Why More Than 25% Of Americans Can’t Charge An Electric Vehicle At Home
With the surging popularity of electric vehicles, I thought this was an opportune time to refresh a popular post that I published in 2013 when I worked as the Director of New Membership for EverCharge. The following piece is an updated version of the original in order to remain current.
If you live in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, Portland, Miami, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, or Seattle you’ve probably noticed a surge of electric vehicles on the road. With 24 plug-ins now available from multiple manufactures, plug-ins accounted for nearly 4% of 2014 total vehicles sales in the US. Tesla sold just shy of 20,000 vehicles. With the announcement of the exciting all-wheel drive Model S and forthcoming Model X, Tesla will reach new markets and aims to build 100,000 cars in 2015.
As the diffusion of innovations details, emerging technologies go through phases in adoption. America is now exiting out of the ‘Innovators’ phase and into the ‘Early Adopters’ phase. Until now, only people that could work an electric vehicle into their existing lifestyle made the switch. People who have easy access to charging, most likely via their own private garage and power source, have been the primary purchasers.
Tesla has been very open for its plans to build an electric car around the $40,000 price point, essentially opening up its demographic by an order of magnitude. The California Air Resources Board has also publicly stated that by 2040, every single new car will be zero emission, meaning either electric or fuel cell. (Probably won’t be the latter, see why Mr. Musk believes hydrogen isn’t the answer.)
If Tesla and other manufacturers want to start selling more EVs, they have to start addressing a massive demographic that has been overlooked; residents of Multi-Tenant Buildings, also referred to as Multi Dwelling Units (MDUs). This designation includes condominiums, town homes, apartments, and mobile homes. In San Diego, 51% of residents fall into this category. In California overall, it is just shy of 39%. Most of these residents park in a large covered or uncovered lot, parking garage, or some other communal situation. Accordingly, nearly half of the urban EV market is being ignored. Ironically, this high density market is where EVs are catching on, too. So, you have more potential buyers with less practical means of charging.
Some charging companies out there think they have a solution. They’ll say, “Let’s put a few public chargers nearby or on the property, that will solve the problem!”
Um…no it won’t. Here is why:
- If I have my own parking space at my condo or apartment, I want to park in it everyday. I don’t want to come home, cross my fingers and hope that nobody else is using one of the public chargers, and then walk to my place with groceries and get yelled at to move my car for the next resident later on.
- What happens after 5 EVs are on the property? What about 10, and 20, and 100? Publicly available charging may kind of work for a handful of EVs, but after that, there just isn’t enough charging to go around.
- Current public charging systems are absurdly expensive. I recently spoke to one business owner who paid $16,000 to install one at his office. It can charge 2 cars simultaneously. I counted 6 Teslas in the parking lot. Hmmm….seems like there is not enough to go around.
Alright, so public charging isn’t the answer. Then what are the other options? Well…
You could run an extension cord from your car, across your parking lot, over your yard, and into your home. Of course, this would only be a 110V line, meaning you will get a whopping 1–3 miles of charging per hour. You can probably last a few days before someone complains that this is either a hazard or any eyesore.
You could luck out, and find an outlet right next to your car. But the problem is that the outlet isn’t connected to your meter, so you don’t pay for the power and are essentially stealing from the community. How long will that work?
You could call up an electrician, and instruct him to run a line from your own power meter to your parking spot. Of course, this would not work for renters. For homeowners, this can theoretically work, but situations often arise where a resident’s meter is 500 feet and 6 walls away from their spot. This means it is incredibly expensive for an installation. Furthermore, the parking area will look like a bowl of spaghetti (conduit running every which way) if more residents decide to go this route.
You could run a line to the house panel. (The panel for the common area lights, doors, etc. The HOA or building owner usually pays for this.) However, there is often only capacity for 2–3 vehicles before massive infrastructure upgrades are necessitated. I knew of a 400 unit California building that had allowed 3 Tesla owners to run lines to the house panel. Everything was fine until the 4th Tesla showed up, and received the unfortunate news that it would be $30,000 to upgrade the infrastructure to allow for the additional car. Had they gone with EverCharge (read below), they would have been able to support 18–30 EVs before they needed to upgrade.
The reality is that EV charging takes a massive amount of electricity.
Simultaneously, the amount of electricity entering a building or property is finite, so how do you ensure that all residents have the power that they need without overtaxing the system and tripping breakers all day long?
Enter EverCharge. EverCharge makes the most sense from the first vehicle to the 500th, most notably because of scalability. The charging stations are installed directly in residents dedicated parking spaces for their exclusive use so they don’t need to worry about where they will plug in at night. The proprietary system communicates wirelessly to expand the capacity of a property by a factor of up to 10x. The technology intelligently allocates the available power to requesting vehicles maximizing the infrastructure potential enabling buildings to support more vehicles before costly upgrades are required.
California Civil Code Section 1352–1353.9 protects homeowners by forbidding HOAs from denying a resident’s request to install charging. The HOA doesn’t have to pay for the system, but they can’t disallow it. This same law has some requirements, though. Chiefly, a $1,000,000 insurance policy has to be in order. With EverCharge that policy is included.
EverCharge keeps track of the power that a resident uses, bills them accordingly and reimburses the HOA or building owner automatically so that they aren’t paying for a resident’s power. Let’s call it a win-win-win-win because EV owners get power, auto manufacturers sell more EVs, greenhouse gases are reduced, and HOAs/building owners don’t have to worry about the logistics.
A bright future lies ahead for EVs. But, it won’t come without many issues to address. EverCharge decreases the barriers to go electric for a significant portion of the population.
Greg Muender is the cofounder of Whttl, described as the “Yelp for startups.” Use it to find the sweet startups that have launched in your ZIP code. Drop Greg a line via greg<at>whttl/dot/com or check him out on Twitter.
If you found value in this, it would be tremendous if you scrolled down a little further and clicked the “Recommend” button.
