Why Apartment Dwellers Are Being Left Behind In The EV Transition

It would be convenient if you were a smoker...you could grab a pack of reds and some scratch offs in your own driveway. The negative is if you run away for milk and don't plan on coming back your wife will be able to find you

that would be a good point if charging and gassing up were the same thing. but the point still stands, we didnt have to pay upfront to have a gas station put in our neighborhoods. it makes sense to charge evs in peoples driveways/garages etc the way it makes sense to have a gas station for gas cars. bc evs and ice are different. im not an ev zealot and even i can tell u why. why make a big parking lot full of evs charging each for an hour when u can just charge it where its going to be parked for extended periods of time anyway? the electricity is already at your house, you dont have to pay the oil dealer to bring gas there (people in rural areas used to do that, they literally had a gas station in their driveway). my city has an ordnance that i think is a pretty fair implementation of this. all new construction and major renovations require the infrastructure for ev charging to be installed, specifically a 240v junction box. the owner, or tenant, or landlord or what have you still has to pay for the charger, installation, and electricity, and they can pick whichever one they want (some are even built into the curb). but in cities like mine that are pretty old with aged electrical infrastructure, thats really helpful to ppl that otherwise couldnt own an ev bc they would have to drive 15 mins to the nearest big parking lot required to have an ev charger (i dont think that should be required, most large developers would put them in anyway) or risk burning their 100 year old alley garage down with a trickle charger. overall, i dont think ev charging stations need to be required, i just think infrastructure should be made to accommodate it so anyone can access it the way anyone can access a gas station.

Now that I’ve installed an EVSE at my house, though, owning a gasoline car is less convenient and more expensive for everyday driving. 🤷‍♂️

The cost and hassle of installing an EVSE at home is real: spent about $1200 on parts and DIYed the labor.

But now that my home charger is just part of my house, driving a gasoline-powered vehicle is just kinda a dumb decision for me, financially speaking.

A couple of years after I installed my charger, the $1200 is history, and the savings over gasoline happen every day.

Your concerns are real, but they don’t look like that big of a deal to me in retrospect.

P.S. Considering how often my gasoline vehicles eat $1200 in maintenance costs (usually about once a year), that $1200 was only a big deal because it came from the home-improvement budget rather than the car-maintenance budget.