Most big garages, unless built recently, probably don't have the power required to make a substantial amount of spots with chargers, and parking garages are generally so optimized it's hard to run more.
I know that at my work, which is in a fairly modern office building meeting all the latest hotness in LEED and whatever, there are basically just a handful of spots with electric and there is so much demand for those spots that you're not allowed to park there for more than two hours at a time.
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Parking has the double whammy of being entirely an expense, and possibly being outmoded. If you buy the electric autonomous fantasy of people no longer owning cars and relying on Uber-like shared fleets, that basically makes the vast majority of parking spaces obsolete, and so developers understandably are trying to make their parking lots easy to tear down and redevelop. (You can't really reuse the sloped floor plates of a parking garage for much else since all other building uses tend to need flat ground, and in any case the runoff from parked vehicles is quite nasty stuff.
A fair amount of city drivers do not have a dedicated off street parking space where they can install a charger. There are basically zero street parking spots in any American city with charging. It is not going to be possible to retrofit most multistory garages to have even a significant minority of spots with chargers.
I live and work in fairly new multistory buildings, and there aren’t many EV spots. My coworkers with EVs move their cars around constantly in hope of getting their one hour ration of charging in the office garage.
There are chargers in parking lots at/near office buildings. People use them during the day. In residential areas without offstreet parking, there are few to no convenient chargers.
> considering most condo parking garages I've seen only have 3-4 charging spots
Easy: condos will place more chargers.
Currently the paradigm is to place a few high-power chargers and have people occupy the charger as little as possible. Once electric cars hit a certain threshold everyone will want a charger, so it'll become more viable to just equip every single parking space with a low-power charger, and have everyone slow charge overnight.
Yeah if there were parking garages or lots where every parking space had a charging port, that would be awesome, and could actually be part of a practical solution in the long term. Unfortunately most garages I've seen have somewhere from zero to two spots in the entire garage :(
I live in an apartment complex that has cars parked along all of the roads because there's not enough parking spots. That's pretty common for apartments. Maybe, on paper, there's at least one spot per building, but not next to your building in particular and most apartments will have multiple car owners. And none of those spots have outlets. Even with a law making every spot have outlets, I frequently get off work and arrive to no open spots and parking on the streets. I cannot afford to gamble around on whether I'll be able to charge my car tonight or not. I really don't see how electric cars could work in that scenario.
On the other hand its pretty easy to retrofit car parks with chargers if there is demand for it. My building (which, to be fair, is a new construction highrise in seattle) has ~15% of its carpark with charging capacity and I suspect they could add more if needed.
at least where i am, these either do not have their own parking lots, or have multistory lots where maybe 5 spaces out of dozens are equipped with chargers, and I have no idea how feasible a full retrofit would be.
in the pre-pandemic world they had to implement a queue system for the charging spots, so you couldn't just park your car the whole day in one and had to move it out to let someone else have a turn.
EVs are very energy intensive, and in a location of the building that never had such high energy requirements; parking garages are one of the pieces of the building that is extremely optimized and so may be complicated or expensive to retrofit.
Building codes have had to be adjusted to accommodate, but new housing is a fraction of the total building supply in any given area, and retrofitting can be nearly four times the cost of a new installation. And these building codes usually target a <10% amount of EV spaces. Anecdotally, I work in an office building that meets these codes and is all LEED-compliant and stuff, yet demand for the limited EV spaces outstrips supply and you basically get rationed access to it on a first-come first-serve basis.
At least in the short term, having a few charging spots here and there (similar to parking spots for handicapped people) might be enough. Make them free to use for overnight parking/charging, and people won't need a garage. Of course you have to plan to scale up the infrastructure in time (which is hard because a parking lot full of chargers can drink electricity in the megawatts), and sooner or later it won't be free anymore, but it's a start.
Like I said in another comment, there is barely enough room on the sidewalk for signage on the street where I park my car, let alone chargers every 30 ft. The only place they can reasonably fit are on commercialized streets where residents don't park anyway because it's metered during the day.
Again, I don't see mass adoption of EVs in dense cities like Boston (Seattle is only 6.7k/mi²; Boston is 13k) happening until you have fast chargers at refueling stations. We don't have garages, we don't have sidewalk space on residential streets, and we don't drive to work (or if we do, it's not to a place with a commercial garage). The exceptions are (1) luxury high-rises, which generally have private garages, and (2) the very wealthy, who either own their own garage, or drive to work and park in a garage, or both.
"Lots" is still relative though. A large employer near me has something like 50 chargers available in their lot. Of course, on a normal workday, 8,000 cars are being parked there. If 4,000 of those employees start driving electrics, I'm not sure it would be possible to accommodate them.
Everyone has to park their car somewhere, and most people who don't have a garage (indeed, most people) have to park their car somewhere during work hours as well.
This is a problem which solves itself during the buildout phase: BEVs are less attractive to people without a garage, but for people with a garage, it's a no-brainer once they're cheaper than ICE.
Those people will want to charge during the day as well, and legislate for charge points in the downtown areas. Malls and other outlying work areas will want to add charge points as well: Malls in particular, anything which induces customers to spend longer at the mall is attractive.
A bit of government funding to induce cheapskate office parks to put in electric chargers isn't out of the question.
By the time we need them on city streets, it will happen.
You don't need to electrify the entire parking lot.
Even if you do, not every parking spot needs to have a 350kW HPC charger. 11-22kW is more than enough. Add load balancing and maybe a battery in the future and you're good.
The handful of spots is part greenwashing part gauging the demand. They do track the usage of those spots and increase the amount if they see that they're in use and driving business.
Less than half of all vehicle owners have access to a garage or carport with an electrical outlet.
If EV’s are to have mass appeal, how do you reconcile that? Most apartments have few (or none) EV chargers. I can barely get my apartment to follow through with maintenance requests, let alone install an EV charger.
Why bother with that hassle when my Honda Civic that already gets 35 mpg that I bought for $12k cash works just fine?
It's a problem which will go away as popularity grows.
If you have your own garage then you're all set now, obviously.
If you park in a shared garage, it's pretty simple to install a charger there. Garages still have electricity. It could be dedicated for you, or shared with metering. Either way, it's pretty straightforward. What can be hard, depending on who you're dealing with, is convincing the garage owner to let you do this. As EVs become more common, catering to their owners will become more desirable. It's one thing to block installing chargers when one tenant wants one, and quite another when 10% of your tenants want them.
The same story plays out with street parking. In terms of infrastructure it's no big deal, and the main obstacle is political. As EVs become more common, that will go away.
I know this is getting a little off topic, but I'm as surprised as you that electric charging isn't taking on at parking lots and structures much as I expected.
I mean even Disney only has like 2-6 charging spots in each of their parking lots designed to hold over 12,000 cars per lot!
And then you look at other parking structures and see that they have a token charger or 2 and the few I've reached out to never have any plans on increasing the number of them.
Interesting. Do you have details to share, because I'd vaguely planned to equip my garage with electrical charging capability? I can assure you though that nobody is paying several hundred bucks per month for a garage or parking lot except maybe in the very city center of the four big cities in Germany, like next to the iconic main attraction of that city. It seems the public sector wants to grab the money for EV charging, with public parking lots being dedicated to it, while there's no plan for private proprietors to install their own charging.
I know that at my work, which is in a fairly modern office building meeting all the latest hotness in LEED and whatever, there are basically just a handful of spots with electric and there is so much demand for those spots that you're not allowed to park there for more than two hours at a time.
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Parking has the double whammy of being entirely an expense, and possibly being outmoded. If you buy the electric autonomous fantasy of people no longer owning cars and relying on Uber-like shared fleets, that basically makes the vast majority of parking spaces obsolete, and so developers understandably are trying to make their parking lots easy to tear down and redevelop. (You can't really reuse the sloped floor plates of a parking garage for much else since all other building uses tend to need flat ground, and in any case the runoff from parked vehicles is quite nasty stuff.
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