5 ms·

For those of us who live in apartment buildings and don't have a garage where we can install such things, then what? To me this has always been the biggest obs

For those of us who live in apartment buildings and don't have a garage where we can install such things, then what? To me this has always been the biggest obstacle of an electric car.

greglindahl 11y ago
Wait to buy an electric car until it's convenient for you to charge it?
- msandford 11y ago
  That means few millenials will ever be able to own them; real estate is just too damn expensive to buy, nevermind the car that you really only can get once you own a house with a garage.
  - greglindahl 11y ago
    Lots of places don't have super-expensive real estate, unlike the Bay Area and Manhattan. More and more places over time will require apartment garages to have chargers -- already a law for new construction here in Palo Alto. Personally, I charge at the city parking garage a block away.
    - msandford 11y ago
      So let me get this straight. In the "flyover country" where you DON'T get big city salaries, you're going to buy a $100k-$150k house because you don't make six figures. And then with all the leftover money that you don't have because you're not earning SF engineer salary, you're going to buy a car that costs anywhere from 25%-50% of your house?
      - greglindahl 11y ago
        Last I lived in flyover country, I bought a $162,000 house on a $55,000 salary, and owned a car a bit more expensive than a Leaf. So yes, it does work. And that's the owning a house case. There's also the "renting an apartment at a modern complex" case.
      - bpodgursky 11y ago
        Bay area house prices are not proportional (even discarding the effects of higher marginal tax rates). 150K salary for a million dollar house is not easy; 150k house on 50k salary (and a 3x salary difference is a bit of an exaggeration, while house prices are not) is much more plausible.
        kenrikm 11y ago
        I bought a foreclosed 70k house in Miami in 2009 (4br - 2.5bth, now worth 150k - rented and cash flow positive) I've lived in the bay area since 2012 It hurts knowing I could buy two or three more houses with what I pay in rent here, similar houses in the bay cost 600-700k yes it really is a 5-10x difference #sigh
      - chao- 11y ago
        Have you seen the vehicle culture in "flyover country"? You will absolutely see people put off repairs and upkeep to their house while they make sure they get a new car every 5 years (or stagger new cars with their spouse, 10 years for each because). If you haven't seen it, I can only ask you believe someone (me) with experience in it (various cities in Texas). Would it surprise you as well to learn that "SF engineer" isn't the only job in the world that pays a high salary? In Houston for instance, I know dozens of people who earn comparable amounts from engineering in the medical and energy companies. And don't get me started on the consultancies that support them (megabucks) or salespeople paid on commission (ultrabucks). It's actually one of the biggest obstacles to our startup community here: luring good people away from their low-risk, high-salary position in energy, medicine and finance.
        msandford 11y ago
        Yeah I've never lived in SF but I understand that the economics are different out there. Once you have a note on a million dollar house, what's another $80k for a car? It barely moves the needle. But when your mortgage is only $1k/mo and then you have to spend another $1k/mo on a car (before insurance or "fuel" or anything else) you might start to wonder. I've got a Subaru and I figure that car will cost me about $1500/year for the car and another $200/mo for fuel. That's $400/mo insured and everything versus the $1100-$1200 for the Tesla. Look I'm not saying it's IMPOSSIBLE for people to buy electric cars. But the idea that somehow all the millenials who have generally been screwed by not buying real estate before interest rates went to zero are going to find the cash to start buying electric cars seems pretty laughable to me. Will some do it? For sure! If you can pull down six figures somewhere with a reasonable cost of living it's totally doable. But there aren't too many places where you can make six figures without everything else costing more too. EDIT: I live in flyover country. Always have. I'm talking from experience, not how I perceive things from my golden throne on the west coast.
        Gibbon1 11y ago
        Actually I do live in SF. If you put a million dollar note on a house you are the mother of all house poor. One point I make is the Tesla is luxo-sport car. Costs a lot new like any other sporty car. So the cost of a new Tesla vs a used gasoline power car isn't really a fair comparison. Looking on Craigslist, you can get a used Nissan Leaf $10k, cost per mile is $0.035. One can run numbers but the cost of ownership is probably $300/mo. Problematical in places like SF is the lack of parking and thus lack of charging. Though large numbers of people do have or rent garages. In Suburbs a problem can be many people have long commutes that exceed the range of an electric car. Interestingly a friend just threw down for one of those million dollar homes in SF and is considering an electric car to avoid having to ride the google bus. I'll be interested in how it works our for him. I do have another friend that lives in Oakland, he has a leaf seems to like it.
      - VLM 11y ago
        "In the "flyover country" where you DON'T get big city salaries" Sure you do. I could expect at absolute most a 25% pay raise if I moved to CA. Its not worth it. The ratio in cost of living might be 10:1 but the ratio in income is more like 5:4 or so.
    - threeseed 11y ago
      The world is bigger than just the US. Housing affordability is a major problem in almost every developed country.
      - paganel 11y ago
        > The world is bigger than just the US. Sometimes it doesn't feel that way, at least according to people here on HN. I live in an apartment block which looks like this (https://www.google.com/search?q=bucharest+communist+flats&biw=1920&bih=902&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAWoVChMIlbvBnb7axgIVkgfbCh1DTQaA https://www.google.com/search?q=bucharest+communist+flats&bi...), where normal people have actually starting physical fights, with fists and police intervention, over parking spots situated between those buildings, there's no way you could, I don't know, somehow charge your car when you live on the 7th floor.
  - gorgak 11y ago
    you dont need a garage, you can just have a lead, my friend was doing it like that in london 5 years ago! just had a lead coming out of his house onto the street!
- threeseed 11y ago
  I guess you have missed the big population trends of the last few decades. More and more people are moving to inner city apartments every one of which is not designed with electric cars in mind. And with property prices reaching astronomical amounts in many places e.g. Australia, UK, Europe, HK, SG the lure of cheaper but smaller apartments is only going to grow. For me this is is one of the big advantages of hydrogen cars i.e. you use them exactly the same as your existing car.
  - jannotti 11y ago
    I agree there's a problem here, but the trend you point out is probably breakeven with respect to gas/electric. Many people how move into a dense city have no car at all. (Those who do have more money and often garage their car, so they'll add charging to long term garages as demand increases.)
    - snogglethorpe 11y ago
      Yes. People moving to inner city apartments are dropping the car altogether, so for them what matters is what's most convenient for car-rental companies when they occasionally rent a car.... In an environment where people only use cars for special trips, not for day-to-day activities, the longer range of gasoline might end up being a bigger advantage than it is for current-day Americans.
  - krschultz 11y ago
    It is massively cheaper to solve the problem of extending electricity 5 meters from the inside of the apartment building to the parking lot than it would be to build a global hydrogen distribution network.
    - threeseed 11y ago
      You're missing the point. Who is going to pay to extend electricity into each car bay of an apartment building car park ? It's a significant cost that any property developer is not currently doing (they clearly see a weak market) nor likely to do for the handful of people who will request it. Much of a future hydrogen distribution network already exists (we have transportation companies, gas stations etc) all of whom would be more than happy to add a new technology. Just like they have done already with LPG.
baldeagle 11y ago
There are a number of players looking to open up that market. It will be a second order effect, once electric charging becomes a market driver for high end apartments. See this link for a quick example: http://cleantechnica.com/2015/04/15/chargepoint-offering-solution-charging-apartments-condos/ http://cleantechnica.com/2015/04/15/chargepoint-offering-sol...
sahat 11y ago
If you own a Tesla Model S and live near a supercharger network, charging is not an issue. Over 8,000 miles in my Model S, all powered exclusively by the superchargers, free of charge. Note: I live in an apartment less than 2 miles from the nearest supercharger in Los Angeles and only 8 miles from work. So, the range is never a problem.
- vtsrh 11y ago
  Tesla Superchargers are not the solution for this, as they are simply not designed for such use. They were built to help with long range destinations. There are cases where users, (ab)using them as you do, got a request to reduce their usage. I guess you didn't trigger any flags.
adevine 11y ago
As electric cars become more and more popular, more and more apartment buildings will start offering charging stations. My condo building added them about 2 years ago.
cbhl 11y ago
Electric Car-sharing, just like how since you don't have a garage you would use normal car sharing (Zipcar). If you live in the SF Bay Area: https://us.drive-now.com/ https://us.drive-now.com/
ryandrake 11y ago
Not only that, but commutes > the range of the car make it impossible as well. The only thing stopping me from buying a leaf is that my commute is 50 miles, so if I don't find a charging station near work, I don't get home.
higherpurpose 11y ago
Electric car infrastructure is "cheap" (compared to say hydrogen stations or even gas stations). Chargers will be everywhere by the time 20% of the car market is electric. I wouldn't worry too much about it if you're not planning to get an EV in the next 10 years anyway.
VLM 11y ago
"don't have a garage where we can install such things" Why? In the frozen north its, maybe not customary, but not overly unusual, to have parking spots wired for engine block and battery heaters. Theres a whole cultural thing of not blocking other peoples access, a legal framework of not blocking sidewalks, when its OK to share, or not share, someones extension cord, stuff like that. Its just not a serious issue. The cost of one parking spot was rolled into my bachelor pad, but when space was available I could get another spot for $25/mo or whatever it was, surely a charger spot would have some minor additional costs, but chargers are pretty cheap compared to land and pavement and buildings. I guess the only technological limitation I can think of is service drop size, if you wire up 200 parking stalls at 25 KW each you're probably going to have to upgrade the service drop or implement something "interesting" involving partial charge rates. Presumably someone will start shipping an apartment charger that can bluetooth pair with its neighboring chargers and cooperate such that the total average draw of the entire lot never exceeds 100 KW or something like that. 100 KW is a drop in the bucket for an apartment building, thats like 1000 watts worth of TVs or lights in each of 100 apartments. Dinner time on a hot summer night is a large multiple of that draw. House service drops used to be just 60 amps a few decades ago and now 200 is pretty standard... if you think service drop upgrades for a house are expensive, imagine the cost of an entire apartment building upgrade LOL. Of course this may be a short term thing... solar panels may mean apartments will be net producers while the sun is up, soon enough.

For those of us who live in apartment buildings and don't have a garage where we can install such things, then what? To me this has always been the biggest obstacle of an electric car.

greglindahl 11y ago

Wait to buy an electric car until it's convenient for you to charge it?

msandford 11y ago
That means few millenials will ever be able to own them; real estate is just too damn expensive to buy, nevermind the car that you really only can get once you own a house with a garage.
- greglindahl 11y ago
  Lots of places don't have super-expensive real estate, unlike the Bay Area and Manhattan. More and more places over time will require apartment garages to have chargers -- already a law for new construction here in Palo Alto. Personally, I charge at the city parking garage a block away.
  - msandford 11y ago
    So let me get this straight. In the "flyover country" where you DON'T get big city salaries, you're going to buy a $100k-$150k house because you don't make six figures. And then with all the leftover money that you don't have because you're not earning SF engineer salary, you're going to buy a car that costs anywhere from 25%-50% of your house?
    - greglindahl 11y ago
      Last I lived in flyover country, I bought a $162,000 house on a $55,000 salary, and owned a car a bit more expensive than a Leaf. So yes, it does work. And that's the owning a house case. There's also the "renting an apartment at a modern complex" case.
    - bpodgursky 11y ago
      Bay area house prices are not proportional (even discarding the effects of higher marginal tax rates). 150K salary for a million dollar house is not easy; 150k house on 50k salary (and a 3x salary difference is a bit of an exaggeration, while house prices are not) is much more plausible.
      - kenrikm 11y ago
        I bought a foreclosed 70k house in Miami in 2009 (4br - 2.5bth, now worth 150k - rented and cash flow positive) I've lived in the bay area since 2012 It hurts knowing I could buy two or three more houses with what I pay in rent here, similar houses in the bay cost 600-700k yes it really is a 5-10x difference #sigh
    - chao- 11y ago
      Have you seen the vehicle culture in "flyover country"? You will absolutely see people put off repairs and upkeep to their house while they make sure they get a new car every 5 years (or stagger new cars with their spouse, 10 years for each because). If you haven't seen it, I can only ask you believe someone (me) with experience in it (various cities in Texas). Would it surprise you as well to learn that "SF engineer" isn't the only job in the world that pays a high salary? In Houston for instance, I know dozens of people who earn comparable amounts from engineering in the medical and energy companies. And don't get me started on the consultancies that support them (megabucks) or salespeople paid on commission (ultrabucks). It's actually one of the biggest obstacles to our startup community here: luring good people away from their low-risk, high-salary position in energy, medicine and finance.
      - msandford 11y ago
        Yeah I've never lived in SF but I understand that the economics are different out there. Once you have a note on a million dollar house, what's another $80k for a car? It barely moves the needle. But when your mortgage is only $1k/mo and then you have to spend another $1k/mo on a car (before insurance or "fuel" or anything else) you might start to wonder. I've got a Subaru and I figure that car will cost me about $1500/year for the car and another $200/mo for fuel. That's $400/mo insured and everything versus the $1100-$1200 for the Tesla. Look I'm not saying it's IMPOSSIBLE for people to buy electric cars. But the idea that somehow all the millenials who have generally been screwed by not buying real estate before interest rates went to zero are going to find the cash to start buying electric cars seems pretty laughable to me. Will some do it? For sure! If you can pull down six figures somewhere with a reasonable cost of living it's totally doable. But there aren't too many places where you can make six figures without everything else costing more too. EDIT: I live in flyover country. Always have. I'm talking from experience, not how I perceive things from my golden throne on the west coast.
        Gibbon1 11y ago
        Actually I do live in SF. If you put a million dollar note on a house you are the mother of all house poor. One point I make is the Tesla is luxo-sport car. Costs a lot new like any other sporty car. So the cost of a new Tesla vs a used gasoline power car isn't really a fair comparison. Looking on Craigslist, you can get a used Nissan Leaf $10k, cost per mile is $0.035. One can run numbers but the cost of ownership is probably $300/mo. Problematical in places like SF is the lack of parking and thus lack of charging. Though large numbers of people do have or rent garages. In Suburbs a problem can be many people have long commutes that exceed the range of an electric car. Interestingly a friend just threw down for one of those million dollar homes in SF and is considering an electric car to avoid having to ride the google bus. I'll be interested in how it works our for him. I do have another friend that lives in Oakland, he has a leaf seems to like it.
    - VLM 11y ago
      "In the "flyover country" where you DON'T get big city salaries" Sure you do. I could expect at absolute most a 25% pay raise if I moved to CA. Its not worth it. The ratio in cost of living might be 10:1 but the ratio in income is more like 5:4 or so.
  - threeseed 11y ago
    The world is bigger than just the US. Housing affordability is a major problem in almost every developed country.
    - paganel 11y ago
      > The world is bigger than just the US. Sometimes it doesn't feel that way, at least according to people here on HN. I live in an apartment block which looks like this (https://www.google.com/search?q=bucharest+communist+flats&biw=1920&bih=902&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAWoVChMIlbvBnb7axgIVkgfbCh1DTQaA https://www.google.com/search?q=bucharest+communist+flats&bi...), where normal people have actually starting physical fights, with fists and police intervention, over parking spots situated between those buildings, there's no way you could, I don't know, somehow charge your car when you live on the 7th floor.
- gorgak 11y ago
  you dont need a garage, you can just have a lead, my friend was doing it like that in london 5 years ago! just had a lead coming out of his house onto the street!
threeseed 11y ago
I guess you have missed the big population trends of the last few decades. More and more people are moving to inner city apartments every one of which is not designed with electric cars in mind. And with property prices reaching astronomical amounts in many places e.g. Australia, UK, Europe, HK, SG the lure of cheaper but smaller apartments is only going to grow. For me this is is one of the big advantages of hydrogen cars i.e. you use them exactly the same as your existing car.
- jannotti 11y ago
  I agree there's a problem here, but the trend you point out is probably breakeven with respect to gas/electric. Many people how move into a dense city have no car at all. (Those who do have more money and often garage their car, so they'll add charging to long term garages as demand increases.)
  - snogglethorpe 11y ago
    Yes. People moving to inner city apartments are dropping the car altogether, so for them what matters is what's most convenient for car-rental companies when they occasionally rent a car.... In an environment where people only use cars for special trips, not for day-to-day activities, the longer range of gasoline might end up being a bigger advantage than it is for current-day Americans.
- krschultz 11y ago
  It is massively cheaper to solve the problem of extending electricity 5 meters from the inside of the apartment building to the parking lot than it would be to build a global hydrogen distribution network.
  - threeseed 11y ago
    You're missing the point. Who is going to pay to extend electricity into each car bay of an apartment building car park ? It's a significant cost that any property developer is not currently doing (they clearly see a weak market) nor likely to do for the handful of people who will request it. Much of a future hydrogen distribution network already exists (we have transportation companies, gas stations etc) all of whom would be more than happy to add a new technology. Just like they have done already with LPG.

baldeagle 11y ago

There are a number of players looking to open up that market. It will be a second order effect, once electric charging becomes a market driver for high end apartments. See this link for a quick example: http://cleantechnica.com/2015/04/15/chargepoint-offering-solution-charging-apartments-condos/ http://cleantechnica.com/2015/04/15/chargepoint-offering-sol...

sahat 11y ago

If you own a Tesla Model S and live near a supercharger network, charging is not an issue. Over 8,000 miles in my Model S, all powered exclusively by the superchargers, free of charge. Note: I live in an apartment less than 2 miles from the nearest supercharger in Los Angeles and only 8 miles from work. So, the range is never a problem.

vtsrh 11y ago
Tesla Superchargers are not the solution for this, as they are simply not designed for such use. They were built to help with long range destinations. There are cases where users, (ab)using them as you do, got a request to reduce their usage. I guess you didn't trigger any flags.

adevine 11y ago

As electric cars become more and more popular, more and more apartment buildings will start offering charging stations. My condo building added them about 2 years ago.

cbhl 11y ago

Electric Car-sharing, just like how since you don't have a garage you would use normal car sharing (Zipcar). If you live in the SF Bay Area: https://us.drive-now.com/ https://us.drive-now.com/

ryandrake 11y ago

Not only that, but commutes > the range of the car make it impossible as well. The only thing stopping me from buying a leaf is that my commute is 50 miles, so if I don't find a charging station near work, I don't get home.

higherpurpose 11y ago

Electric car infrastructure is "cheap" (compared to say hydrogen stations or even gas stations). Chargers will be everywhere by the time 20% of the car market is electric. I wouldn't worry too much about it if you're not planning to get an EV in the next 10 years anyway.

VLM 11y ago

"don't have a garage where we can install such things" Why? In the frozen north its, maybe not customary, but not overly unusual, to have parking spots wired for engine block and battery heaters. Theres a whole cultural thing of not blocking other peoples access, a legal framework of not blocking sidewalks, when its OK to share, or not share, someones extension cord, stuff like that. Its just not a serious issue. The cost of one parking spot was rolled into my bachelor pad, but when space was available I could get another spot for $25/mo or whatever it was, surely a charger spot would have some minor additional costs, but chargers are pretty cheap compared to land and pavement and buildings. I guess the only technological limitation I can think of is service drop size, if you wire up 200 parking stalls at 25 KW each you're probably going to have to upgrade the service drop or implement something "interesting" involving partial charge rates. Presumably someone will start shipping an apartment charger that can bluetooth pair with its neighboring chargers and cooperate such that the total average draw of the entire lot never exceeds 100 KW or something like that. 100 KW is a drop in the bucket for an apartment building, thats like 1000 watts worth of TVs or lights in each of 100 apartments. Dinner time on a hot summer night is a large multiple of that draw. House service drops used to be just 60 amps a few decades ago and now 200 is pretty standard... if you think service drop upgrades for a house are expensive, imagine the cost of an entire apartment building upgrade LOL. Of course this may be a short term thing... solar panels may mean apartments will be net producers while the sun is up, soon enough.