Article like this always seem to ignore/forget that you can charge your EV at home, and that this is usually where you charge it the majority of the time.
It's an understandable thing to forget, since you can't fill up your gas car at home.
I own an EV and I only use public chargers extremely rarely.
If you live in an apartment complex or otherwise only have street parking, you likely don't have access to electricity. Or at the very least, would need to negotiate with the landlord to have a new outlet installed -- which is going to depend on how much you get along with said landlord.
"Assembly Bill 2565 would give tenants the right to install an electric-car charging station at their residence, provided the tenant submits a written request to the landlord and pays for the installation costs."
The demographic that would currently buy an electric car in California can easily pay for $1K for a changing station. If you're going to spend $30K on a Leaf or plug-in Prius or $50K on a Model 3 (vs. $18K for a Corolla or Fit), $1K is a drop in the bucket. It's also a tiny fraction of rent in Northern California, roughly 12 days worth.
The new Hyundai Ioniq PHEV can be bought for $25k.
In any case, most people don’t just shell out a random $30,000 they have burning a whole in their pocket, they finance the purchase over 5-6 years. Sudden out-of-pocket $1,000 is kinda a big deal, especially if one plans on moving out in a year or two.
I must be living in Silicon Valley too long, because a large number of people I know - amongst the tech crowd at least - do in fact shell out a random $30K they have burning a hole in their pocket.
(Lest I get accused of being way too out of touch, I do know people for whom affording even a $200 car repair is out of reach, and something they'll put up a GoFundMe over. These people do not drive electric cars. If you can afford the ~$5K in interest that financing a car over 6 years will cost you, you can afford the $1K charger. If you can't afford this, you buy a used Ford or Chevy rather than any of the cars we're talking about here.)
The way I see it that with 0% financing deals aplenty there’s virtually no incentive to pay cash upfront. Might just as well stick that $30k into some high-yield savings account and set up automatic payments from there. Builds credit history, too.
The last couple times I've been car shopping the 0% financing deals come with a jacked-up list price. You may get the loan at 0%, but the way that works is that they quote a higher price to begin with and then the 0% financing (assuming good credit) was their "concession" in the negotiation. We bought our cars for under dealer price, paying by cashier's check, so I assume that the actual dealer price was even lower (otherwise they wouldn't be willing to sell us the car), particularly since the lowest price they would go with financing was a couple thousand higher (credit scores in the 800s).
This is exactly right. And i reiterate this often, TANSTAAFL. (There ain't no such thing as a free lunch).
No one is loaning you money interest free. You are just paying for it in the purchase price or through other fees.
I will admit there are rare cases where strange incentives may make it cheaper or the same price to buy with credit, but these are very rare, and are only applicable if you artificially limit your available selection of vehicles to brand new. Even though you could get virtually the same car with 10k miles on it for much less.
For used cars there's always room for negotiating, but for new cars I felt the pricing was standardized through TrueCar (and their derivatives, like Costco Auto, Amex Cars, Overstock Cars). Is that not true?
There's the floor on prices that they will advertise to the public and then there's the actual floor on prices, and the latter can be significantly lower than the former.
Car dealerships have a number of incentives that can change their reserve price in strange ways. There's the advertising holdback and potential servicing cross-subsidies that sokoloff mentions, and then there are also monthly quotas and per-salesperson quotas. If the dealer is very close to their monthly quota and it's almost the end of the month, you can get a car below invoice price, because the manufacturer will give them a bonus for hitting the quota and so the marginal profit on the one car they sell you can be positive (including the bonus) even though the car itself sold at a loss. Similarly, if an individual salesperson is close to hitting their personal quota, they will let you have the car for the lowest price that won't get them in trouble with the dealer, because it helps them hit their numbers and gives them a bonus.
It's entirely possible that similar incentives exist for financing, and that's why people get zero-percent auto loans with cash back, and they're cross-subsidized by people who end up paying thousands in interest because their credit scores weren't as good or they didn't get as good a deal. But on average, the financing cost needs to be eaten by somebody, so on average you're likely to get better deals paying cash than financing. The dealer can also book all the cash immediately when you pay cash, which makes them somewhat more amenable to offer deals and opens up some other incentives for them to sell cheap (like getting rid of old model years near the end of the fiscal year and converting it to cash so their numbers look good and they can order more new model years).
(There can also be strange situations that make buying new more economical than buying used - I bought my Fit in 2009 for less than used 2007 Fits were going for, because the bottom had fallen out of the economy and oil had gone from $100/barrel to $50/barrel. The used car owners had paid ~$2000 over sticker price for a fuel-efficient car in a booming economy, while I paid ~$500 under invoice price because dealers were desperate to hit their quotas, and the dealer's beliefs about where the market is at adjusts faster than private owners' beliefs about where the market is at. Such situations are the exception rather than the rule, though.)
I used the TrueCar price as a starting point for negotiation. I emailed a bunch of dealers asking them to beat the out-the-door price until I found the dealer offering my the best price. I walked in with a certified cheque and bought it after a short test drive. I got my car below TrueCar. The dealer claimed that I was getting it below invoice and he was only making money because of incentives. I brushed it off as a negotiation tactic.
I think it's easier to do this for a popular car so your mileage may vary.
In theory, you can get a 1 year old car for much less than new, but people who buy cars with the options I want* tend not to sell them after 1 year of use. Or like truck prices in the bay area, when I bought my ranger, it was about $2000 more to buy new than to buy a 10 year old truck. Or, occasionally I'm dumb and buying a new model, even though that's a bad idea because when things break nobody knows how to fix it yet.
When I bought my LEAF in Dec 2014, I negotiated a price including a $2000 incentive from Nissan. Turns out that incentive was from NMAC (Nissan’s financing arm) and was only avail if I took a loan with them. Ok, what’s the interest rate? 0%. Wait, you give me $2K at signing and finance the car at 0% for 60 months? Ok, sign me up!
In terms of selling below their invoice price, they also get an advertising holdback that scales with cars sold, so they’re still making a small amount on the sales floor. The real money at a dealership is made in the service bays, not on the sales floor. This is what really sucks for dealers about electric cars. In 42 months, my LEAF has never seen the dealer again and I’ve only added washer fluid and changed the wiper blades once.
Watch the range over time, though. The cells in even the latest Nissan Leafs do not have any charge or temperature conditioning for the batteries, so they are likely to age poorly basically anywhere with more than 1 season.
If you care for the batteries nicely (drive slow, don't slam accelerator, avoid winter), I'm sure they'll last a good long time, but the battery is a consumable that will need to be replaced sooner than most other major components, I think the Leaf has them under the rear seats, and may be a pain to deal with. If your Leaf has fast charging, it's advised to avoid using it too often because it will heat the batteries and may reduce charge over time.
I guess the skimping of quality here seems short-sighted, but every EV has some weird, questionable choices to cut down on weight.
Concur all around. I think I’m down about 10% range in 3.5 years. Other family members own 3 different Smart electric drives and they’re down only 2-4% in the same timeframe. (Those cars have liquid cooled batteries, which appears to dramatically reduce long-term range loss.)
Eh, not so sure about that. I live in Portland and 2011-2013 used Nissan Leafs go for ~$7k. They're not rich people cars anymore, at least not here. I assume the same is true in California.
The Tesla gives around 5 hours of range per hour of charging in a standard 120VAC outlet, so if your car is parked 12 hours overnight, your one-way commute has to be less than 30 miles.
Here in the UK, EV chargers are heavily subsidised, on the basis that they're tantamount to a common resource. Installing a 7kW home charger costs as little as £150 ($200) after subsidy, with charger grants also available for businesses and local governments. It's a bit regressive considering the high cost of EVs right now, but it seems like a sensible step if you're aiming for ubiquitous charging infrastructure.
I'd be curious if there are loan options that would cover the cost. Then it's not such a crazy thing for renters to consider installing a charger. (I mean, they're already paying ~$30k for a car on loan; another $1k isn't much).
If the landlord bought the charger station, they'd up your rent by what the market would bear for parking spots with EV-charging capacity.
So you install it at your expense, sell it at the depreciated price when you move out, and the landlord recovers the cost by upping the rent for the next EV driver looking for a new apartment. Or they don't, and you remove it and take it with you when you leave, paying the electrician labor again on both ends.
I'll suspect that these people (and most people in fact) won't own their own cars. Those that do, in regional areas most likely, will have their own garaging and access to power.
My wife wants a new car (I don't drive) and I'm looking into an EV. We live in an apartment building. The biggest problem I see is that there is no power I can connect a cable to that can be billed to me. The only external power in the building is used by the building for various things (mostly cleaning).
So there is going to be some cost to setting this up even if the landlord allows it (which he may not).
My parking garage in California charges $5,000 for charger installation. Plus you have to pay for the energy, at retail charging rates. Definitely not worth it.
What do you do if you park on the street. I've seen some people here just throw the cable across the sidewalk but I'm not sure thats really the best solution...
EV chargers can be integrated into lamp posts or other items of street furniture. A city-wide network of charging points can be managed using contactless payment, with IoT sensors to indicate vacant charging points. Building out widespread on-street charging infrastructure won't be quick or cheap, but it's entirely feasible with existing technology.
There's also a reasonable expectation that some combination of car-sharing, ride-sharing and autonomous vehicles will significantly reduce the rate of private car ownership. Electric bicycles and scooters show tremendous potential for reducing the demand for car ownership in urban areas. Good public transit of course has a major role to play.
Autonomous vehicles makes owning a car even more convenient. I don't have to worry about parking, it can drop me off at the door, and then go park a mile away (or just circle around). I can get one for my child, so I don't have to drive him to school or let him walk/bike to school (it's dangerous, what with all the cars around).
Pretty much every significant apartment building built in Chicago in the last decade has had EV chargers in the garage.
The problem is that there aren't enough EV spaces to go around for all the residents who have electric cars.
If you're renting a stand-alone home, isn't there an EV station you can plug into a regular outlet? Naturally, the charging time would be slower than a 220V connection or whatever is needed, but if it's charing overnight, is that not an option?
(Don't own an electric car yet, so I'm not up on chargers)
Pretty much every EV out there comes with a "granny cable" that you can use to very slowly charge. It won't fully charge overnight (works out to about 4 miles an hour), but if you are topping off it can be adequate. I have used it many times, including one time where I actually ran out and had the car towed. Towed the dead car home, plugged in. Went to work fine the next morning and plugged there.
That's if you are in the US, actually, where most outlets are 110V. If you have access to 220V or you can rewire an outlet, then charging time should be similar to public level 2 charging stations. Beware that not all charges will support 220v and will blow up (but some can be modified).
110v is the biggest barrier for adoption everywhere, that and old electrical installations.
As an EV owner, I'd say that you need either a place to charge at work, or at home (great if you have both). If you do, then it is more convenient than pulling up at gas stations (more so if you are trying to get the cheaper ones in the likes of CostCo). If you do not, then relying on the public infrastructure is stressful and time consuming.
One of the cars in my family only drives eight miles a day, and never on weekends. So I'm thinking about replacing it with an EV. Sounds like a granny cable might be all I need.
My commute today is exactly 8 miles (4 each way). With a 2015 Leaf, I could go for two weeks without even bothering to charge if I'm only commuting. Since I can charge at work for free, I do it every Friday. And it's fantastic.
My previous commute was 50 miles a day. Using only a standard 110v, I would top off every day, and that worked just fine. I could even forget once (but not twice in a row!). It took about 12 hours to charge what I used up during the day.
So yeah. Just grab an extension cord (make sure it is rated for the current), and plug into whatever outlet you can find.
Even if you down own your home, it's no guarantee.
I live in a condo with a detached garage, which is on the far side of another row of condos.
So getting power from my meter to the garage means trenching through a sidewalk, under a block of condos, then through about 20 feet of pavement. Alternatively, I could trench through 100 feet of pavement from the power vault where our complex's transformer is and have the power company install a new meter for me.
The garage has a light bulb + garage door opener circuit, but the panel that feeds it wouldn't support a single charge station, let alone enough for the 8 garages that the panel serves.
The HOA isn't interested in running enough power to let residents install an EV charge station in the garage, and I'm not interested in paying for it either. So unless I can get my neighbors to help share the cost, I'm not going to be able to install a charge station.
Just a thought: a sufficiently smart EV and a sufficiently smart garage door could talk to each other to share a circuit. The car just stops charging when the door needs to move, which shouldn't add up to too much time.
Not practical for an individual to develop to solve their individual problem, but maybe it could become a selling point for any particular EV.
The problem isn't "sharing" the circuit, the problem is that the EV charger wants power, as much power as possible, and the circuit to that garage has been sized to allow for just enough to run a bulb and some trivial electrics like a door opener. Say 150W.
If you divert that 150W to an EV charger, so little power will make no perceptible difference to the charge overnight. Maybe 3-4 miles per night. And in fact a smart charger might conclude the circuit is faulty and cease charging altogether at this very low input.
That's not going to be a serious obstacle to that 5 million figure, though. It obviously hurts individuals plenty, but in aggregate, enough people own their own homes that adoption can be orders of magnitude greater than it is now before the renter issue is figured out.
There are solutions for street parking (both standalone and equipment that can piggyback off street lamp installs). In this case, you do need municipal buy in for the installation and maintenance of this infrastructure.
Yes the problem with that is you kind of need it everywhere all at once, whereas if you have a home with a drive you only need to install it when you buy an electric car and only in one place.
You really don't. You just need to pace the installs to EV vehicle uptake (which you can monitor with vehicle registrations and the addresses vehicles are registered at). Install where cars are being bought and garaged (or in this case, street parked).
Laws are already on the books that penalize non-EVs for parking in EV charging spaces. My statement assumes you'd overbuild in order to ensure spots (one EV in neighborhood? build capacity for 3 to charge).
Street parking spaces aren’t reserved for individuals. Anyone else with an EV (visitor? neighbor who just bought one?) is equally entitled to those spots. You would own a car rather than rent or take public transit (esp. in an urban area) because you need it to be available and working every time, not just under ideal circumstances. Gambling your work attendance on getting a particular street parking spot the night before isn’t smart.
There's a couple of spots by a charger in a plaza where I often go, posted as "reserved for hybrid/electric". Well, they didn't make it explicit enough, because someone with a non-plugin hybrid was using one of them, the last time I was there. It would suck if I had an electric car and someone like that was blocking me.
Unfortunately, almost everyone I know that would be a candidate for buying an electric vehicle doesn't own a house. Definitely a big issue in places with sky-high housing prices like San Francisco.
Almost everyone that I know in my age-group is nowhere close to being able to afford buying a house.
> Unfortunately, almost everyone I know that would be a candidate for buying an electric vehicle doesn't own a house.
See, that’s the problem with anecdotal evidence based on your own bubble. I’m in the exact opposite position - literally everyone I know that would buy (or already owns) an electric car also owns a house.
Yeah it's a stupid idea. But outlets can't all be on the same breaker, otherwise you would not be able to run an average home.
Having something like a Powerwall that's always plugged in, and fast charging your car off of it overnight (or faster) could work. Very expensive, though.
You need a home with a driveway. Out of all my friends in the UK, I can count two who have such a thing - if you live in a terraced house, apartment, or even a regular house but without a driveway, how are you going to charge your EV? Where you park at night is completely arbitrary - one night you get a spot close to your door, the other you have to park on the street nearby because there is no room. Public fast charging stations are the only solution to this.
Not everyone can charge at home. Everyone can gas up at filling stations almost everywhere they go. For mass adoption, chargers need to be as available for everyone.
In most cities, the cost of time to park long enough to charge would exceed the cost of electricity.
Alternatively i would suggest: when the paradigm has shifted, the ancillary processes shift accordingly rather than cling onto some cloned reliquary husk of gasoline culture.
Gas pumps have much better throughput though. I can fill up the 45 litres tank (good for ~750km) in less than a minute.
How long would charging for the equivalent range take?
For instance, in California, it is now law that apartment renters can install EV charging stations (at their own cost). So even those who do not own a house can charge at home.
I’m renting a single family home in San Francisco. I drive a Chevrolet Bolt EV.
Using a little known SF electrical code that allows DIY electrical work in a fully detached house, I installed a 50-Amp 250v NEMA 14-50 outlet in my garage. I did 50A service for room to upgrade the stock EVSE in the future. My landlord is fine as I’m insured, followed all National Electric Code guidelines and laws. It cost me $100 in parts/wire.
I then created a NEMA 14-50P to a NEMA 5-15R adapter to plug the GM stock EVSE in at 250v.
It’s a little known fact about the Chevy Bolt that the included EVSE charger supports 250v - by wiring each blade on the NEMA 5-15 plug to a 125v hot lead; then wiring the ground pin to neutral. I then locked the NEMA 5-15 plug/receptacle extension cord in a lockbox clearly labeled.
While a normal 40A EVSE Gives 7.2kW, this setup- still limited to 12A due to GM/Clipper Creeks firmware - gives me around 3kWh. That’s perfect for my use. I am not tempted to really upgrade this set up a time soon, but can if I want to. It’s also easy enough to take with me.
Total installation of level 2 charging in my San Francisco rental? $150ish.
(Please don’t try this at home if you have no idea what you’re doing when it comes to working with electric. this is only informational, not an endorsement!)
Using a little known SF electrical code that allows DIY electrical work in a fully detached house
If you did this in my property, when I found out what you did, you'd be in violation of the lease and paying me to have a licensed electrician out to inspect the work and do anything needed to bring it up to code.
I can't imagine why your landlord is ok with a tenant's DIY electrical work, since the landlord is the one on the hook if it goes bad now or in the future.
First, the person you replied to didn't say that they didn't have it inspected and didn't have to meet code. I just perused San Francisco's municipal ordinances. They follow the same ones I've seen elsewhere. The homeowner or lessee of a single-family detached house is allowed to pull permits on his or her own authority and do the work. The work must still follow the same inspection process from the city and must meet all relevant codes. It is not just that the tenant could slap wire wherever he or she chose; the relevant rules would still be followed.
Second, and this is the editorial part, why do landlords--at least the ones I read on the Internet--have such an adversarial relationship with tenants? "My property," "what you did," "violation of the lease," and so on. The tenant is the one making the money for you; why immediately assume bad faith? If you're going to be all legalistic about it, when you signed the lease, you signed over most of the rights for "your property" to the tenant. Perhaps that should be a more harmonious relationship?
I assumed he didn't pull permits because he said It cost me $100 in parts/wire -- nothing about permit fees.
Because tenants, in general, don't have a long-term interest in the property and are willing to cut corners. Some things I've seen:
Switching 15A breaker for a 20A breaker "because it trips too much".
Wiring an extension cord into the panel and running it through a hole in the wall to the garage "because I needed another circuit (my grow lights kept tripping the other one)"
Swapping hot/neutral when replacing outlets
Using a wire nut that's too small and taping it to hold it in place.
Not using a wire nut at all, just twisting wires together and taping them.
It's funny how some people seem to be afraid of DIY electrical work. In European countries it's really different. For example, in Switzerland, you can do it yourself, but it must pass the routine inspection. France is even laxer.
If you follow most of the most important rules (Fuse, RCCB, cood conduit, proper cable), hardly anything can go wrong.
Hell, you can easily destroy a house with a single cigarette, but nobody talks about it.
In the USA, the landlord holds the bulk of the responsibility if shoddy electrical work injures or kills someone.
While it is certainly possible for an amateur to follow the right procedures and do safe work, it's also possible (and even quite likely) that they don't know everything they need to do, and end up doing something unsafe.
While you can easily destroy a house with a cigarette (though many landlords have non-smoking clauses here), a cigarette won't generally burn down the house a year from now after the tenant who did the work is long gone.
That's not a safe presumption -- insurance companies can deny a claim based on unlicensed work.
So unless the tenant was a professional electrician with his own liability insurance that would cover the work, it's quite possible that the landlord is not covered.
So, most people are going to have to completely rework their electrical system in order to put in an EV charger, going by the Tesla specs[1], up to including a larger service. Not too many people have an extra 40 amps of capacity kicking around, much less 60 or 90. And let me tell you, it's not exactly cheap to redo an electrical panel, particularly once you get in there and then have to bring up any other things that were grandfathered in up to newer code.
Your point is valid, but I'd mention that I doubt most people need >40 amp installation. If we talk about your average Joe who gets a Model 3 or equivalent than they're already getting 30mi/h charge at 40 amps. Average Joe only drives 16 miles to work.
We have the 40 amp installation and have never wanted for more.
Somewhat related, but a neat hack might be to get solar installed at the same time. Re-doing the panel would be included as part of the project, which means you can A) get a loan to cover everything, and B) get a 30% credit from the government (in the U.S.). [I say might; our solar installer explained to us offhand that many people do things like that and get other upgrades as well like new water heaters, etc. You'd have to check with your CPA to confirm.] Considering that solar is cheaper over the long-term it's a pretty good deal depending on what loan terms you can get.
I recently moved and have been lazy about getting a charger installed at the new place. I’ve been plugging into a standard outlet in the meantime. Turns out that’s plenty. I still want to get something faster because it’s more efficient and it would be nice before and after long trips, but there’s no rush.
Yea, it is a good starting point as many EVs use 30-32A charging (including the short range version of the Model 3 in fact), and fits into the 200A service that most homes since the 1980s have pretty easily.
It's an understandable thing to forget, since you can't fill up your gas car at home.
I own an EV and I only use public chargers extremely rarely.