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I live in an apartment. I drive a full EV and the 200+ miles range allows me to get away with charging at public chargers intermittently rather than having to plug in basically every night.

If I had a plug in hybrid, it wouldn’t get plugged in.



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I’ve had a couple of apartments install ev chargers in every parking space in the last few years. That kind of thing is going to get progressively more common.

I think the "if I had a hybrid, it wouldn't get plugged in" part is what they were calling out: that is now a fossil fuel car even though they could quite comfortably plug it in.

Hybrid cars are, effectively, enablers. The not-even temptation to just top it up, in under a minute, at an entirely acceptable cost (given that you could afford a hybrid, you can afford gas) is the best way to prevent people from actually going electric.

Plus, from an industry perspective, hybrids are the perfect excuse for manufacturers to just keep spending on ICE improvements rather than EV improvements: as long as the total package seems to get more mileage every year, no one's paying attention to the fact that the EV parts don't get improved nearly as much as the ICE parts do. And because hybrids cut into EV sales, manufacturers have the perfect excuse to keep working on ICE tech because "the majority of people are still buying cars with an ICE or ICE component".

Hybrids would be great if people were rational. Instead, people are the exact opposite, and hybrids are the perfect "let's not move to full EV" excuse for consumers and manufacturers alike.


Why do we need chargers in every parking space? Is every space allotted? In our parking structure (five floors) we have about 50 EVs and only four chargers, there’s always at least one spot available. I guess there’s no real harm in it but seems like a waste of resources.

If everybody has an EV it becomes more of a problem and shuffling your car around to leave space for your neighbors is a time sink.

For a while I commuted 80 miles a day which would have meant daily charges were more or less necessary. Having to take the car out for a walk every night would have been irritating.


I think there is a sweet spot for city size and how many people are using EVs for apartment EV users now. Your city needs to be large enough to draw investment for this infrastructure, but it can't be so large that each and every charger in town has someone already parked there, which is what seemingly happens when I see the few dozen chargers installed around my neighborhood.

You also don't want most people to be driving EVs, because then it quickly becomes a situation like bikes are with last mile transport: if everyone used them, they wouldn't work so well, but so long as only a few people are using them it works great for you. If everyone brought a bike on the train we'd have to redesign trains to be far longer and lengthen underground stations to match; right now its fine because its only maybe 2-3 people per train car with a bike in my experience, but if that changes the fixes are expensive.

Likewise with EV chargers, if we see mass adoption, we'd have to foot the bill to turn every basically zero cost spit of pavement people park on into dedicated charging infrastructure. I'm assuming a municipal charger will have to be substantially more rugged and able to handle more abuse than your average home charger installation. Estimates on the internet vary for what a l2 charger costs, lets say its $10000 for one fit for a public parking spot. That would put the cost to convert the 6 million parking spots in Los Angeles at $60 billion. Sure that's probably not sound math, but it doesn't seem cheap, especially factoring in ongoing maintenance and replacement.


A decent L2 charger should be installable at scale for ~$1K per unit IMHO. I'm basing this on the fact that a singular L2 home charger can be installed for about that. Figure the industrial variant costs a little more, but you get savings from the mass scale of deployment. They probably cost more now, but competition will bring it down as we scale.

Also, not everyone will even need L2 everywhere all the time, because many will be able to charge at home or use fast-chargers in emergencies. You don't have to be near-full at all times. You could deploy them at only 1/N spots, say something closer to 1/4 of all the spots, if even that (apartments might need 1/1, but streets and business parking lots/garages would need far less. You don't need them in any short-term street parking areas, as L2 is mostly-useless unless the car is sitting in place for hours).

You also don't necessarily need to have the raw power to run them all simultaneously: you can have local groups powershare (e.g. deploy 8 chargers with a feed-in that supports 4, and the chargers can coordinate to drop their charge rate as more people plug in).

If those wild assumptions are true ($1k, 1/4 of parking spots), LA's bill drops to $1.5B, which seems much more reasonable. The capacity will build up organically over time as EV adoption grows, starting with corporate and apartment parking lots.

I think in this hypothetical all-EV future, there would be other compensating changes to the city as well. Like, all gas stations would go poof, and their tanks, and the fuel delivery trucks, and most of the refineries, and all of the associated impacts on peoples' health from both the fueling and the car exhausts, etc. There's a lot of potential upside to offset any reasonable electrification costs.


I'd be curious to see where the money ends up coming from long term. Hopefully it doesn't mean shifting money that could have gone towards mass transit into subsidizing private ownership of single occupant vehicles.

If you could charge at home with your own dedicated charger, would you plug in a plug-in hybrid?

Of course, but that would be a completely different scenario.

Frankly having my own charger at home would make owning a full EV even more convenient over the hybrid.


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