Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
A factor I'm reminded of by this video, but which the video doesn't mention...
It's about the main challenge facing electric vehicles being not the vehicle prices or the weight & range of the batteries, but the placement of charging stations. But that's all about places you stop at while traveling, which is the context in which a half-hour wait is said to make sense because you'd want to take about that much of a break anyway.
But, for daily life between local commutes, the idea is to charge it at your own home; nobody wants to stop & wait for a half-hour on the way home from work, now matter how many days of commuting you can go between episodes of needing to do that. But that not only means a lot more charging stations would need to be built & distributed than gas pumps, but also introduces a couple more complications about precisely where to place them: renting versus owning a home, and precisely where around your home you park.
So far, charging at home really only works if you own your home and you have a parking spot that other people won't park in: either your own driveway or your own garage. Neither of those applies to me.
I live in a big house that's been divided into four apartments for rent, with a driveway and 3-car garage that take up most of the back yard and the land on one side of the house. One of the four of us parks outside next to the garage and the other three have one garage spot apiece. If we were to start charging electric vehicles, we'd need at least four charging stations at a place we don't own. And the garage doesn't even have electricity. Even if somebody else were to take up the entire cost of the upgrade, they'd still need the owner's permission, or a law compelling it. And four wouldn't necessarily be enough. All four of us are single, but one or two couples could just as easily move in next after one or two of us move out, and any of us could sometimes have visitors who don't live with us. There's enough space for up to six vehicles in the back yard & garage, so either six chargers would be needed to make sure there's one for each spot even though we currently
only use four, or the option would need to be left open to add more sometime after the original upgrade if needed.
And that's without bringing street parking into consideration. Even some people who own a house still park on the street in front of it, not in a garage. I park in my garage during winter but on the street in front of the house in summer. Sometimes, in summer, I come back home and find some other vehicle in my usual spot on the street, so I either use another spot nearby or pull up into our driveway. At my last apartment, street parking was all there was, and we were all constantly shuffling around based on which ones were open when we arrived (and whether one side of that street was closed at the time for street-cleaning). Even if you got everybody to agree to lining the streets with chargers, you'd need some way to keep track of which vehicles are on which ones in order to know who's supposed to pay for the electricity that each one uses, unless electricity becomes communalized. Or, if you assigned each spot to a specific person, you'd have no way to prevent somebody from taking a spot that isn't his/hers, especially when a bunch of guests arrive to be in one place. And at the apartment I had before that, the pavement in front of the buildings had six parking spots assigned to the six apartments in each building, but there was also unmarked paved space between the groups of marked & assigned spots, where guests or cohabitants could park. I imagine the six marked spots per building would have chargers, but that leaves no way for whoever sometimes parks in the unmarked gaps to charge, and putting chargers in all those other spaces would mean acquiring almost twice as many chargers just for most of them to go unused most of the time...
It's about the main challenge facing electric vehicles being not the vehicle prices or the weight & range of the batteries, but the placement of charging stations. But that's all about places you stop at while traveling, which is the context in which a half-hour wait is said to make sense because you'd want to take about that much of a break anyway.
But, for daily life between local commutes, the idea is to charge it at your own home; nobody wants to stop & wait for a half-hour on the way home from work, now matter how many days of commuting you can go between episodes of needing to do that. But that not only means a lot more charging stations would need to be built & distributed than gas pumps, but also introduces a couple more complications about precisely where to place them: renting versus owning a home, and precisely where around your home you park.
So far, charging at home really only works if you own your home and you have a parking spot that other people won't park in: either your own driveway or your own garage. Neither of those applies to me.
I live in a big house that's been divided into four apartments for rent, with a driveway and 3-car garage that take up most of the back yard and the land on one side of the house. One of the four of us parks outside next to the garage and the other three have one garage spot apiece. If we were to start charging electric vehicles, we'd need at least four charging stations at a place we don't own. And the garage doesn't even have electricity. Even if somebody else were to take up the entire cost of the upgrade, they'd still need the owner's permission, or a law compelling it. And four wouldn't necessarily be enough. All four of us are single, but one or two couples could just as easily move in next after one or two of us move out, and any of us could sometimes have visitors who don't live with us. There's enough space for up to six vehicles in the back yard & garage, so either six chargers would be needed to make sure there's one for each spot even though we currently
only use four, or the option would need to be left open to add more sometime after the original upgrade if needed.And that's without bringing street parking into consideration. Even some people who own a house still park on the street in front of it, not in a garage. I park in my garage during winter but on the street in front of the house in summer. Sometimes, in summer, I come back home and find some other vehicle in my usual spot on the street, so I either use another spot nearby or pull up into our driveway. At my last apartment, street parking was all there was, and we were all constantly shuffling around based on which ones were open when we arrived (and whether one side of that street was closed at the time for street-cleaning). Even if you got everybody to agree to lining the streets with chargers, you'd need some way to keep track of which vehicles are on which ones in order to know who's supposed to pay for the electricity that each one uses, unless electricity becomes communalized. Or, if you assigned each spot to a specific person, you'd have no way to prevent somebody from taking a spot that isn't his/hers, especially when a bunch of guests arrive to be in one place. And at the apartment I had before that, the pavement in front of the buildings had six parking spots assigned to the six apartments in each building, but there was also unmarked paved space between the groups of marked & assigned spots, where guests or cohabitants could park. I imagine the six marked spots per building would have chargers, but that leaves no way for whoever sometimes parks in the unmarked gaps to charge, and putting chargers in all those other spaces would mean acquiring almost twice as many chargers just for most of them to go unused most of the time...
