Yes, to be fair, I did it myself and found our brand new hotel has one. Technically all new parking lots have to have 1 space. But we don’t get much development here. I know of 3 installed in the last year (including the hotel) in places like fast food joints. We probably have the only Sheetz in the country (that was rebuilt in 2020 of so) that doesn’t have one. (This planning code is very new)
But no, charging at home would be a PITA. (As I stated 1000 or so posts above) We have no garage or carport - only a parking slab out back. It would require running a long extension cord through wet grass and a fence to get there. And we are fortunate. Most of my neighbors have no off street parking.
But I also noticed that several of the ones that exist on the map either aren’t really there, or are private. It shows one at my workplace. Yes, it’s there, but you can’t use it. I know we have had people towed who were plugged in. (It only for our one EV work vehicle and it signed as such.) Most of the others are at car dealerships.
My older S lives in an apartment and keeps his car in their garage. Every tenant has a designated spot. I don’t know what would happen if he got an EV. Maybe there are a few? But what if 50% of the tenants went out and got one in the next year. It would become a problem in a hurry. That unknown is a huge deterrent
My younger S originally wanted a Tesla. But he is moving in with his GF’s family. They also don’t have a garage. And within ~6 months they will move to an apartment. They have no idea what the charging situation will be like. So now he is planning to buy a regular hybrid.
We have a phev and only buy about 4 gallons of gas every few months, when we have used the 1/2 tank. Mostly we drive 25 or fewer miles in a day and that’s covered by the electric battery.
My friend has an older leaf with a degrading battery and she worries about whether it will make it and often feels safer looking for a charger to give it a boost if she’s going to be driving some distance to be sure she gets home. My neighbor has a leaf she bought in 2017 and has been waiting since Nov for a replacement electric battery. Fortunately they have her H’s non-plug in Lexus to share.
Our island is pretty small so unless you drive back and forth a great deal, many of us have fairly low mileage but stop & go traffic. We have some charging stations in parking lots but I just plug into household current at my home and that’s enough (unless i chance upon a charger that is available and doesn’t charge for use). We do have range anxiety so are happy to have my plug in prius hybrid.
Respectfully disagree. This thread has long morphed into a general EV and hybrids discussion, so locations of charging stations and people’s personal experiences with everyday use of such vehicles are very relevant to the topic. If all we had to do is answer the questions, the cafe would quickly die…
Coming back to answer the rest of your questions to the best of my ability.
Get a Level 2 charger in your garage. While trickle charging on 110v works it’s much slower and depending on how low your battery is you may not get fully charged over night. A Level 2 220/240v charger will charge you up overnight w/o a problem.
I addressed the slow charging in my earlier reply. I think for the earlier EV models like the Nissan Leaf that was an issue, but not for other cars.
So much depends on their lifestyles and their specific apartments as far as how annoying it would be to find a charger. Some apartment complexes do have chargers. We had a friend whose apartment complex did, but my oldest’s apartment complex did not. However there were chargers at two grocery stores nearby so something like that or a charger at work or the gym or wherever else is part of their daily or weekly routine might work out for them. Some people do run power cords from their apartments, but my oldest’s apartment complex sent out a notice that that was not allowed, so it just depends. As for vandalism, just depends on the neighborhood, no?
You mentioned superchargers. Are you/they thinking Tesla? I don’t drive a Tesla and someone else might be able to better address any questions about them specifically, but if you just meant a Fast Charger (also known as Level 3 charger) that means all the EVs that aren’t Teslas. Also there is some sharing of the networks in the works. https://electrek.co/2022/05/10/tesla-add-ccs-connectors-supercharger-stations-us-elon-musk/
Will I buy an EV? Well, maybe, maybe not. Our current cars, a couple Toyota Hybrids, some low mileage ICE cars, etc. will last a lifetime. I actually would like to “thin the herd” some.
My main EV complaint is that they’re all, from an exterior/interior design standpoint, UGLY.
To the best of my knowledge, there are no EV 2-door “sports cars” (in quotes for a reason) and no convertibles yet, but for the original Tesla Roadster, which was made more than a decade ago, so ancient in terms of EV technology. Plus, those are around $100,000 +/-, depending on model and condition.
Or there are EV prototypes, not yet in production, which will likely sell for $1-$2 Million. That’s out of my league.
EVs are super duper low maintenance. We have 1 EV (2017 Chevy Bolt), 3 Plug in Hybrids (2 2013 Ford C-maxes, 1 2012 Chevy Volt), 1 2005 Honda Odyssey. The Bolt is obviously a good bit newer than the other cars (has almost 100k miles), but the routine maintenance with it is so low. Just get tires rotated and get new ones every once in awhile and maybe new wiper blades. There are no belts or hoses to worry about, no oil changes. The other vehicles we have are always having something going on. Latest was bad cylinders and a defective spark plug in one of the C-maxes. Had to have it towed home from D22’s college.
I’ve always liked the Mini Cooper, but not enough to buy one. An EV version could be attractive to me, but BMW’s have always had a reputation of expensive repairs, which I would have to weigh in any purchase decision.
The other thing about all new cars, including EV’s, is that many of them can/will have electrical problems, because of the complexity of electronics, windows, door locks, etc.
As manufacturers begin to produce designs that I can buy, I’m much more likely to buy an EV.
Because we have two cars and only really need one, and because of how our driveway is, we tend to drive one car for a while and then switch to the other one. So I can speak to this for usage gaps of up to a month: it doesn’t really matter. There’s a tiny bit of battery drain, I’m pretty sure. How much? Not enough to notice. We don’t tend to keep our Bolt plugged in after it’s charged up, but I don’t think that really matters either.
By the way, the lack of battery drain is true in traffic too. Your battery drain in traffic is attributable only to you use of heat or A/C, so you can sit in traffic for half of forever without any worries.
I would definitely not advise an EV in your situation. The tech is good enough that if you were passionate about going electric you could make it work, but I think either the cost or the inconvenience might be rather high. 14 days is a lot of days to rent (if you went that route), or to turn into longer days, or to turn into 21 days.
We do one 500-mile trip a year (each way). When we send the hybrid off with the college kid, we’ll obviously do it in the Bolt - by now a pretty outdated EV. We’ve done it before. It’ll work with two 1/2 hour stops, but we’d consider a rental car (or a flight!) for the 1,200 miles each way that you’re talking about …. and either of those options comes with its own limitations.
And I’m hoping folks continue to share what they are looking at. We are looking at ionic, subaru, volvo and possibly whatever is replacing the bolt. Since we aren’t in a big hurry, we are just taking our time…and waiting for more models to come out…and I’m thinking that is going to happen.
While I was gone this week, DH went to our local dealership and bought a 2022 Ford Escape with 1800 miles on it (I’m not totally thrilled he did this while I was gone but that’s another story). He asked about hybrids but they didn’t have an Escape on the lot and it would have been more expensive. It also doesn’t have the towing capacity of a conventional model. We need to pull snowmobiles so that was a dealbreaker.
