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Should you buy an EV? 1. You live in a private house where you can charge the car? - Yes 2. You don't have a charger at home? - No Simple, really :) . I alwa

by Yizahi 4y ago

Should you buy an EV? 1. You live in a private house where you can charge the car? - Yes 2. You don't have a charger at home? - No Simple, really :) . I always wanted to buy an EV but that's a deal breaker criteria. Also the secondary problem - author makes assumption about electricity price, but it almost doesn't matter at all if you are changing at the commercial stations only. They will charge you for as much as they want, and it would be a far far more than bare electricity price at home. I have once calculated a price to kilometers value at the nearest commercial charger in my city (not USA and not EU), it was about equal to the running a benzin car on a 95 octane fuel. At the same time my colleague was spending on charging his Leaf about 1/4 of the fuel price of his previous city car (using commercial electricity prices, not the home one, home electricity price would have been 1/8 to fuel). So the commercial markup of a charging station was 300%. Not very enticing.

wffurr 4y ago
I see a good variety of EVs parked on the street here in Cambridge, MA, USA. There’s a decent local network of level 2 and 3 chargers that are regularly used to charge the cars, in the neighborhood and at various area workplaces. Some are owned by the city and only charge enough to break even on installation and electricity cost. Workplace ones are often subsidized by the employers as a side benefit. Clearly it doesn’t work in all locations; yours being a prime example, but there are parts of the world where it’s feasible to own an EV without home charging.
- Yizahi 4y ago
  I'm currently in the eastern EU, and while there a lot of EVs on the roads, the infrastructure is not usable for my personal use there too. No chargers at homes or near homes, not even in the new apartment blocks. No chargers at work parkings. Honestly, I wonder how can EU ban selling ICE cars even in 10 years, if the infrastructure in so much lagging behind.
  - badpun 4y ago
    > Honestly, I wonder how can EU ban selling ICE cars even in 10 years, if the infrastructure in so much lagging behind. They won't. I believe it's purely fiction.
  - ianai 4y ago
    It doesn’t take that long to wire up new electrical stuff. Just the will to do it. We’re talking 3.3kw to 6.6kw a drop unless it’s a fast charger. (Edit-the wider spread the slower chargers probably the lesser need for fast chargers, too.) 3.3kw is about 120v/27.5A. Not negligible but no one worries about hooking up hair driers to the grid and they draw tons of power. Reference the places putting chargers on light posts and similar.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      When's the last time someone and 10 of their neighbors dried their hair for 12 straight hours, though? It's not the instantaneous power draw from a single plug that people are worried about but rather the aggregate draw.
      - ianai 4y ago
        Fair, it’s maybe more like adding another appliance per household (fridge/freezer).
        trstregfsdgfd 4y ago
        More like a tumble dryer, running almost continuously. Fridges/freezers, even huge US-sized ones, don't use that much power. I measured the average consumption of my under-counter fridge at less than 10W.
        ianai 4y ago
        That’s an unfair comparison.
sigio 4y ago
Here it's actually cheaper to charge my EV on the public-chargers then doing it at home, europe has highly inflated electricity prices, but in my city all the chargers have fixed (low) prices, while my home electricity has risen from 21ct to 40+ct/kwh now. It will probably get even better as soon as I can get solar on my house, but getting enough juice from public-chargers is sufficient. Last weekend I even got a full (60+kwh) charge for free, as I was visiting Froscon, and the chargers in Sankt Augustin were all completely free, and there was a charger on the parking next to the venue.
acallaghan 4y ago
I hear this view a lot - my main rebuttal is 'but can't top up your car with petrol/gas/diesel at home either'. The infra around EV charging needs to be much much better, I totally agree with this, but the idea that everyone will be able to charge their cars at home just isn't going to happen
- Yizahi 4y ago
  Let's imagine I need a car for a daily commute. Or work. After a day ends, I need to get it to the charging station, which is away from the home. I leave the car there and take a bus to the home. There I do something not engaging too much, because in 1-3 hours I need to get out again, at night, get a bus to the charging station (longer waits late in the evening too), then get the car to home and then finally I can rest. It's totally not an option. Also taking a bus or tram twice a day additionally is not free, and kinda defeats the economy part of the EV car. PS edit: lets add some concrete numbers - the nearest station to my current home (in the peripheral region of the big city, but not the outskirts) is 10 minutes walk away, 2 (two) 22kW type-2 stations. The seconds closest station is 10 (ten) 100kW stations and it is 33 minutes away by bus with a single transfer. So I would need to wait for bus 4 times just to get to the big station and back.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    You shouldn’t need to charge every day in a city. Also, a lot of people will be able to charge at home. You don’t need special infrastructure for this, you can just plug into it into the mains.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Why would that be a valid rebuttal? From turning into a gas station to exiting, completely filling a gas tank takes, at most, 5 minutes and gas stations are everywhere. How long does charging to be able to travel the same distance take?
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    It's a rebuttal because it reduces local/regional pressure on fast chargers. If the average driver charges at home, fast chargers mostly only need to see the traffic of long distance drives. It's a move from strong centralization (gas stations are the only place to refuel a gas car) to much larger decentralization (in theory an EV can charge anywhere the electric grid touches and especially in the US the electric grid sure touches a large amount of the country, even "wilderness areas"). In terms of real world charging times added to travel the same distance, the raw numbers are generally for the same distance where you need one gas stop you need one charging stop. The charging stop is 15-30 minutes, which seems like a clear "loss" if you see gas stops as only 5 minutes. But gas refueling is a necessary serial task and you should not do anything else while waiting for your car to refuel. (technically, there are even laws that it is illegal to not watch your car the entire time), while charging is a parallel task and you can eat/hit the restrooms/do any number of other things while you wait. Experientially you may not notice any "lost time" in comparison of the two approaches depending on how you use refueling stops today. It sounds like a lot of lost time on paper, but you make up for it in parallel tasking.
Pelentio 4y ago
I own an ev and it's easy enough to charge it out of my home. It's not that black and white. I will also be able to start charging at work in a year if I even need to go to work. And I have seen plenty of normal companies providing charging options (Germany). Charging infrastructure is easy to setup.
kbos87 4y ago
Not to pile on but I’ll second some of the other commenters who have said that not being able to charge at home isn’t that big of a deal. I live in a condo in a major US city and don’t have the option to charge at home. From a convenience perspective, it’s truly turned out to be a non-issue. We’re at the point where I live that there are enough chargers around that I simply plug in once or twice a week while I’m running some errands. From a cost perspective, it probably would be cheaper for me to charge at home, but it would be small and would take years to pay off the cost difference of having a charger installed. I spend so little on charging that I don’t really pay attention to it as an expense. Obviously your situation may vary but I had a lot of anxiety about this and it turned out to be completely unfounded. Figure out where there are (ideally level 2 chargers) near you and you’ll be fine.
- News-Dog 4y ago
  With the number of Shopping Centers/Malls installing solar PV's on their building roofs and car parks, it is probably only a matter of time till they install EV charges to entice customers to their Centers.
  - yywwbbn 4y ago
    They already tried that where I live (northeastern Europe) since the government subsidized most of the installation cost. Most of the businesses closed them last month after the market price of electricity for commercial users shot up by 10x. There is zero chance of having enough solar on site to charge any meaningful number of cars simultaneously.
    - News-Dog 4y ago
      Edit to fix typos (sorry), and add google search; search >'Shopping Centers/Malls installed solar PV's'< @DDG <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='Shopping Centers/Malls installed solar PV' https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='Shopping Centers/Malls ...> search >'Shopping Centers/Malls installed EV charger'< @DDG <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='Shopping Centers/Malls installed EV charger' https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='Shopping Centers/Malls ...> search >'Shopping Centers/Malls installed solar PV and EV charger'< @google <https://www.google.com/search?q='Shopping Centers/Malls installed solar PV and EV charger' https://www.google.com/search?q='Shopping Centers/Malls inst...>
rnk 4y ago
If you have an accessible 120v outlet, it's extremely likely you can charge just with that. Evidence - had an ev since 2012, using only 120 volts. Only the most inefficient recent evs argue for higher voltage. The reasons 120v garage charging won't work for you: 1. You commonly drive 200+ miles, need to come home, charge, driving 200 or 300 miles almost immediately. When I need to do this I can go to a supercharger or fast dc charger, but that's rare. There's another alternative, I have used my house's dryer vent to charge at 30 amps, 220v maybe a dozen times in 10 years.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  Even the least efficient EVs still get some charge at 120v. One of the worst offenders only gets 1 mile per kWh so that's roughly 1 mile every hour at home. Even if your inefficient EV is only plugged in for the roughly 8 hours you need to sleep, that's still 8 more miles of range when you wake up than you had before you went to bed. A lot of people like to discount that as "basically nothing", but a gas car isn't going to have 8 more miles it can drive when you wake up. It's a subtle seeming shift, but it's still a useful shift, because it adds up. 8 extra miles a night is still 56 miles a week you don't need to "fast charge", even with the most inefficient sort of EV and the least time at home. Cars spend more time parked than in use by a great margin, even among those drivers that drive hundreds of miles every week. The US is at a disadvantage with our 120v standard and that a lot of people don't think 120v is "adequate" for EV charging ("it's only an additional mile per hour range in my inefficient EV Hummer!"), but we should normalize 120v charging because it should be easy and affordable to almost every household and a lot of shared parking. We've more than a century of experience installing "regular plugs" everywhere. We could start there and do a lot of good in the US to encourage charging everywhere a car is parked. We have to reduce the stigma that it "isn't good enough" because people can't think fourth dimensionally that 1 mile per hour is "adequate" because it is still more than the car would have had otherwise. Dryer plugs are great, too, but we don't have as many free circuits in our fuse boxes and circuit breaker boxes as we'd all like to put extra dryer plugs in all our garages, because the US made the mistake of standardizing on 120v instead of 220/240v like most of the rest of the world. (Thanks, Edison.~) We can start with regular plugs, and need to destagmatize it/normalize it if we want cheap charging everywhere and less focus on "how do we install chargers" as if it's this deeply complicated bootstrap process. We have outlets everywhere, let's use them better. We install new outlets all the time for relatively pennies (the labor investments far dwarfs the supplies/capital investments), we can install them near every parking lot a lot cheaper than we can add 240v circuits to parking lots (or "fast chargers"). If we can start to think of it as "adequate" because it is still additive.

by Yizahi 4y ago

wffurr 4y ago

I see a good variety of EVs parked on the street here in Cambridge, MA, USA. There’s a decent local network of level 2 and 3 chargers that are regularly used to charge the cars, in the neighborhood and at various area workplaces. Some are owned by the city and only charge enough to break even on installation and electricity cost. Workplace ones are often subsidized by the employers as a side benefit. Clearly it doesn’t work in all locations; yours being a prime example, but there are parts of the world where it’s feasible to own an EV without home charging.

Yizahi 4y ago
I'm currently in the eastern EU, and while there a lot of EVs on the roads, the infrastructure is not usable for my personal use there too. No chargers at homes or near homes, not even in the new apartment blocks. No chargers at work parkings. Honestly, I wonder how can EU ban selling ICE cars even in 10 years, if the infrastructure in so much lagging behind.
- badpun 4y ago
  > Honestly, I wonder how can EU ban selling ICE cars even in 10 years, if the infrastructure in so much lagging behind. They won't. I believe it's purely fiction.
- ianai 4y ago
  It doesn’t take that long to wire up new electrical stuff. Just the will to do it. We’re talking 3.3kw to 6.6kw a drop unless it’s a fast charger. (Edit-the wider spread the slower chargers probably the lesser need for fast chargers, too.) 3.3kw is about 120v/27.5A. Not negligible but no one worries about hooking up hair driers to the grid and they draw tons of power. Reference the places putting chargers on light posts and similar.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    When's the last time someone and 10 of their neighbors dried their hair for 12 straight hours, though? It's not the instantaneous power draw from a single plug that people are worried about but rather the aggregate draw.
    - ianai 4y ago
      Fair, it’s maybe more like adding another appliance per household (fridge/freezer).
      - trstregfsdgfd 4y ago
        More like a tumble dryer, running almost continuously. Fridges/freezers, even huge US-sized ones, don't use that much power. I measured the average consumption of my under-counter fridge at less than 10W.
        ianai 4y ago
        That’s an unfair comparison.

sigio 4y ago

Here it's actually cheaper to charge my EV on the public-chargers then doing it at home, europe has highly inflated electricity prices, but in my city all the chargers have fixed (low) prices, while my home electricity has risen from 21ct to 40+ct/kwh now. It will probably get even better as soon as I can get solar on my house, but getting enough juice from public-chargers is sufficient. Last weekend I even got a full (60+kwh) charge for free, as I was visiting Froscon, and the chargers in Sankt Augustin were all completely free, and there was a charger on the parking next to the venue.

acallaghan 4y ago

I hear this view a lot - my main rebuttal is 'but can't top up your car with petrol/gas/diesel at home either'. The infra around EV charging needs to be much much better, I totally agree with this, but the idea that everyone will be able to charge their cars at home just isn't going to happen

Yizahi 4y ago
Let's imagine I need a car for a daily commute. Or work. After a day ends, I need to get it to the charging station, which is away from the home. I leave the car there and take a bus to the home. There I do something not engaging too much, because in 1-3 hours I need to get out again, at night, get a bus to the charging station (longer waits late in the evening too), then get the car to home and then finally I can rest. It's totally not an option. Also taking a bus or tram twice a day additionally is not free, and kinda defeats the economy part of the EV car. PS edit: lets add some concrete numbers - the nearest station to my current home (in the peripheral region of the big city, but not the outskirts) is 10 minutes walk away, 2 (two) 22kW type-2 stations. The seconds closest station is 10 (ten) 100kW stations and it is 33 minutes away by bus with a single transfer. So I would need to wait for bus 4 times just to get to the big station and back.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  You shouldn’t need to charge every day in a city. Also, a lot of people will be able to charge at home. You don’t need special infrastructure for this, you can just plug into it into the mains.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
Why would that be a valid rebuttal? From turning into a gas station to exiting, completely filling a gas tank takes, at most, 5 minutes and gas stations are everywhere. How long does charging to be able to travel the same distance take?
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  It's a rebuttal because it reduces local/regional pressure on fast chargers. If the average driver charges at home, fast chargers mostly only need to see the traffic of long distance drives. It's a move from strong centralization (gas stations are the only place to refuel a gas car) to much larger decentralization (in theory an EV can charge anywhere the electric grid touches and especially in the US the electric grid sure touches a large amount of the country, even "wilderness areas"). In terms of real world charging times added to travel the same distance, the raw numbers are generally for the same distance where you need one gas stop you need one charging stop. The charging stop is 15-30 minutes, which seems like a clear "loss" if you see gas stops as only 5 minutes. But gas refueling is a necessary serial task and you should not do anything else while waiting for your car to refuel. (technically, there are even laws that it is illegal to not watch your car the entire time), while charging is a parallel task and you can eat/hit the restrooms/do any number of other things while you wait. Experientially you may not notice any "lost time" in comparison of the two approaches depending on how you use refueling stops today. It sounds like a lot of lost time on paper, but you make up for it in parallel tasking.

Pelentio 4y ago

I own an ev and it's easy enough to charge it out of my home. It's not that black and white. I will also be able to start charging at work in a year if I even need to go to work. And I have seen plenty of normal companies providing charging options (Germany). Charging infrastructure is easy to setup.

kbos87 4y ago

Not to pile on but I’ll second some of the other commenters who have said that not being able to charge at home isn’t that big of a deal. I live in a condo in a major US city and don’t have the option to charge at home. From a convenience perspective, it’s truly turned out to be a non-issue. We’re at the point where I live that there are enough chargers around that I simply plug in once or twice a week while I’m running some errands. From a cost perspective, it probably would be cheaper for me to charge at home, but it would be small and would take years to pay off the cost difference of having a charger installed. I spend so little on charging that I don’t really pay attention to it as an expense. Obviously your situation may vary but I had a lot of anxiety about this and it turned out to be completely unfounded. Figure out where there are (ideally level 2 chargers) near you and you’ll be fine.

News-Dog 4y ago
With the number of Shopping Centers/Malls installing solar PV's on their building roofs and car parks, it is probably only a matter of time till they install EV charges to entice customers to their Centers.
- yywwbbn 4y ago
  They already tried that where I live (northeastern Europe) since the government subsidized most of the installation cost. Most of the businesses closed them last month after the market price of electricity for commercial users shot up by 10x. There is zero chance of having enough solar on site to charge any meaningful number of cars simultaneously.
  - News-Dog 4y ago
    Edit to fix typos (sorry), and add google search; search >'Shopping Centers/Malls installed solar PV's'< @DDG <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='Shopping Centers/Malls installed solar PV' https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='Shopping Centers/Malls ...> search >'Shopping Centers/Malls installed EV charger'< @DDG <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='Shopping Centers/Malls installed EV charger' https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='Shopping Centers/Malls ...> search >'Shopping Centers/Malls installed solar PV and EV charger'< @google <https://www.google.com/search?q='Shopping Centers/Malls installed solar PV and EV charger' https://www.google.com/search?q='Shopping Centers/Malls inst...>

rnk 4y ago

If you have an accessible 120v outlet, it's extremely likely you can charge just with that. Evidence - had an ev since 2012, using only 120 volts. Only the most inefficient recent evs argue for higher voltage. The reasons 120v garage charging won't work for you: 1. You commonly drive 200+ miles, need to come home, charge, driving 200 or 300 miles almost immediately. When I need to do this I can go to a supercharger or fast dc charger, but that's rare. There's another alternative, I have used my house's dryer vent to charge at 30 amps, 220v maybe a dozen times in 10 years.

WorldMaker 4y ago
Even the least efficient EVs still get some charge at 120v. One of the worst offenders only gets 1 mile per kWh so that's roughly 1 mile every hour at home. Even if your inefficient EV is only plugged in for the roughly 8 hours you need to sleep, that's still 8 more miles of range when you wake up than you had before you went to bed. A lot of people like to discount that as "basically nothing", but a gas car isn't going to have 8 more miles it can drive when you wake up. It's a subtle seeming shift, but it's still a useful shift, because it adds up. 8 extra miles a night is still 56 miles a week you don't need to "fast charge", even with the most inefficient sort of EV and the least time at home. Cars spend more time parked than in use by a great margin, even among those drivers that drive hundreds of miles every week. The US is at a disadvantage with our 120v standard and that a lot of people don't think 120v is "adequate" for EV charging ("it's only an additional mile per hour range in my inefficient EV Hummer!"), but we should normalize 120v charging because it should be easy and affordable to almost every household and a lot of shared parking. We've more than a century of experience installing "regular plugs" everywhere. We could start there and do a lot of good in the US to encourage charging everywhere a car is parked. We have to reduce the stigma that it "isn't good enough" because people can't think fourth dimensionally that 1 mile per hour is "adequate" because it is still more than the car would have had otherwise. Dryer plugs are great, too, but we don't have as many free circuits in our fuse boxes and circuit breaker boxes as we'd all like to put extra dryer plugs in all our garages, because the US made the mistake of standardizing on 120v instead of 220/240v like most of the rest of the world. (Thanks, Edison.~) We can start with regular plugs, and need to destagmatize it/normalize it if we want cheap charging everywhere and less focus on "how do we install chargers" as if it's this deeply complicated bootstrap process. We have outlets everywhere, let's use them better. We install new outlets all the time for relatively pennies (the labor investments far dwarfs the supplies/capital investments), we can install them near every parking lot a lot cheaper than we can add 240v circuits to parking lots (or "fast chargers"). If we can start to think of it as "adequate" because it is still additive.