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> Most EVs charge at home most of the time

Umm, there's a significant chunk of the world's population who will likely never be able to charge at home, because they live in apartments and park on-street.

"EV owners who live in apartment buildings and park on the street will rely heavily on public chargers—in 2021, 42 percent of European EV owners living in cities had no access to home charging points."

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/...



> will rely heavily on public chargers

Public chargers =/= DC fast chargers (like Tesla superchargers).

I've already seen level 2 chargers that drop down from light posts in my city. Roll those out to every light post near apartment buildings and throw in some curb-side stalls if you need more capacity. Most people won't need to charge every night with 200/300mi+ range, so you won't need a 1:1 mapping of chargers to cars. This way, people charge passively overnight at stations that are cheaper to build than DC fast chargers.


> Roll those out to every light post near apartment buildings and throw in some curb-side stalls if you need more capacity

Don't forget your local electrical grid will likely need a significant upgrade too. An LED streetlamp probably draws a couple of hundred watts, tops.


Apparently LED can use less than 100W, and before LEDs streetlights would use 250-400W . The really bright sodium ones were 1000W, but those probably weren't over your neighborhood sidewalk.

https://pacificlamp.com/street-light.asp


Local electrical grids are already being upgraded due to the increasing need for AC thanks to climate change.


Yah this is where people get stuck in their way of thinking about current technology limitations.

Really fast <10m charge times are only about 5 years away which means people will use DC fast chargers like gas stations.


I wouldn't make investment decisions on that kind of prediction. Slower (cheaper) chargers will take much of the load, and unless outlawed, are going to heavily bite into fuel station margins. The best they can do is charge more for DC fast charging when it is needed (during holiday weekends).


In the US, most apartment dwellers park in a garage, which can and will be retrofitted with chargers. Street parking is the major challenge. In Park Slope Brooklyn, I often see a lone cable coming out of a brownstone out to a Tesla on the street. :-)


What is your stats for most apartment people Park in a garage? Where I live garages cost a hefty amount extra and the apartment complex doesn't even have enough for more than a quarter of the residents anyway


https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-958-january-2-2017...

It's lower for renters (who are more likely in an apartment), but it's still overall decently high.

Every apartment I've lived in had a garage or carport that could easily have had a charger installed (and probably does, by now).


Most of the US has aggressive parking minimums.


We have plenty of outside parking. I've just never seen majority garage parking


LA is notorious for their parking minimums (two car spots for a two bedroom apartment), Seattle in contrast lacks parking minimums at all.


On street parking is very much allowed only in some countries, the biggest one being the USA, but much of western Europe it is disallowed (or at least, you pay for it by the hour). Many countries require proof of parking spot before they will let you even buy a car.

Even in that case, it isn't hard for cities to put out L2 charging pylons at each on-street parking space. They can just combine it with street light infrastructure or whatever (they would also be able to monetize street parking at that point, which is inevitable anyways).


> Even in that case, it isn't hard for cities to put out L2 charging pylons at each on-street parking space.

How does this work for physical logistics? e.g. I’m a two-car household that can’t practically reduce to a single car, with a driveway that only fits one car. (That my partner uses.) I street park in front of my house, and there’s street/sidewalk/lawn. The only place I can think of to put a charging station is in my lawn with some kind of arch over the sidewalk to reach my car. Also becomes problematic as street parking spots aren’t reserved. (I could potentially remove a tree from my front yard and pave over it to provide another parking space, but that’s not a very appealing solution.)


Are your electric lines all buried? I guess if they are that would make it much more difficult. Otherwise, you have poles or something to keep the lines in the air.

I'm just amazed America has so much free parking still. People buy houses, even if they have garages, they use the garage as storage and park their car on the street. Having lived in other countries where that simply can't happen, its like this country practically gives away parking spaces for free.


Yes, utilities are all buried. Electrical doesn’t even come from the street side of the house, it comes in from a utility corridor behind my house.

Also have a garage, but isn’t practical to park in it for various reasons, some more fixable than others. (It’s set up as a home gym which I view as essential for my health, it’s single car and parking in the driveway would block in the garage, it doesn’t have a floor drain or appropriate slope for draining which is fairly important for winter snowmelt, and it doesn’t have an automatic door opener.)


Seattle has lots of garages like that, so much so that they no longer dig basements for new housing (lots of old garages are basically a decline to a basement with a garage door). Seattle is one of those cities that doesn't enforce parking minimums, so street parking is otherwise over prescribed by new dense housing projects going up (unlike say LA).

I don't think street parking is sustainable. We build denser, and without parking, it is eventually going to fall apart where too many people are going to be fighting it out for too few street parking.


Depends. In Japan you're only allowed to buy a car if you have a free parking space on your property. A police office will come by your home to verify that the number of parking spots on your property is enough to house all the cars you plan on having. So in this case you would just have to deal with only having one car, or pave over the lawn to fit another parking spot.


At least in Germany, most city areas where people live are "Anwohnerparken", so people who live on the street are allowed to park on the street, nobody else.


Also, surprisingly there are HoA's that are fighting people that want to install an outlet for their car e.g. town home owners without a garage.


I offered to pay for a charger to be installed in my spot, and the hoa board flat out refused. Granted, they're old, and are probably still upset about the switch to unleaded gasoline...


Keep badgering them each and every month/year until they give in.

Some states are moving to make it illegal for HOAs to prohibit it the way the FCC did with satellite dishes.


True but these people mostly don’t go to superchargers, they go to slower & cheaper chargers near their apartment or work.




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