I live in a high rise apartment with three shared level 2 chargers in the garage. I would say there are ~10 EVs in the building and sharing the chargers has never been an issue. It's like shared laundry; you really only need it once a week or so for a few hours. Once it's easy to make people pay for electricity, adding lots of chargers will be a no-brainer for garage owners.
Laundry. That just might be the perfect example. What a huge division of experience between the wealthy and the less wealthy.
Most homeowners have laundry in their home. Starting and switching loads is a few minutes, and the rest of their time is still free. Many high-end apartments have laundry within a short walk from each residence. It's largely the same experience. But then those with less ability to afford "nice" housing often have to use shared public laundromats that are not as close to home. You probably plan a trip once a week or two, and it takes you several hours. If you're lucky, it's close to other errands, but since you've got your hands full with your laundry, it's not like you can really combine it with grocery shopping.
In a future where everyone drives EVs, the wealthier will have higher range vehicles, easy access to super fast chargers, and even chargers in their home or luxury apartment. But the poor, with lower range vehicles, will just have to visit a mediocre public charger, and hope they can make that time useful, or read a newspaper while they wait. They'll have to be more thoughtful about how they use their car because going an extra 20 miles for some unexpected errand might screw up their schedule and send them to the public charger where they can waste a half an hour of precious time waiting in line and getting a partial charge.
> Laundry. That just might be the perfect example. What a huge division of experience between the wealthy and the less wealthy.
While a bit off-topic: I never understood why a lack of washing machines in flats is such a huge issue in some countries.
In Germany, most flats come with a connector for your own washing machine, those that don't have on inside the flat often have them in the basement, where every party living in the house just adds their washing machine.
Public laundromats do exist, but from what I can gather they are quite underutilized because there's barely any demand.
Does anybody happen to know why these vast differences in "washing machine availability" exist in other countries? Is it really that much more expensive to lay the water/wastewater lines for washing machines inside the flats? Doesn't all that just plug into the same plumbing that's already there?
In my Eastern European country it's the same deal, basically everyone has their own washing machine (often washer-dryer in one unit). It's usually fitted in the kitchen or bathroom rather than a separate laundry room.
Some buildings are five stories without an elevator, yet the residents at the top still have washing machines. Unlike Germany, it usually comes as part of the apartment when you rent it.
Thinking about it now, I don't even think I've ever seen a laundromat in my city...
Germany is usually used as an example of good tenants' rights, though. I've never lived there but my understanding is that there's nothing wrong with renting, well off people might do it too, and so it's comfortable.
Apartment living mixed with bad tenants rights is a recipe for disaster because the majority of people then end up basically living in a minimum standard hellhole that no-one cares about. See: UK private rental sector.
I checked if it's something that's required by tenants law, but from what I could gather nothing like a "tenants right to a washing machine in their house/flat" exists in Germany.
And it's not like the situation is that perfect either, these past years rents have been exploding in most places with any economic development. Government response has been slow to non-existent on the issue.
It doesn't have to be legally enshrined for the general attitude to help the situation, though.
A bit like how buses in the US, or at least the parts I've visited, seem to be a shitfest, because they're only a thing poor people use, whereas in Europe they're often a lot better not due to legislation per se.
Also, most luxury apartments have in-unit laundry. Just like they typically have electric charging stations in their garages. Laundry actually is scarily analogous here
God yes I don’t have laundry machines in my new place (there’s space for some but I gotta get my own) and walking several blocks to the laundromat on a weekly basis is A Hassle.
I am lucky in that my work fits on a laptop so I can just sit there and get stuff done while the washer and dryer run. But if I had a shitty service job it wouldn’t be money-earning time for me.
Every service job that I worked in high school and college had a washer and dryer in the stockroom that was there specifically for people to do laundry - specifically their work laundry, but if there was nobody using it you could get some time to do your own laundry.
Work laundry used a shared (inventoried from the shop when I worked retail) detergent, but personal loads required you to provide your own.
I've often said that if I were to open a retail business, it'd be a 24 hours combo, laundromat, pizza place, coffee shop and book store, probably with a side of bodega inside.
Laundromat thrift store. You need to wash all the clothing you take in and people want to wash stuff after they buy it.
A food truck might bundle with a tool truck. Considering that food trucks occasionally run out of trailers you could explore the idea with minimal risk by owning one and partnering with someone who has the other
The idea has potential but you'd need the experience of actually running these kinds of things in order to figure out what combinations result in the economics fitting together nicely. I think there's high risk that the regulatory burden of serving food may add overhead that makes other ventures uneconomical to bundle.
Why will public chargers be slow? We should assume that those who provide public charging services (the gas stations of the future) will be trying to optimize throughput + convenience store sales.
DC fast chargers currently get you 40 miles in ten minutes[1] (that sucks!) so your extra 20 miles gets you an extra 5 minute wait. Presumably that wait can be "limited" by getting your shopping done or grabbing a bite to eat while you do it.
> These stations are expensive (up to $100,000) and require more power than your house, so you’ll never have one of these in your garage.
In other words, most chargers are not going to be "the best." Especially ones in less affluent neighborhoods, within a short drive (or on the way) of wherever you happen to be. Maybe it's a 10 minute round trip for a 5 minute wait (assuming no line) to charge up for and make up the extra 20 miles you need.
Realistically there are best case and worst case scenarios in our future. When chargers are all as fast and convenient as gas stations, the problem pretty much goes away. Anyone that could buy an ICE car and get to the gas station when they needed to could also have a 200+ mile EV and get to (really fast) chargers when they need. If that doesn't happen (and until it does) there will be plenty of people that cannot switch to an EV without adding out-of-the-way trips to their lives, and having long wait times while they charge on less-than-the-best chargers.
As I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread, forcing "shopping" or "dining out" to be a part of fueling your car is unnecessary coupling. It sounds natural, because gas stations are almost always convenience stores. Personally, I rarely eat out (especially alone!), prefer to never set foot in a convenience store, and my spouse does the majority of the food shopping. My charging time would be as equally wasted as my gasoline fill-up time.
> > These stations are expensive (up to $100,000) and require more power than your house, so you’ll never have one of these in your garage.
I challenge this on the cost front and on the power front.
There is zero reason why a fast charger should be $100,000 other than the fact that the volume is sufficiently low that these are all hand built. The semiconductors in that thing can't possibly be $100,000 in volume. Copper is roughly $10 per kilogram--or $100,000 and you could use 10 metric tonnes--there is no way those things hold 10,000 kg of copper.
As for the power, these things are probably more than 90% efficient, so they don't use any more power than the smaller ones (the load they are charging is a fixed size regardless of how fast you charge it). They may use more current, but that's the whole point! These things charge your car faster.
The biggest issue with installing these at home is probably access to genuine 440V (or higher) 3 phase. And you probably get around that by making the charger the equivalent of a Powerwall--it stores the energy at normal 220 feed levels but blasts it into your car from it's own batteries as fast as it can.
> The semiconductors in that thing can't possibly be $100,000 in volume. Copper is roughly $10 per kilogram--or $100,000 and you could use 10 metric tonnes--there is no way those things hold 10,000 kg of copper.
I mean... yes, you're right. A better example would be that electric cars can already convert 3-phase to DC (as well as the other way), and the Tesla Model 3 can convert over 200 kW even though it comes with a motor, battery, and an entire car for far less than $100k.
> As for the power, these things are probably more than 90% efficient, so they don't use any more power than the smaller ones (the load they are charging is a fixed size regardless of how fast you charge it). They may use more current, but that's the whole point! These things charge your car faster.
Closer to 95%, most likely. There also theoretically are very few bad chargers (despite exceptions[1]) since most of the cost is in installation, insurance, and weather/tamperproofing.
Permits, load studies, switchgear components for 3-phase systems (breakers etc.) cost more, engineering costs drive this up, etc. The grid and city permitting processes weren't designed for broad "consumer" scenarios, at least basing it off of the current Seattle experience, where even Level 2 charging can be difficult.
$100K doesn't seem like that much to me. Compare to the costs of like, having a massive petrol tank under the floor with regular maintenance, lorries filling it all the time, the amount of space required for that.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I imagine the cost of installing a new petrol station anywhere close to civilization would dwarf that.
It's not even "next generation" chargers; it's next generation EVs at this point. Nearly all new Electrify America rapid charging locations have at least one station that can do 350kW. We're just waiting for EVs like the Taycan* to be released (less than 1 month -- Sept 4th!) to be able to accept charge rates approaching that. EA is on-track to get 2,000 fast chargers at nearly 500 locations up and running by end-of-2019.
*The first generation Taycan will charge at 250kW. But the infrastructure is coming online now as EV manufacturers iterate on battery pack technology to accept faster charge rates.
You're right, but ultimately, this just points to apartment living being basically a hack that is only acceptable for the poor, and some very specific prestige situations (e.g. the alpha cities; a flat in London is 'special' because it's London; a flat in Leeds is just crap).
It strikes me as being another one of these 'let's make the life of the poor better' type situations, where you assume the continuation of strong class boundaries.
A person should be able to modify their living environment as they choose within reason. Plugging in a car or plumbing in a washing machine is such a basic adjustment that really should never be an issue.
It becomes such because we have this whole class-based nonsense of tons of people being serfs to a hamster wheel of landlords or whatever.
