It ain’t the junk in the garage, it’s the $80k
As opposed to what your comment implies, the drivetrain (EV or ICE) has nothing to do with cars spying on you. You should not blame the technology itself because shady car companies spying on your internet connected car. Most of them are well known ICE car brands that do the spying (GM, Volkswagen for instance)
Yes, most new ICE cars are Internet connected now, not just EVs.
Blame those greedy corporations, not the technology.
exactly, data collection is an issue with new cars in general. It’s not a reason to buy a new ICE car instead of a new EV.
It is a reason to not buy a new car which means people who aren’t buying new cars won’t be buying EV’s.
with the used EV tax credit there are good options at ~20k.
edit: why downvotes? the used EV market is bigger every year and if the price is under $25k you get a ~$4k credit.
How about talking to the landlords who refuse to install EV chargers? Or maybe talk to manufacturers who won’t sell a basic EV that isn’t overpriced?
This is just “Am I out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong!” again.
Why lower your EV price when you can just block foreign competition?
Ah, the Detroit approach
What do landlords have to do with it? Can you not power the charger off 110V or 220V? Do you need a higher amp circuit cut in, larger than 30A? (American question obviously.)
Some apartment buildings are nowhere near where tenets park vehicles. Running extention cables would be a mess and dangerous
Ah! When I think “landlord”, I’m thinking of a single family home. That’s generally the context in America.
It depends. More rural areas are single family/duplex set ups. If you are more urban you’ll find complexes or even skyscrapers in large metro areas :)
fast charging requires a larger service connection than a wall outlet. you can slow charge from a normal wall outlet, but it will take ages to fully charge a modest battery.
generally people have it installed by an electrician, running a new conduit from the circuit breaker.
For home charging to keep up with a commute, a normal wall outlet all night long is fine. It just needs to be installed where the car is parked, and it should have some protection from weather while the car is plugged in.
…this obviously depends on how far your commute is, and how large the battery is.
https://supercarblondie.com/tesla-cybertruck-owner-regular-plug-outlet/
220V? Better than 30A? I’m asking what I would need to install in my home. I have no clue on this.
talk to an electrician after looking at the specs on the charger you want. I’m not qualified to give you electrical instructions
How much do you drive in a year? What kind of car are you looking at?
For the average driver, a 120V (normal) outlet on a smaller car is actually perfectly fine most of the time. If you think you might get a bigger car, or multiple EVs, you may want to look into a level 2 setup. And while you’re at it, use thicker wires so you can run more power through it. But don’t feel like you have to go overboard. I think the sweet “buy once, cry once, hard to come up with a situation where this isn’t enough” number is a 50 amp 240V circuit running a 40A charge cord (always charge at 80% of your circuit rating, max).
But if your panel can’t take it or you want to do it cheaper or whatever, a 20A 240V circuit is on the lower end of the level 2 spectrum and it can still do a lot… Like, more than double that “average driver” amount for level 1. And here’s the fun part: everyone is so afraid of 240V and think it takes special wiring or whatever. It really doesn’t. I’ve got a 240V air compressor outlet on a 20A circuit, just like what I suggested a minute ago. It uses the exact same wiring as the 120V next to it. The only difference? It’s connected to two “opposing” hots with a double breaker (not terribly more expensive) rather than a single hot on a single breaker plus a neutral as you’d see on 120V. All you need to do is wrap the white wire (usually neutral) with a colored (not green, that’s ground) electrical tape to indicate that it carries current. Do it on both sides. Easy peasy, up to code, and uses really affordable wiring.
Also, volts and amps are apples and oranges. Home electric circuits mostly run on 120 volts, but some bigger things like stoves and central air run on 240 volts instead. Amperage is the other piece of the puzzle. Wire sizing is largely based on how many amps the circuit can carry. Multiply the two together, and you get watts. Divide that number by 1000, and you get kilowatts.
My car’s battery has a capacity of 65 kilowatt-hours, meaning it can run 65 kilowatts for an hour, 1 kilowatt for 65 hours, 13 kilowatts for 5 hours… You get the idea. Same idea goes for charging. My 240V 40A charging setup (which runs on a 50A breaker) can give almost 10 kilowatts of power, meaning my battery will be charged 0-100 in about 6.5 hours. A regular outlet gives about a kilowatt and can do it in about 65 hours. But before you think that’s useless, remember that you can easily plug in daily and if you only use a fraction of your battery each day, it’s no big deal at all!
I rent a house. Our lease is explicit about no battery charging in the garage, including EVs. Yet they seemingly have no problem with my welder or RC cars…
What about transit? Why do Americans always have to drive. We need real alternatives to cars.
The suburban sprawl makes building transit a lot harder but to fix that we need to increase density but then it’s hard to increase density when you need space for cars because you have no usable transit
It’s really isn’t difficult
Our government just won’t spend the money to do it
If you want useful public transit then it needs to connect population centers where people are. People are lazy and don’t want to walk more than 1/2 mile to a bus stop so if you have a population density of 1000/ sq mi that means any one bus stop is only going to be able to provide adequate coverage to 250 people. With so few people per stop it needs to make a lot of stops to be useful which then makes it slow which further lowers use. At that density it also doesn’t make logical sense to have designated bus lanes so they are stuck going slow in traffic as well. So now you have an expensive system that nobody uses because it sucks
If you have higher density then you can justify more lines which makes them actually useful and can add things like light rails which really make a difference
Bike transit is usually easier in those lower density areas but due to the low density getting between places is usually a bit further away so there are usually higher speed limit roads that aren’t as good for cyclists so more expensive barriers need to be constructed or they have to follow less direct paths which causes cycling to be slow
I live in a mid-sized Canadian city, with a population of just under 400k with what is considered a pretty good bus-based transit system, with roughly 60 routes. Even way out in the boonies you can catch a bus. You can get from pretty nearly any point A to any point B on the bus.
And yet I and those who can afford to do so generally avoid the bus. Our streets are still filled with cars during rush hour (which, as someone who has 100% WFM for the last 15 years I’m happy to say I’m not contributing to). Reasons?
- If your origin and destination aren’t on the same route, you’re going to need to transfer. Possibly multiple times. And wait for those transfers.
- Buses are sometimes either late, or too full and don’t stop. Which means if you rely on taking the bus to get to work, you had better be up quite early to ensure you get to your destination on time.
- Bus people. Creepy old guys hitting on young (or even old) girls and women. People who haven’t showered in a while sitting next to you. The people who think their bag is too important and needs a seat. We bought my wife a car the week after some racist tried to attack her.
You know what doesn’t have any of those problems? My car. I can crank my music up if I want to. I get to pick who is in my car. I don’t have to get up extra early to make sure I get to my destination on time because the bus might be late, full, or because I have to make multiple transfers (at each point of which the bus could be late or full…).
I’m glad we have the bus system we have for those people who need it. I know we have people in our city who don’t have the privilege of owning a vehicle of their own — and for some people whose needs are simple the bus can likely work just fine. I’m glad we have that system for the people who don’t otherwise have a choice — but for everyone who has that choice, the choice is typically being in their own private vehicle where they can sing loudly, eat and drink whatever they like, control who rides with them, and go wherever they want to — heck, I can even change my mind about my destination mid-drive and go wherever I want to without having to switch cars.
I’ll admit, having taken transit in bigger cities (Toronto, Montreal, Istanbul) being able to take a train (subway, LRT, surface rail, streetcars etc.) can be pretty great. I think bigger cities need this kind of transit — even with its many, many problems it can beat out taking a car to a downtown core. But even when I lived in some of these cities I still had a car. But the size of my current home city just isn’t big enough to accommodate that level of transit. The cost would just be too horrendous.
Can everyone do better? Sure. But I don’t think such improvements are going to significantly encourage more people to take transit over their own vehicles.
Couldn’t be that most Americans can’t afford new cars.
Because they keep buying shit they don’t need and hording it in the garage, while their car sits outside in the driveway exposed to the elements.
Hyperinflation and incoming recession aside, Americans have been using their garages for junk storage for many decades.
Money and options are hurting my adaption rate
you don’t even need a garage to charge your EV, just install it on the exterior.
If you need to top off with 200 - 300 miles of range every night, you commute sucks giant donkey balls.
We have a one-car garage and two cars. I have a table saw, therefore we have a no-car garage.
lol, this totally makes sense to me. It can’t be the only reason. But my lived experience tells me it’s not insignificant.
If you’re work commuting with an EV and charging at home. What’s the hit to your electric bill?
Because that’s one of a few bottlenecks. $10 every few days for some gas is a lot easier on people than a blanket X hundreds of dollars higher light bill.
Being poor is expensive.
You’re right, being poor is expensive, but that doesn’t really apply to charging a vehicle.
The term “being poor is expensive” is generally applied to situations where you don’t have the money to pay for something upfront (a quality product, bulk purchases, preventative maintenance, preventative healthcare, down payment on a house) so you have to spend smaller amounts of money repeatedly and/or have a large unavoidable cost as a result (multiple cheap products that wear out, multiple small purchases with a higher per unit price, a blown engine, a root canal, rent), which can cost a lot more over time.
The electric bill is post-paid, not up front. Not being able to set aside the “$10 every few days” to pay the higher bill at the end of the month with money left over is just poor money management.
That being said, the higher purchase cost of electric vehicles preventing poor people from taking advantage of lower operating costs that would more than offset the higher purchase price after some number of years is an example of it being expensive to be poor.
My MIL has had the original leaf and is now driving a newer Bolt. She said her bill only went up 20-30 bucks a month compared to what she was spending a month on gas.
