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> "I live in an apartment, I can't charge one, on the street" I agree with pretty much everything you said, but I still can't fathom how electric cars are goin
by Eric_WVGG 8y ago
> "I live in an apartment, I can't charge one, on the street"
I agree with pretty much everything you said, but I still can't fathom how electric cars are going to make more than a dent in NYC where most cars are stored streetside.
- petre 8y agoUnless the municipality installs street size charging stations. Then they can charge for parking and electricity.
- mabbo 8y ago> I still can't fathom how electric cars are going to make more than a dent in NYC where most cars are stored streetside Consumer/taxpayer demand for a solution, like most problems in a capitalist democracy. I imagine streets where every nth parking spot has something that looks like a beefy parking meter, but will allow thick-ish extension cords to run from a car to it. Turn it on with an RFID tied to which house you belong to on the street (ensures only locals can use it, charges the electrical costs to the right house). It's technically doable with the technology in our hands today and not very complicated to install. Give in 10 more years, there'll be even smarter ideas.
- ryanmarsh 8y agoIn most urban areas hooking up new electrical service does not usually mean breaking concrete. I think you'll be amazed how quickly cities deploy charging infrastructure once they realize the premium they can charge for the same parking spot.
- sokoloff 8y agoWhat's the "premium" that a typical consumer would pay? Take 15K miles/year at 4 miles/kWh or 30 miles/gal. 3750kWh or 500 gallons of gas. At MA electric rates, the electricity is $750, the gas is about $1500. It's unlikely that an electric car consumer would pay more than the $750 delta for the electric charging spot, and would likely be willing to pay only a smaller figure because they are unlikely to do all of their charging in that space or network of spaces. That premium/willingness-to-pay won't even cover the all-in cost of installing a single EVSE in the first year.
- ryanmarsh 8y agoAny infrastructure spend that paid for itself in a year would be like winning the lottery. Infrastructure investment is evaluated on a timescale more akin with geology.
- sokoloff 8y agoAgreed with the first sentence, but I still don't think the math pencils out. I'm not going to pay City X $750 (on top of the existing parking charge and electricity) so I can use their charging network. The figure I'm willing to pay specifically for the EVSE access is probably more like $100. Barring significant over-subscription, that's still a ~10 year payback. With massive over-subscription, it doesn't become a reliable charging source. (My prior post, which I'll leave unedited, was unclear/insufficient in stating it was longer than a one-year payback.)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- newnewpdro 8y agoPresumably at that point the 0%-100% recharge time will be competitive with pumping gas. But I do think between now and then we need more infrastructure for tenants to charge at home.
- astura 8y agoThere's no physical reason why there can't be municipal on street charging, even if it's "pay to charge." Think like parking meters. There just needs to be a demand for the initial infrastructure to be built.
- Eric_WVGG 8y agoWe can't even handle parking meters out here, though.
- perl4ever 8y agoI think there is a "physical" reason, or to be exact, a concrete logical reason why it will be difficult. We have X number of gas pumps. If it takes Y times the amount of time to charge a car as pumping fuel, then we need X*Y chargers for everyone to go electric. It's not just a matter of what's convenient, but of multiplying the infrastructure.
- taneq 8y agoYes, but the power grid is already in place (although it'll probably need upgrading, piecemeal, to handle the additional load). You couldn't run a gas pipeline to every kerbside parking spot but you could put a paid charge point there and it would pay for itself in no time.
- kwhitefoot 8y ago> although it'll probably need upgrading, piecemeal, to handle the additional load Not necessarily, see this document from the UK National Grid which discusses the options: https://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/articles/electric-dreams-future-evs https://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/articles/electric-dreams-fut...
- sunstone 8y agoAnd, at an equivalent of about $1 a gallon, lots of people will get on that.
- gambiting 8y ago
- aphextron 8y agoIt's really not a big deal. Chargers are everywhere in urban areas. I've lived with an EV for two years now with just street parking.
- gambiting 8y agoMaybe everywhere in urban areas in certain US cities. I live in a mid-size EU city(<500k people) and there's just few charging points around me, which are pretty much permanent occupied.
- aphextron 8y agoThings are much different in the bay area at least. My employer has a whole bunch of of plugs in our parking garage, and I charge for free every day. My commute cost is almost negligible because of it. I can totally see a future where it just becomes standard for every parking lot to be powered with at least a few plugs. When you're plugging in everywhere you go, there's no need for overnight charging.
- Angostura 8y ago> My employer has a whole bunch of of plugs in our parking garage An employer with a parking garage. That's a very funny concept.
- Zanni 8y agoRange will solve this issue. For 18 months I charged my Tesla at Whole Foods, Target, etc, at a paltry 20mph charge rate. When my commute was 40+ miles round trip, that meant I had to charge a couple of times a week for multiple hours. Very frustrating. But when I got my weekly miles under my max range (180 miles) and started using a near-ish high-speed charger, I'd just catch a movie once a week, and my car would be fully charged for the week by the time I was through. A high-speed charger is enough to put 300-400 miles on an EV while you watch an average movie, if they have that capacity.
- stephengillie 8y agoMy Camry Hybrid can have 500+ miles of range recharged in a few minutes. That's the "killer app" that electric has to beat, one way or another. Spending multiple hours recharging is like driving 30mph on the freeway.
- greglindahl 8y agoAnd yet hybrid sales are low, despite your enthusiasm.
- giobox 8y agoHybrid or not isn’t really the point. A gas car refills to max range almost instantly. It just so happens this Camry example has particularly good range on one tank of gas by virtue of being a hybrid, but the point is no more diminished with any other ICE car. Many non-hybrid models will also comfortably manage 500+ miles on a single tank. All that said, I suspect there is a “good enough” tipping point for EVs, especially now that we are seeing some manage ~300 miles on one charge, which is more than enough for many commutes/weekly shopping trips etc.
- greglindahl 8y agoUh, OK, I thought it was, but you're free to disagree. I do agree that there's a ton of evidence that Tesla's S/X have plenty of range for most people to not be bothered by it. And it doesn't appear to matter to these folks that a hybrid would fill up faster, which brings us back to hybrids.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- richardw 8y agoNYC seems like a good place to have autonomous electric taxis. No ownership, no streetside storage. When battery drops, it goes home and swaps with a charged-up car.
- theluketaylor 8y agoConveniently cities have already done a huge amount of the legwork for enabling charging at street parking thanks to street lights. It will be expensive no doubt, but so was converting gas street lights to light bulbs.
- kosievdmerwe 8y agoCars draw a lot of power vs electric lamps.
- pentae 8y agoSo? It's about the voltage lines. They aren't running low voltage lines to power the street lights.
- jacobush 8y agoIt's better to have a car partly charged vs not charged at all during the night. On my morning walks in Brooklyn I noticed many cars didn't move an inch for days.
- code_duck 8y agoStreet lights are currently changing from 250-1000 watt HIDs to LEDs, so they used a lot of power in the past and not much in the future.
- AYBABTME 8y agoYou don't need a 35kW charger to charge overnight. Low power overnight will be good enough to top off most cars' daily usage.
- Symbiote 8y agoMany dense European cities have installed on street charging points. https://andrew.london/2018/01/solving-the-electric-car-on-street-charging-problem/ https://andrew.london/2018/01/solving-the-electric-car-on-st...
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago> I agree with pretty much everything you said, but I still can't fathom how electric cars are going to make more than a dent in NYC where most cars are stored streetside. You're thinking about this from the wrong way around. The people who buy the first electric cars mainly don't live in places they can't charge them, they live in single family homes where they can install a charging port. That allows enough electric cars to accumulate that the lobby for installing charging ports on city streets can form and get a few of them installed. But with more charging ports you get more people buying electric cars and so the lobby for installing even more charging ports grows, until they're all over the place.
- icc97 8y agoIt raises the value of houses that have garages where you can plug your car in. I'm looking at buying a house in Belgium and it's a definite issue.
- sokoloff 8y agoHow much of that is the garage (which I agree would raise the value) vs the EVSE in the garage (which can be added for under 1500€ in most cases)?
- icc97 8y agoJust the garage. If you don't have a garage, you have to buy one apart which is about €20,000. Then you always have a trip to the car and there might still be issues with installing the EVSE.
- zeta0134 8y agoIt's been quite a while since I visited NYC so forgive me if my memories are outdated, but when I was there, parking meters were commonplace along the roads. Would it not at least make sense to slowly replace those with combination parking meter + charging station, which might be easier for the city to monetize in the long run? I realize this doesn't solve the home-side storage problem, but it might be one way the infrastructure could move forward in common hubs.
- cimmanom 8y agoThey’ve replaced the meter-per-space with a single digital meter per block. And that’s also only there in particularly commercially oriented areas, not in residential areas. Though I personally agree with the argument that we should be charging for parking on public property everywhere in the city.
- honestoHeminway 8y agoMake a autonmous cable-drum that comes to your parking spot if you need charging from some underground storage locker?
- OJFord 8y agoIn the UK, every new street light will double as an EV charger. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/07/08/every-new-home-office-street-light-have-charging-point-electric/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/07/08/every-new-ho...
- jasoncartwright 8y agoI used these every week. It works great. https://www.ubitricity.com/en/ https://www.ubitricity.com/en/
- leoedin 8y agoThat's pretty cool, but even if we converted every single one we'd still be lacking. My street has a car to streetlight ratio of 10 or 15 to 1. Even if the cars only needed to be charged once a week, and everyone was very good at coordinating to allow cars needing charged to be parked next to the streetlight, that would still only work for half the cars parked. There's vast swathes of UK cities - especially the highest density most polluted ones - which have the same problem.