Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where will ‘garage orphans’ charge electric cars?

theglobeandmail.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 545 posts

Re: Where will ‘garage orphans’ charge electric cars?

#281

Post by Brakenshire »

mattlondon wrote: post #129

It is certainly holding me back at the moment. I have allocated off-street parking under my apartment that is actually owned by us as part of the lease, but I doubt the building management will let me install a charger, and I don't think the law in the UK means I can force them to let me. In London there are a few public chargers dotted around, but they are fairly infrequent. I don't have any data but it feels like t…

> There are however lampposts everywhere. There is some talk of adding charging points to lampposts but I think there are only very small-scale trials at the moment.

Look on the Ubitricity website, they have maps of their installations in London, there are over a thousand already and anyone can pull up and use them using the qr code system.

https://portal.ubitricity.co.uk/map

Re: Where will ‘garage orphans’ charge electric cars?

#282

Post by magicalhippo »

chc wrote: post #177
kennywinker wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sitting twidding your thumbs. If they are near somewhere you want to be recreationally, you’re set. The gym, the grocery store, the movies, a hiking trail, spending 1-4 hours at one of these once a week would likely enhance your life not take away from it.

If your solution to the difficulty of finding an EV charger is "put EV chargers literally everywhere," that would hypothetically solve the problem, but how do you propose to make that happen? That's what the question here is.

An EV charging station just requires a nearby transformer with spare capacity and a bit of digging. Here in Oslo (Norway) they're peppered all across town.

Check out this[1] map of them. It's slightly misleading since it counts one station which can charge either CCS or CHAdeMO as two, but still. To get a sense of scale, driving from Lysaker on the left to Manglerud on the right is about 15 minutes.

A fair number of them have been put up by the local government, but the rest are commercial.

[1]: https://www.ladestasjoner.no/kart/?lat=59.9138688&lng=10.752...

Re: Where will ‘garage orphans’ charge electric cars?

#283

Post by chc »

Reason077 wrote: post #89
calyth2018 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a garage, and the work charger charges by the hour. So if one has an EV, and it doesn't charge quickly, you'll be dinged through the nose. Had the charger been charging for the kwh + a margin, then sure. But as is, EVs are off the table for me.

Sounds like a pretty tight-fisted workplace. You would think they'd want to encourage employees to sustainable transport, not try to make a profit on charging.

That's an extremely normal workplace. I've checked out tons of workplaces in my city, and for the ones that actually have chargers, the standard seems to be $2/hr for the first couple of hours and $4/hr thereafter. A workplace that's willing to give up money to help people buy EVs would be uncommonly generous.

Re: Where will ‘garage orphans’ charge electric cars?

#285

Post by MadWombat »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #210
trilila wrote: post #139

I think this points out the elephant in the room: why are so many people in supposedly high income cities not able to buy properties? This is an issue that needs to be solved hand in hand with pollution: less travel, less need for a car, and more living outside overcrowded cities means more living space. So how can we move more jobs to suburbs, where people can work at nearby or home locations and can afford more liv…

Funny, I was thinking something similar but from a completely different direction — the problem, IMO, isn’t that people in cities can't afford to buy garages, but that they want cars at all. The problem that these “garage orphans” don’t get is that society doesn’t owe anyone a free parking space. When one can’t afford car payments, or insurance, or gasoline, they aren’t allowed to simply go out and take it; but for s…

> The problem that these “garage orphans” don’t get is that society doesn’t owe anyone a free parking space

Nobody owes anyone anything. But a lot of things in the society exist because "We would rather live in the world where X rather than in the world where X isn't". Car ownership is a societal norm in US, so most people are going to buy and own cars, at least for a while longer. And people are going to park these cars somewhere, whether you like it or not. I would rather we had regulated street parking than unregulated free for all.

Re: Where will ‘garage orphans’ charge electric cars?

#286

Post by wffurr »

gxqoz wrote: post #141
wffurr wrote: post #127

Yet another reason the real answer to the climate crisis isn't EVs - it's public transit, bicycles, e-bikes, scooters, e-scooters, walking, etc. All these other modes are much lower impact on the environment than purchasing and operating an EV, much less an ICE.

Interesting article from CityLab on why plugging public transit EVs into a city can be more challenging and expensive than originally planned: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/06/electric-bus-... "That’s what Philadelphia discovered when it decided to expand its existing fleet of e-buses with newer models—ones that featured bigger batteries. The city failed to recognize in the early planning process that i…

The MBTA found that CNG buses had the lowest lifecycle cost and cost per greenhouse gas reduction. Diesel-electric hybrids have maintenance issues, and battery electric and hydrogen buses have significant capital costs which makes it difficult to realize the significantly lower operational costs.

https://www.abettercity.org/docs/Alternative%20Propulsion%20...

However, even pure diesel buses are much more efficient at moving people than single-occupancy vehicles.

It's also worthwhile to note that a real plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions would necessarily include substantial capital outlays: not just bus charging infrastructure but grade-separated rail, dedicated busways, bus rapid transit, cycle and scooter infrastructure, etc. etc. Not to mention all the other climate adaptions that need to happen at an infrastructure level.

Re: Where will ‘garage orphans’ charge electric cars?

#287

Post by aplc0r »

koolba wrote: post #230
mast wrote: post #200

A few years ago I lived in a fairly northern Canadian city. Most people had block heaters installed in their cars and plugged them in when the car would be sitting in the cold for more than a few hours. Otherwise, the car would be too cold to start. Most companies and apartment buildings had outlets installed in their parking lots, and at home people just ran extension cords.

You don’t even have to go particularly north to see plug in block heaters. Pretty sure I’ve seen them as far “south” as Toronto. Guess they’re all ready for the EV generation.

You can still find them even in the suburbs of Minneapolis, though I haven't personally seen anyone use them in years.

Re: Where will ‘garage orphans’ charge electric cars?

#288

Post by lutorm »

stcredzero wrote: post #4

I used to run an extension cord out of my 2nd floor window, but I wasn't parking on the street. My space was off the driveway, behind a fence and a gate, but only about 12 feet from the curb. More recently, I had been parking an electric car in my apartment's lot, and running an extension cord from the exercise room, out to the car. Then the apartment decided to close off those outlets. In both cases, the car's batte…

I think "charging time" is the wrong metric to think about. The relevant metric is "miles/h". The model 3 may have a giant battery pack that takes forever to charge fully, but it's also very efficient so whatever electricity you get into it corresponds to more miles. All that matters for the situation to be sustainable is that you drive less than the amount of miles that you can charge while not driving, on average. That's a simple comparison between miles driven, the current you can charge at, and the number of hours you can charge per day.

Re: Where will ‘garage orphans’ charge electric cars?

#289

Post by Brakenshire »

jedberg wrote: post #256
Brakenshire wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d do a weekly food shop, and do your weekly charge at the same time. “Well over an hour” is wrong, there’s almost no electric car that won’t do an 80% charge in 45 minutes, and most take half an hour.

I never said it would take an hour. I specifically said you could get an 80% charge in about an hour. And the grocery store better have a lot of chargers if everyone is doing their weekly fillup while they shop.

> Filing your electric car is at least an hour if you have a DC fast charger and that gets you only 80% full.

“At least an hour” to 80% charge. I don’t think there’s a car on the market for which this is the case.

People will charge in a variety of way. Some people in apartments will have block parking for which there will be chargers, some people will go to superchargers or similar, some will do it at the gym, some at the train station, some shopping, some at work, others will have chargers for on street parking. Other people will use car sharing schemes which have dedicated chargers. Ultimately cars are parked for hundreds of hours a week and you only need a tiny fraction of that for charging.

Re: Where will ‘garage orphans’ charge electric cars?

#290

Post by gmanley »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #227
gmanley wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electricity rates and demand are insanely low during the night. In fact whole sale rates can dip into the negatives where they will literally pay you to use electricity. Aluminum smelting plants run during this time. Even if everyone suddenly started charging cars at night at the most we would be back close to daytime demand, but more math is needed.

Sorry, not night - evening - when everyone is all headed home and when one typically would fill up one's car.

Gotcha, that’s actually the time of peak demand and adding a whole new class of high power consumption during that time is indeed scary. In the UK for example where it’s tea time then as well and a bunch of people put on electric kettles. Utilities do a lot of work during that time load balancing and borrowing from other regions for extra power.
Post reply on HN