Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kelnos 2508 days ago
I think your point hits to the heart of it for many people's situations. You can fit car-charging into your routine if you make some very specific changes to your routine to accommodate it, and you must make possibly several hours of time for those changes every X days, or else you'll have a car with a flat battery and no quick fix that will let you complete your regular car-requiring errands.

If that errand is "go grocery shopping" or "drop a large package off at the post office", you might be fine rearranging or postponing, but if it's "go to work", you're completely screwed. There are quite a few jobs where "I can't get to work because my car's battery is dead" will get you fired.

For me, I'm privileged enough that it's simply inconvenient to put that constraint on my lifestyle (inconvenient enough that I won't buy an EV), but for many people it's a showstopper.

1 comments

What if workplaces add chargers as a benefit? I've seen several do it near me. People then just plug their car in at work.
> Any solution that requires a certain behavior is unnecessarily coupling that behavior to transferring energy into transportation.

Remember when we coupled health insurance to employment? (Also, what if I want to retire next month, but I still drive an EV? Now I'm stuck spending hours of my retirement waiting for my car to charge somewhere? First world problem, I know...)

These ideas are OK for a few people. But then wealthy people with wealthy employers are perhaps less likely to be "garage orphans" to begin with.

I agree that it is not a silver bullet. However it does account for a large portion of car down time and would be a useful place for chargers. Maybe it would work if they were pay chargers as well?
They have a few at work, but people complain about nobody vacating them promptly. With no guarantee that I would reliably have one every day, I'm not sure I see the point, I would always have to be prepared to get home without it.
At my company they do EV valet for the chargers. But it's a big company full of crazy perks.