Hippo 9y agoVery much this - and it describes nearly everywhere I lived the first 35 years of life. Apartments, rural communities and smallish cities (50-60k). The things these have in common were winters (indiana), employers without a decent area to change clothes in, lack of places to safely store a bike, lack of places to safely ride the bike, and a lack of public transportation. Some employers wouldn't hire you if you didn't have reliable transportation (a car) : Even McDonalds inquired about this in the late 90's. One job preffered one to have a vehicle occasionally to take deposits to the bank and get small change for customers. The penalty was crappier work hours because you could not meet business needs. The bank wasn't far away (8-10 blocks) and was in a tiny town (less than 3k people), yet the store was neither busy enough nor in a crime area high enough to qualify for an armored car service. And that's not to mention things like having to go travel to wash clothes or, like some even smaller towns than the one mentioned above, not having even a convenience store in town to get basic items.
- CalRobert 9y agoPerhaps pilots should be required to provide their own airplanes? It's ridiculous that the job wants to force their employees to provide their own $20,000 metal box. Perhaps what they want is a contractor, not an employee.
- mantas 9y agoJust make sure the bike ain't carbon :)
- WorldMaker 9y agoAs others point out, more apartment and civic/street chargers will eventually begin to show up. Don't forget too that there are certainly other interesting infrastructure solutions to deal with as well. A lot of people's cars spend most of their week in the parking lot of a job, so chargers in work places can be a more than good enough option for apartment dwellers. The interesting thing to electricity is that the grid infrastructure is already very well distributed. Just about anywhere your car sits for more than a few minutes could potentially be a charger. The question is probably less when such things will show up and more what sort of interesting things people will do with that. There are all sorts of interesting possibilities, such as inductive chargers embedded into street beds and parking lots that the only need is to park on top of them to get a charge.
- hwillis 9y ago>It'll still take time for me to see savings over a car in the $20-$30k range. Consider that a great deal of that price difference may just be scale. Combustion engines are extremely complex and have hundreds of parts, and require tons of automation and labor to make and assemble. Batteries can be spat out of a few machines. Batteries are heavier, and made of more stuff than an engine+transmission, but they are way simpler to build. Also the highest material expenses of batteries, nickel and cobalt, may also become cheaper at scale.
- jhulla 9y agoSo far cheaper to operate is correlated with smaller/lighter cars. The lower safety ratings of these small cars in offset crashes suggests that owners of these cars are taking a greater risk on the road.
- madengr 9y agoYep. The energy costs in my Leaf are $0.02/mile, and that's if I charge at home. There are 1000 L2 charge stations around Kansas City, and many L3, all free.
- jokoon 9y agoWhat kinds of costs are you talking about? I guess the electricity bill? Subscribing access to a charging station? Renting batteries?
- KirinDave 9y agoI subscribe to chargepoint and pay my PG&E bill.