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Comment by connicpu | Hacker News Reader

At my last apartment before I moved into a home where I did have the ability to install a charger, they had 4 EV chargering spots in the parking garage. I believe residents just had to pay the normal residential electricity rate to use them, they were standard commercial level 2 chargers like the kind you see in public parking lots.

All this to say, if the demand is there then shared parking structures will install them. I live in a city with a fairly high percentage of EVs, but it will continue to spread.

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We get away with level 1 chargers, and live far from the city. Residential lots could easily get away with one level one charger per spot. (The wattage is < 25% that of one level 2 charger, so you can put in 4x as many with the same backend connection to the grid.)

For city commuters, this would probably be more than good enough.

Yep absolutely, I used a level 1 charger at home for a couple years and it could easily recharge my daily work commute in about 5-8 hours (depending on season). Even now the only upgrade I did was move to a 240V16A charger because I wanted it to be a little quicker after long trips, but most of the time I limit the charge rate to 8A to preserve battery health.

Yeah, Level 1 charging is way too easily overlooked in the US. A lot of US parking lots could add simple Level 1 outlets to most lamp posts and do a lot, easily, for EV charging. (Most traditional halogen lamps were nearly Level 2 circuits, prior to recent switches to LEDs. If the LED transition had been timed a little different there might be way more L2 chargers "easily" installed in parking lots.)

A bit of an aside: I think part of the public perception problem is calling Level 1 "chargers" and not just "outlets". At so many points in our discourse, especially in the US, we've let car manufacturers sell us this idea of "gas-pump-like capital-C Charger" as something bulky and "hard/expensive to install", but really most EVs just need more wall outlets, classic, boring electrical outlets. Sure, the US can blame Edison that we don't have Level 2 as a default outlet and our cheapest/easiest outlets are Level 1, yet still we need to stop underestimating L1.

The other thing beyond "don't discount L1 as a reliable way to charge" (slow and steady charges the race car, eh) is "don't discount the power of destination chargers". Everywhere you park is a possible place for a charger. If you can't get one easily at home, maybe your employer can build one. Your grocery store and your church or bar or pickle ball court or other third place can build one. (Especially Level 1. Outdoor outlets have always been a thing, moving them a little closer to parking spaces shouldn't always be a big deal. Boring old electrical outlets are "everywhere" already, we just aren't always yet in the mode of thinking about them, their ubiquity, and how they can charge our cars, while we eat or shop or work or hang out or play or sleep.)

I think the biggest hurdle to just doing that is who pays for the electricity. Sure right now it's a nice perk you can provide your EV owning visitors that probably won't cost too much, but in a world where 10%+ of cars are EVs the costs will add up even at level 1, so you'll need to go for capital-C Chargers that come with payment infrastructure.

WiFi-controlled 120V outlet plugs cost $20 or less retail (including tariff costs.) Those aren’t rated for the sorts of continuous draw an L1 charger needs, but upgrading the hardware to handle this isn’t going to make the hardware crushingly expensive. So the actual question mostly comes down to software and integration. Seems like a good ycombinator business. Think of the TAM!

I do keep joking that I've got hundreds of dollars to invest in the first restaurant that wants to be the McDonald's of EV Charging. (The early business model of McDonald's was notoriously putting one near almost every interstate exit so it became a ubiquitous staple of the driving landscape.) Could be McDonald's itself. The Sonic-style of sit-in-your car "drive in" restaurant seems almost like a preternatural echo of an EV restaurant business. It would be a beautiful irony if Cracker Barrel decided EV charging was the next great idea; sit in a rocking chair and peruse the gift shop of very analog goods while you wait for your car to charge sounds like a smart business model to me.

Some company that wants a restaurant near every interstate exit to build their brand is going to figure out that the economics of electric charging are simpler than they expect and with it they build a potentially very loyal audience of travelers with easily 30+ minutes a stop on their hands to eat, shop, what-have-you. Maybe it will be one of the old guard of such restaurants, maybe it will be a new disruptor. If someone on HN wants to start it, I have a very tiny seed fund round in the hundreds of dollars to invest.

one answer would be to make the parking spaces expensive enough to account for electricity. parking meters are pretty widely adopted.

Arguably a lot of parking fees are already expensive enough to account for electricity. In a city charging, say, $15/hour for parking, it seem like we should be able to expect say $0.15/hour to be a drop within the existing profit margin. There's a very simple order of magnitude relationship between the two numbers already.

I try to make this point all the time.

We have already built all of the charging infrastructure except the chargers.

You are probably no more than a block from a 440v line (that's what typically goes into the transformer, of which there is one on almost every block, at least). You are in a building that almost certainly has 220v power in it. You are probably less than 10 feet from a 15-20 amp 110v plug for almost your entire day. There are far more places to charge a car than there are people in most of North America.

If the incentives are correctly aligned, we have the infrastructure to make this happen VERY quickly.

Electricity generation is an issue, but not as much of one when you realize that not every car will be charging at the same time. Not every car will be fast charging. Hell, not every car will even need a full charge every week. I fill up my ICE car every 400km or so, which is about 2-4 weeks depending on weather. Right now AI growth is projected to increase the rate of power consumption far more than electric cars even under the most optimistic adoption curves. If generation is the problem, we need to kneecap chatGPT immediately.

Its amazing how many people think that our gasoline infrastructure is a given, and that electric car infrastructure is impossible.

A related tale: One of Rivian’s goals was to electrify National Parks and campgrounds as part of their branding as a “rugged” or “off-roading” brand and one of the maybe funniest things about that was how unsuccessful they were in parts of that branding effort, not because it was hugely expensive to get electricity out to such places but as much that it was hugely silly to take credit for all the electricity already there.

Any US park or campground with regular RV visits has tons of 240v “dryer plug” outlets, many of which with decades of battle testing of simultaneous high draw use. EVs look almost considerate next to most RVs, and those don’t even use any of that electricity to drive.

SAE J1772 (the ugly “gas pump” looking thing that CCS in Europe still resembles, but the US is fortunately moving to the relatively saner NACS instead) should have just been a “dryer plug” and we might have avoided some silliness in how few people realize how much existing EV infrastructure exists and/or what can be repurposed easily as EV infrastructure.

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