[Yizahi]

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.

[kbos87]

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.

[chrisandchris]

> 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.

May I ask what you spend? I think here charging at home vs. at public chargers is a difference of up to 100% more expensive (~0.30 cents at home vs >0.50 at public chargers).

[sokoloff]

In eastern MA, I find level 2 charging is rarely marked up (and is not infrequently free). DC fast charging is 50-100% marked up, which feels pretty fair to me to be honest.

The thing I find pleasing is office park level 2 charging often charges the retail electricity rate, but they have a large solar installation and if they sell me electricity at full retail (including distribution charges), they make a lot more than selling it to the utility. That’s good for me (I get a charge at the same cost it would be at home) and good for them.

[News-Dog]

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]

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]

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 ...>

search >'Shopping Centers/Malls installed EV charger'< @DDG <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 inst...>

[yywwbbn]

Yoy can do that and you might have enough panels to charge a few cars at once if you cover the entire roof with them. But even in ideal condition you’d need more than 300m2 of solar panels to charge a single car at 50kW and this would increase significantly if they don’t operate at 100% capacity.

So unless your goal is primarily virtue signaling you might as well just use the energy generated for lights and cooling since you’ll still need power from the grid for that anyway (unless it’s some hyper energy efficient shopping center with no fridges or cooling).

[ZeroGravitas]

If the idea is to get people to come and buy things in your shop while their car charges then 50kw is far too fast a charge.

[yywwbbn]

If you don’t need fast charging at home (i.e. you’re fine leaving it plugged over night) the fixed costs for a home charger a very low.

Unless the commercial chargers you use are exceptionally cheap or even free charging might cost nearly as much as gas for a similar car and 4x more than at home (obviously depends on your local situation)

[turtlebits]

You don’t even need a home charger if you drive less than 50 miles a day, Just plug into a wall outlet.

[sigio]

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.

[rnk]

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.

[Fatnino]

I was recently tasked with moving a chevy bolt what was parked on the street too long to save it from being impounded.

It had sat there for quite a long time and wasn't anywhere near full when it was parked. When I got it the battery was in the orange where it stops telling you how much range is left and just says find a charger. I belive this kicks in at the 15-20 miles remaining range.

I moved the car about 10 miles to a residential driveway that has a 120ac plug.

When I left, the car was indicating it would be fully charged in 60 hours.

That's two and a half days to do what a gas station can do in 5 minutes.

Bottom line is relying on 120 to keep your car charged up is a fantasy unless your car usage is so low you might as well have a bicycle instead of a car.

[mwint]

This is not true. Rule of thumb is 4-5mi per hour on 120AC. I drive a Leaf and charge exclusively at home on 120AC, zero problems keeping up with my non-bicycle-friendly commute.

If I needed to I could put in a 220 charger for a couple hundred bucks and a few hours of time, but I just don’t.

[Fatnino]

It is true, and your rule of thumb backs it up.

The chevy bolt has a range of ~260 miles. Divide by 4mi per hour charging and get ~60 hours of charging.

I'll allow that my bit about the bike was slightly hyperbolic.

[wffurr]

I was a little taken aback first time I charged my Bolt up with the 120V charger on an standard outdoor outlet. The time estimate said “9 AM” but I didn’t notice that it meant 9 AM two days from now.

I still only use the 120V outdoor outlet charger, since my usage is infrequent and adequately served by the 0.9 kW/hr charging, but it helps to know that a full charge does take something like 55 hours.

On the (hasn’t happened yet) occasion that I need more range than that, there’s a variety of level 2 and 3 chargers easily accessible in the area.

[ZeroGravitas]

Average commute is 40 mile round trip so 10 hours of charging.

A top up fast(-ish) charge then becomes something you need to do about as often as visiting a gas station in an ICE.

EVs generally shouldn't be run to 0 or charged to 100%, so this works out well if you have a suitable parking spot.

[Fatnino]

But that one fast charge takes 40 minutes, not the 5 minutes at a gas station.

It's totally workable, you can uausaly find something to do during that time, but I maintain that we are still one or two charging tech generations behind parity with gasoline.

[WorldMaker]

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.

[News-Dog]

search '3-phase 220/240 volt EV charging USA' @Goo <https://www.google.com/search?q='3-phase 220/240 volt EV cha...>

[WorldMaker]

Search it for what? How is this a useful comment? Yes, the US has 3-phase 220/240 volt plugs. We call them "dryer plugs" out of habit and there aren't enough of them. Because they are "infrequent use"/"single use" plugs in the US most buildings don't have a lot of three phase circuits and expanding the number of three phase "dryer plugs" is relatively expensive. Expanding 120v plugs is much simpler in every class of US building today. That's exactly what I'm complaining about that we aren't doing more of, because it is much cheaper/easier and still a good start for the US. Level 1 charging is better than no charging.

[BenjiWiebe]

All the dryer plugs I've seen are single phase. I don't think I've ever seen a household with 3 phase service. Our farm has 3 phase service but the house is still wired up to a single phase.

Using both sides of split phase is still single phase.

[News-Dog]

Three-Phase Electric Power (3φ) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-phase_electric_power

[Pelentio]

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.

[wffurr]

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]

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.

[ianai]

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]

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.

[nicoburns]

I think it’s perhaps mostly still within the margins that grids are built to tolerate. We’ll need to generate more electricity, but we might not need to rewrite all our streets. Also, it won’t be a step change, it will be gradual. NEW cars will be EVs by 2030 (or whenever), but most cars will still be old cars.

[ianai]

So granted not everywhere has enough sun or wind potential. But building out a ton of renewables compliments building out a ton of EV chargers and cars. Definitely worth upgrading infrastructure to handle. V2L makes it even more of a direct compliment.

There’s an important relationship between energy available per capita and “health” of civilization. So I saw we do it all.

[News-Dog]

search: >'electric stove hot-plate kilowatts'< @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='electric stove hot-plat...>

"Most electric ovens draw between 2,000 and 5,000 watts"

[rnk]

That turns out not to be a problem in the us, because the increased electricity use by expected ev charging is contained in our 2 or 3% increase per year. I expected this will be true for other places. Also in the us you find that people are using unneeded capacity at night.

[ianai]

Fair, it’s maybe more like adding another appliance per household (fridge/freezer).

[trstregfsdgfd]

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.

[thatfrenchguy]

People run AC, that’s worse :-)

[badpun]

> 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.

[acallaghan]

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

[cronokirby]

One big difference is the density of the fuel.

You can fill a car with gas in under a minute.

While fast-charging (like Tesla's super charging) has growing deployment, that's still at least 15 minutes or so, which is a significant difference.

And, the density of that is just not there yet, so for the near future having charging at home makes daily driving much more convenient.

[nulbyte]

The difference is: You're not standing around waiting for my car to charge. Your parked to do something else.

Depending on where there is, there may well be enough density. Here, we have 129 stations, and half of them are free. It goes up to over 300 if you include the rest of the metro. We're not that large a city, either.

[Yizahi]

I just looked at the plugshare map of the city I'm at currently. It show 101 stations up to 60 minutes pure drive distance. Also that's all kinds of chargers, private hotel spots, small two post stations, big stations.

Lets charitably assume that ALL of them are inside the city and that ALL of them are fast 10 post stations. So that's a capacity for about a thousand EV cars. That's in 1 million population city. I guess that's not enough at all.

PS: and what do you do for several hours while your car charges at the station? Walk in circles around the small overprices station shop? Drink coffee?

[shagie]

Imagine the road trip with an EV.

We're driving from Chicago to Memphis (about 600 miles or two full charges of a Tesla).

First question is "is there sufficient charging in the 200 - 300 mile distance? If you run out of charge, its a bit more difficult than "call AAA to bring you a gallon of gas" ( https://tiremeetsroad.com/2022/05/28/aaa-members-will-tow-tr... ). I'm sure that tow trucks will get to the point where they also have a charger, but we're in new territory here.

The next issue is the time to fuel. With a road trip, this isn't a "park in the EV vehicle spot at Fry's while you go shopping". With a gas station, I'm in and out in about 3 minutes tops. A Tesla super charger station takes 15-30 minutes - 5x to 10x longer than regular combustion. Aside from the "you're there for 5x longer", this means that to get the same throughput of vehicles served at the station it needs 5x to 10x more space than the gas station. This is where its going to be real interesting.

The image at https://electrek.co/2022/05/19/tesla-building-new-worlds-lar... claims it will be 100 stalls (There are about 30 in the picture, so 3x larger than the picture). That's 200-400 cars per hour. That's a 20 pump station - here's a 28 pump station ( https://www.google.com/maps/@43.5755315,-89.7774477,3a,75y,2... )

EVs are great if you are returning home each night or are in an area where there are EV stations while daily errands are run. I have difficulty seeing them useful for distance travel and the situations where one charges midway each day.

One such road trip / distance travel experience - https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-rented-an-electric-car-for-a-...

[rnk]

The wsj article was kind of from an idiot. At the same time, it's true there aren't enough chargers and we are building them out and it should be as easy as "just drive".

Separate from that, if you have a tesla, this problem is not there because they have enough chargers and they are maintained. It's the clown car mixed private ev chargers that are broken, in bad locations and have low power. When tesla opens up their network (by adding the other common plug) I expect many of the other ev charger companies will go out of business or have to significantly improve their speed and quality. My 2012 tesla had around 250 miles range (drove it for 50k miles, after 3 years upgraded to the awd, still have that one, still has 265/270 original miles range.

[ZeroGravitas]

Wall Stree Journal? no thanks. If you refuse to accept climate change then your opinions on EVs can't be trusted.

Doesn't Tesla have all this built in, and automatically tell you which charger to stop at based on optimal charge time (20% - 80%) and current usage of the chargers?

There's third party apps that do it for other EVs but I thought Tesla had this all tied up in a neat package?

[WorldMaker]

> I'm sure that tow trucks will get to the point where they also have a charger, but we're in new territory here.

Tow trucks don't need chargers, they just need to drop your car off at the nearest charger.

This isn't even "new" territory: tow trucks tow things from point A to point B all the time. That's what tow trucks were built for.

It isn't "new" territory for EVs: Anecdotally, I had a friend tell me working as a tow truck near a "blind spot" at the time in Tesla's charging maps along an Interstate through one of the Plains states. (A blind spot that has since been filled.) There was a driver that drove that stretch regularly and couldn't get enough charge to make it to the next station so would regularly call for tow. (So regularly in that case that they'd call a day ahead or so and schedule it like an appointment and the tow truck would just be waiting around the "usual spot".)

> Aside from the "you're there for 5x longer", this means that to get the same throughput of vehicles served at the station it needs 5x to 10x more space than the gas station. This is where its going to be real interesting.

Though it likely will not ever need the exact same throughput because home charging and destination charging remove a lot of "local traffic" through fast chargers that gas stations still have to regularly serve.

Even in long distance travel destination chargers will shake up and decentralize a lot of the "station need". On a road trip you might not need "park at a Fry's while you shop", but you might still find use in "park at a restaurant while you sit down and eat" and "park at a cool gift shop while you shop for souvenirs" and "park at the neat tourist trap and explore a mini museum" and maybe even "park at a motel where you can catch a quick nap".

EVs could herald a return to the sorts of weird destinations that Route 66, as one clear nostalgia-filled example, made US long distance travel such an "exciting thing" and that lots of people have great nostalgia for even if most of today's Route 66 is a rusted memory of itself. I know plenty of long distance drivers that might like a small return to that Americana tradition of weird tourist traps and strange excuses to stop, and even AAA still thinks you should pay them for trip tiks even in the internet age of GPS because they still think they can find some of that nostalgia for you.

With EVs, we don't have to cluster around the logistics of gas stations anymore and could have all sorts of chargers "off the beaten path" (of the Interstates). What sort of weird local and regional places could install chargers? There's all sorts of creativity to be explored here.

[lotsofpulp]

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]

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.

[sdflhasjd]

I agree, but right now in the UK, aside from the odd token charging point in a supermarket car park, realiably accessible charging stations are few and far between, particulary outside major city centres.

[nicoburns]

Where I live (north west london), there’s a pilot scheme where they’ve installed roadside chargers on my residential street (these are pretty small - they look more like “cats eyes” than petrol pumps). I’m guessing that’s the future.

[Yizahi]

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]

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.