I'm excited to see how we upgrade everyone's houses to handle charging. I don't think my house can handle it without spending thousands to upgrade. Not to mention adding chargers to all apartments and condos.
The apartments and condos are a problem for sure, but everyone can charge at a house. I went 3 months charging my EV using a standard level 1 charger on a normal house plug, and I have a fairly long commute of about 80km total. The level 2 charger just allows me to only charge a couple times a week, rather than it being something I do every time I get home (it takes about 15-20 seconds to plug in a charger)
You can also get smart splitters for your existing dryer circuit (as long as it isn’t on the opposite side of house) that allows you to only run one at a time and therefore saves you needing to upgrade your overall electrical service.
Why doesn’t your house meet the requirements out of curiosity? I think most dryer outlets are 220 and I’ve been told if you can run a dryer you can charge a car. My parents just use the standard 110v outlet and are happy.
Yes you can charge two cars on one circuit, you just need a more advanced charger that can either load balance between two connectors simultaneously or switch between them when one’s completed. It’s probably cheaper to just have a single normal charger and alternate days they’re plugged in though. That’s what we expect to do once we switch our second vehicle over to EV in the next few years.
I’ve owned a car for 3 years and I have 0 desire for a fast home charger (my garage already has a 240V plug, I just don’t care enough to pay for the wall wart it needs). overnight in a standard outlet is more than enough to handle usual driving. I only need the range for road trips, in which I’m using public chargers anyways.
A 120v outlet will do more than the average Canadian commutes daily.
It could still be an issue with winter charging for places that don’t have a garage when it hits -10c or so.
For colder places with no garage, I think a nema 5-20 outlet would be enough to overcome that, and most houses will have the wiring for that already in place. You might just need to upgrade the breaker in the box which would be cheap. You’d need an electrician to be sure, but if the house already has the wiring and box supports a 20amp vs 15amp breaker it it’d be under $100 vs getting a 50amp service set up for L2 charging.
We really don’t need L2 chargers at every home to make this work.
On an average day, I probably drive less than 20km. However, I'm frequently making trips about 300km out of the city with family. When I'm staying out that way I don't have a garage to park in. There is zero public transit and I don't think I've seen a single EV out that way.
I think it’s worth another reply to mention, while I think you’d be fine on 120v and most people could probably cheaply upgrade to a nema 5-20 outlet and 20amp breaker switch if they needed a bit more daily charge, neither of those are as efficient as charging at 240v.
I charge my car on 120v and it’s about 80% efficient and drops off as it getd really cold. I think 240v is 90-95% efficient.
If we have millions of people charging their cars on 120v as that’s all they need and it’s the cheapest option for them, that’s a lot of wasted electricity.
So really long term we probably do want people to make the upgrades to their boxes and wire in a new outlet as it’ll help us reduce our power consumption. Hopefully they’ll be a lot of incentives available for people to make the upgrade.
It would be like the big push from incandescent to fluorescent or led house lighting. Semi low hanging fruit to reduce power consumption by upgrading to something more efficient.
This is going to be a sentiment that will anger a lot of people (and it should) but banning ICEs will, in the short term, price a lot of people out of being able to own a car, and that will drive a lot of demand for improved transit. It’s definitely not the best way to do it, but I think it will have an indirect effect on transit.
But why must the people undergo that financial crunch when we know by the numbers that transit is just more effecient economically and environmentally? Its just kicking the can of car dependancy down the road with greenwashing and small improvements along the way.
Sounds like it’s time to start building infrastructure for public transit so that 2035 doesn’t hit like a lead brick. Except of course this will last all of about five seconds after the first Con government gets voted in.
Because your whole argument ignores reality. Any politician who makes some drastic change will get voted out and someone who will undo any made progress will be voted in.
Countries in Europe didn’t magically flick a switch and get good public transit. Their whole societies have been shaped since pre-world war 2 to where their populace is on board. Incremental change for 70 odd years was needed. They also didn’t have their whole train network get bought and destroyed in the 40s and 50s.
Your opinions are valid and stupid at the same time. Nobody is going to argue that public transit is bad, it’s just completely unfeasible in a lot of places without a lot of incremental change first. Nothing of this scale happens without buy in from the larger population.
I’m curious if instead of banning ICE vehicles we should just heavily tax new ICE vehicles and use that money to subsidize EVs. ICE vehicles do still have a use in the economy within commercial and industrial areas which can likely afford the increased taxes, but it would heavily encourage people to switch to EVs for their daily commuter vehicles.
Add comment