As an amazonian, this has come up during the five day RTO discussion. As a manager, I can't imagine a more obvious way to destroy the service that I help run and then really risk losing customer trust.
I we are all cogs at some point but I really have trouble being this cynical.
maybe. In my case my big project was cancelled and my engineers borrowed to work on an away team. So yeah, not super productive after that. But other times it was very busy and rewarding.
we already do that on my team- you can hardly respond to a pager in 10 minutes if you commuting. I suppose it's an unofficial policy but we never got any pushback from it.
>> The quality of life I would lose by going into the office 5 days a week is too high.
Putting aside quality of life (though I agree that is a huge consideration) -- even when people show up to the office, they are on Zoom calls most of the day.
But they are using the property, meaning it is keeping its value. The whole point of RTO, so that investment funds, landlords don't lose money they put into commercial property.
Really people forced into office for no reason should at least be given share of the gain they make for the owners.
This argument has never made any sense to me. Why would this collusion happen? I don't see any incentive alignment unless you're claiming that landlords are primary investors in all these RTO companies and can force something like this
I mean this is all completely relative to the other options available.
If all/most employers start mandating a return to office then we'll find out where people really stand on the issue. Will they suck it up and work from the office to keep their generous paychecks? Will they stand on principle and try to find another employer who will let them work remote and who they like working for in other respects? Will they strike out on their own and become freelancers who work on their own terms? Have they already saved FU money and will just retire?
I'll just do what I do now. Go into the office (I am fortunate that I live maybe 15 minutes away), card in, spend 30 minutes there so it detects my computer use on the network, then go home and work from there. Or, I just won't go in and keep doing my work until they call me on it. My work can easily be done 100% remote and most of my coworkers are in other countries, so it is crazy that I need to go into an office.
It's also crazy that any office worker needs to go to an office (and waste time in traffic and pollute, unpaid, for work).
This could all be fixed within 1 day if government would mandate companies to pay you for the duration you're away from home for work (including travel time).
It would fix pollution, traffic jams, housing shortages, fake employee shortages, mental/stress issues and potentially even declining birth rates.
But I guess "because boss says so" is a more important argument to not fix all of those things.
> This could all be fixed within 1 day if government would mandate companies to pay you for the duration you're away from home for work (including travel time).
Be careful what you wish for. The most likely result of this would be companies simply letting go any employees that had a commute longer than X minutes. And of course all the remaining employees would now say their commute takes X minutes too, to get the maximum subsidy. E.g. I currently bike, which takes 15 minutes, but I could easily walk and make it take 40 minutes instead, to get a nice bonus to my current pay.
If an Uber Eats guy brings you food from down the street, they get some amount of money. If they bring you food from across town, they get much more money to cover the extra time they spend driving. In both cases they brought you McDonalds.
That said, I think it's more like if you're expected to work 40 hours per week, and your employer mandates you come into work an hour each way, then you should either be expected to work 32 productive hours -- or you should be compensated for 48 hours. But I guess this has always been the difference between exempt and non-exempt employees.
I had a friend who lived 90 minutes from work. He complained that the commute sucked and wanted something for it. I talked to a friend who pointed out he took the job. It was his decision to take a job 90 minutes away. It was not the company's responsibility to pay him more than others because he chose to live that far away.
As I replied to a peer comment, my employer moved my office from a 10m walk downtown near my house to a 45-60m multi-modal commute to an industrial office park. I didn't sign up for that, but I like my job. Now if they'd had to factor in reimbursements for actual distance traveled for employees maybe they'd be more motivated to stick closer -- and to only hire employees within a distance budget they're willing to pay.
For what it's worth I like my job, if I didn't I probably would have made the move when the office relocation was announced. I was just pushing back on the idea the only employees are to blame for commutes. I take the train and bike now and it's chill, but certainly less efficient.
> if you're expected to work 40 hours per week, and your employer mandates you come into work an hour each way then you should either be expected to work 32 productive hours -- or you should be compensated for 48 hours.
That’s this person’s fault for choosing to live an hour from the office. I’ve always realized how stupid commuting is and the longest commute of my adult life (I’m currently 41) has been a 30-minute bicycle ride.
Now the people who live an hour from the office want less work or more pay than me? I say just fire them instead.
Or just let everybody negotiate the deal they want for themselves and let them price in their cost of commute or whatever into their ask. If somebody who lives an hour away wants to work 20% fewer hours or make 20% more money, let them shoot their shot and ask for it.
Where do you draw the line between "it's the employees fault for not wanting to live next to work in an industrial office park adjacent to a homeless encampment" and "it's the employers fault for insisting people commute in when they can achieve just as much from home without?"
Do you expect people who change jobs to only work at employers they're proximate to - or to sell their homes each time? What if moving means the kids have to change schools? Or a married couple, do they both have to change jobs?
My employer happened to move offices, so my 10 minute walk turned into 45-60 minutes multi-modal. Does that mean I should be fired for their decision to move to a lower cost jurisdiction when I can provide the same value? In that case am I just being fired for not asking "how high?"
I think in practice it ends up being "is this a hot job market or not" and if yes, then the employee gets to dictate, and if not the employer does. This doesn't really resolve the underlying issue though.
I think a simpler model is just to allow employees to expense commute costs at the ~IRS rate. If the employer doesn't want that they can choose to hire only people nearby. If they move offices they should factor that into their cost estimates. But what do I know, maybe they should just fire everyone ;)
> Where do you draw the line between "it's the employees fault for not wanting to live next to work in an industrial office park adjacent to a homeless encampment" and "it's the employers fault for insisting people commute in when they can achieve just as much from home without?"
There is no line. You are responsible for your choices.
> Do you expect people who change jobs to only work at employers they're proximate to - or to sell their homes each time? What if moving means the kids have to change schools? Or a married couple, do they both have to change jobs?
I expect people to take actions that make sense for them. Everybody’s different. I don’t like the idea of a long commute so I chose to live in a dense city and look for work near where I live. I’d be willing to move for the right job but I wouldn’t be willing to commute an hour for it. If I can’t make that work, it’s not the right job.
If you absolutely detest the idea of a long commute then you will only look for jobs close to where you live or you’ll move when you get a job that requires a long commute (in this case, renting probably makes more sense than buying).
If you think, “I’d never move to be closer to work, that’s nuts,” then it turns out you don’t detest long commutes as much as you thought you did.
> Does that mean I should be fired for their decision to move to a lower cost jurisdiction when I can provide the same value?
No, but if you think you can ask for more money for providing the same value, good luck to you. Or you might’ve been lowballing yourself up to this point and you’ll get a yes. Who knows.
> I think in practice it ends up being "is this a hot job market or not" and if yes, then the employee gets to dictate, and if not the employer does. This doesn't really resolve the underlying issue though
I guess I just don’t see an underlying issue. If you want something ask for it and then decide what to do when you get your answer. That’s the resolution.
> I think a simpler model is just to allow employees to expense commute costs at the ~IRS rate.
You can do this already! Submit an expense report to your employer. If you’re valuable enough, I guarantee it’ll get paid. If you’re not, it won’t. If you think, “But I am that valuable and it still didn’t get paid” then you’ve learned you’re not as valuable as you think.
I live a 15 minute drive from my city, but it took me an hour and a half to get home in rush hour a couple weeks ago. I guess it’s my fault though for being stupid and not paying even more of a premium to live within a block of my office.
The logistics of having that level of granularity are probably a little unrealistic, but employers already follow a similar principle when adjusting pay scales based on cost-of-living for a given metropolitan area.
This has come to be known as "coffee badging" where I work, heh.
I usually schedule my in-person meetings in a block, come in for that, then go back home to do my coding. It's nice to get a change of scenery.
I am far less efficient this way of course since I lose 90-120 minutes a day, but if that's how my employer wants me to spend my time... I guess that's why they call it "compensation."
Well, the other outcome: it's moot because the employers don't have enough teeth to enforce the mandates.
They're not firing workers who simply ignore the mandates and continue to work remotely anyway. Cutting workers with institutional knowledge and experience is a bigger loss than whatever lesser productivity there might be from not being in-person. Workers actually have the upper hand here and they're using it.
It's like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy - the companies are saying "I declare RTO" but nothing happens.
I seem to remember quite a few examples posted to HN over the past few years of companies "declaring RTO" and then finding that rank-and-file employees largely just ignored it, and the companies never did anything about it because they can't fire everyone.
"I declare RTO" can only work if you have critical enough mass of employees who believe the bluff and actually come into the office. This is definitely an area where a workforce that is organized and works together could hold out forever, but the tech worker mantra is "unions bad" so collective action is difficult.
> They're not firing workers who simply ignore the mandates
Citation needed. They may not be literally firing people for simply ignoring the mandates, but they sure as hell putting a mark on your performance record (at least at one big tech company).
IIUC one of the reasons for the original RTO mandates was to get people to leave (either willingly or through perf review pressure).
The joke is, this is what it comes down to: a question of who has the most negotiating power. It’s not a question of what’s best for the employees. It’s not even a question of what’s best for the company. It’s all about who has coercive power.
Market competition will decide which school of thought is right. IMHO, technology companies with stockholders will eventually have to explain why they spend so much money renting huge-ass random buildings for no good reason, and why their asses are being kicked by other companies that don't encumber themselves similarly.
The problem here is with multiple tens of thousands employees in IT/Software field in Amazon and their pay pretty close to top among employers at that scale, executives remain absolutely convinced no significant churn is expected.
Further to that point people who are indispensable and absolutely want/need remote work have their managers and even 1-2 level above in confidence to get their demand fulfilled like always before.
This leaves majority of employees who hate these rules but no leverage or wherewithal to get what they want from management which has no reason to listen.
> Will they strike out on their own and become freelancers who work on their own terms
A few of course can but to most no one including Amazon will pay that kind of money for writing API which calls API which calls API.. This is what most people do at the end of day.
Retirement sounds most reasonable for people who have earned and saved enough and not trying to reach or compare to earnings of directors, VPs and above.
I will two additional points. Executives assume that the upcoming recession ( assuming it is a recession ) will make most people hesitate. It is a rational, if an annoying calculation. Separate issue that is semi-related to the timing, is the benefit of not having to lay people off -- some will quit.
Naturally, some would question the wisdom of making people, who can quit, quit, but I get the feeling that the management,as a group, is pissed off about the whole WFH.
Cool hack. Funny to see them drive onto RT 2 after alewife and have a 25 mph limit as everyone floors it. Also not sure where an mbta train ever hits 55.
The normal top speed nowadays is 40mph and you would see that mostly south of the city. There is work being done to (optimistically) allow 50mph in some sections in the future.
The only time I saw the MBTA go above 20 MPH (~30 KPM) was in the late 60s or maybe early 70s as a young kid when I lived in the area.
The driver passed out after he emptied his whiskey bottle, we could see it on the floor. The train was going extremely fast, not stopping at any stations. Me and my friends were banging on the locked door to wake him up.
Not long after a conductor came running and unlocked the door to stop the train.
For the MBTA that was just another day, no one got in trouble. There are still big issues based upon what my friends from then have told me. But seems things are starting to change, but very slowly.
Does the MBTA Trains in Boston even have Conductors now ?
I have two airtags on me at all time. So my wife can find my wallet or my keys. I have an android. The iPhone network is larger so Apple seems more useful. And I can do nothing about these alerts.
EV charging stations shouldn't be making money yet! In my neck of the woods Electrify America prices are around $.64 / kw. I am still on the free plan but if I was paying for that a fill up from 20-80% that would be ~ $30. GAS IS THAT CHEAP for that amount of energy, effectively. How can we get the middle majority off of gas vehicles if, effectively, gas ends up being cheaper and more convenient?
If we really care about climate change, Electric vehicles and infrastructure should be incredible not profitable for 10+ years. We need more incentives and ways so the focus is on expansion of infrastructure, not profitability.
I don’t know where you are located, but I’d have to imagine your residential utility rates are a fraction of Electrify Americas rates.
Cars spend most of their time sitting around, the real infrastructure gap is that we don’t have enough cheap slow chargers located where they usually end up sitting: home, work, shopping centers, etc.
More importantly, EVs are currently a luxury product. Seemingly built like other popular luxury products, too (designed to be hard/expensive to repair). We shouldn't be building EVs as if they were disposable smartphones, intended to be upgraded as soon as the screen gets cracked or the battery degrades somewhat.
Something big needs to change if we want to see wider adoption of EVs, and overpriced EV 'fuel' certainly won't help.
The wealthy with large suburban homes can charge at home no problem. But not everyone can afford to have their own personal parking/charging space, so may be forced to use overpriced public chargers.
I bought my Chevy Bolt new for $28k. With the cheapest new ICEs going for about ~$20k, that's hardly a "luxury product". And I don't really see your "hard to repair" argument: There's very few parts of my vehicle that could conceivably wear out, and most of them can be repaired trivially. The only big one is the battery, and that represents ~2/3 of the value of the vehicle. It's like an engine dying: the car's totaled.
And you don't need a "large suburban home". Even the most cramped townhouse has a driveway you can run a cord from the house to. It's just apartment complexes that have this problem. If you don't have somewhere to charge your car overnight, EVs aren't practical at the moment, and no amount of subsidizing public charging could change that.
I’ve seen some pilot programs where utilities hang chargers from utility poles. Would really love to see that adopted more.
We needed to build out the public charging network for road trips and last minute “whoops I don’t have enough charge” use cases, but we really gotta take advantage of that fact the cars are only in use a small fraction at a time.
If we want everyone to drive electric, we'll need a lot of public charging. People will need to charge on longer trips, some people might forget to charge at home, and some will not even have the possibility. It's already obvious that the charging point operators will try to squeeze as much money out of everyone's pockets as they can get away with. Just like with the oil cartel, they have a customer base that pretty much has no other choice but to buy from them.
Once people are used to high prices and simply accept them, it will be the new normal. EVs won't turn out to be as cheap to operate in such a future as is currently assumed. That's what we seem to be headed for.
So long as the incentives to build and maintain charge stations is private, then profit needs to be on the horizon for operators.
What doesn't have to be on the horizon is high cost for consumers, because you're absolutely right that concern over charging stations is a drag on EV adoption.
There are grants to build EV charging stations, but what's less clear to me are operation grants. Ideally we'd see grants for operation that cover the majority of the cost for a period of time, reduce consumer cost and reward good operation (most stations being open, etc.)
We'd also ideally see incentives for solar installations or other green energy offsets for EV charging stations with grants that phase out.
Grants also would ideally be more about distance from existing charging stations, to incentivize spreading out chargers and rewarding "first movers".
There are still lots of issues with chargers from an operator perspective. While electricity is cheap and cheaper to run than building a gas station, the operating expenses are still there when it comes to maintenance and security, and there's the fact that charging takes significantly longer than filling a tank with gasoline, meaning that one needs more space to service the same number of vehicles.
Some costs do need to be handed back to the consumer, such as cost of using the space at a charging station. If not, then they could become de-facto parking lots.
> Some costs do need to be handed back to the consumer, such as cost of using the space at a charging station. If not, then they could become de-facto parking lots.
Vice versa, too. If a parking lot already charges $15/hour, it seems like an extra hidden fee if charging also costs an additional $2/hour. As charging becomes more common it makes more sense to roll the costs together into a single advertised price.
> there's the fact that charging takes significantly longer than filling a tank with gasoline, meaning that one needs more space to service the same number of vehicles.
Though all of that space doesn't need to be in the same sorts of places. Home and destination charging shake up the need for centralized "stations". Cars already spend most of their time parked, electrifying more existing parking lots and garages where cars already spend most of their time should be common sense. (And if it happens to economically profitable that should just make easy economic sense, circling back to the topic in the article. We probably need to make L1 and L2 destination charging "just profitable enough" without high cost for consumers, too.)
Local, from the pole, rates are $0.12/kw. You're not pay $0.64/kw for electricity, you're paying that for the charger, the lack of full time usage, repairs, etc. A gallon of gasoline in the US is heavily optimized AND, Electrify America would not be a business without it charging a price comparable to filling up a tank of gas. Charging at home is the cost savings, charging while road-tripping has a convivence fee attached to the ability to charge.
of course. But people - real people - will compare DC Fast Charges with traditional gas stations. So you aren't really doing a fair comparison here.
Let me put it another way - do we think that getting people to convert from ICE to EVs will only view fast charging as a convenience? or will they view it as a necessity? In the fullness of time we can view DC fast charging as a luxury, but not right now (which is my point I suppose)
Like the other comment says, it's an education problem. Gas Stations used to not be the thing is is now. Our neighbor had the big glass fuel pump in their garage when you used to fill up a ICE car in your garage. Gas stations won except for commercial locations that still have that tank because it's convenient.
There are mix of personas. Friend of mine was loaned an EV and didn't have a charger. They changed their habits to go grocery shopping at a place with an EV charger. Since they were there for 30-45 minutes, lower rate. That was a shift in perspective which is the issue here. The person doing a cannonball run across the US will never buy an EV and that's ok too.
People are not great at doing a full comparison. I'm sure people who have a Costco card never consider the price of membership into their gallon of gas pricing which is where educating future EV owners come in. Charging at home is cheap, charging while on a road trip you are trading time/money like a toll road. Rates will go down over time and I'm waiting for a Buccees sized EV charging stop where you have the time to stop.
Buc-ee's often has a lot of Tesla chargers. Many of those locations are also NACS-compatible so any car that supports NACS charging can charge at many Buc-ees locations.
I've also seen DCFC stalls near other large rest stops. Not all of them yet by any margin, but lots. Electrify America also tends to have a lot in the big Walmarts near the highways. The last road trip I did in my EV we usually went into Walmart and ate at the restaurant there or got stuff from the deli.
> do we think that getting people to convert from ICE to EVs will only view fast charging as a convenience? or will they view it as a necessity?
As an example, if I were to buy an EV, fast charging would absolutely be a necessity. I couldn't charge at home, so I'd have to use commercial charging stations. Carving out a large block of time to devote to charging would be a nonstarter, and it's something I'd have to do without fast charging. I don't spend enough time parked doing shopping and the like to make it possible to rely on those times to do my charging.
It matters while we work on electrifying cars. If they own the home, but don't have an outlet is different than if they rent and the property manager doesn't want to install a charger. Laws were passed in the US that required renters access to satellite tv and if property managers are the hold up it's important information to know.
I don't think that my single anecdote about the reason will (or should) affect things one way or another. This is the sort of thing that requires a good study.
I would be opposed to the idea of a law requiring properties to install chargers, though. It would make rents increase even more than they already are, and that would only make the housing crisis worse.
The issue is we have anti-ev articles, blogs, newscasts, magazines that take every opportunity to try and find a "gotcha" for why EVs are actually the worst thing ever.
DCFC will (probably) never be as fast or as convenient as gas. However, gas will never be less time consuming or as cheap as idle charging.
The challenge is balancing competing incentives: you need the infrastructure to be built, but you also need people to consider EVs as their next vehicles.
The additional challenge is building the trust in the infrastructure required to make a lot of folks, myself included, satisfied that they'll be able to charge when they need to. My experience here in the Bay Area is that it's hit-or-miss as to whether the chargers actually work, let alone whether they're duly occupied for that purpose.
With some hope, now that there's a potential for profit motive, we'll start seeing the level of service improve to meet expectations as required to make people like me migrate away from burning hydrocarbons.
I very desperately want to like EVs, but so far, the appetite hasn't been there because of issues, nay, subscriptions like this.
It's why Tesla built Superchargers; no one would buy EVs if they were beholden to non Tesla fast DC charging financial fundamentals and user experience. Electrify America built their network as part of VW's Dieselgate settlement. They had no incentive to make it work, only to spend the money and build it.
Bingo, but Tesla also likely wouldn't have built those without sizable grants to do so, just as Electrify America did with settlement money. I'm unsure whether that's a high-enough margin part of their business to warrant that kind of outlay for charging infrastructure otherwise.
It minimally isn't something I'd build out as a loss leader unless I had additional financial support to make it work.
Tesla has also substantially improved its costs, as it manufactures it's own chargers. Circa 2017, it cost them ~$250k per station from UBS' report [1], although it turns out UBS was wildly wrong about what the total cost would be for Tesla to reach the desired network density.
> There are 1,974 Tesla Supercharger stations in the U.S. housing 21,852 Tesla Supercharger ports, according to data collected by the U.S. Department of Energy. That’s roughly a quarter of all DC Fast (the quickest type of EV charger) EV charging stations in the country and nearly two-thirds of all DC Fast EV charging ports.
Yes, you're completely correct that 64¢/kWh is more expensive than a similar sized gas car. A Toyota Corolla has an annual fuel cost of $1,000 versus a Hyundai IONIQ 6 at $2,250 (using 64¢/kWh and $3.27/gal).
But home charging (18.5¢/kWh for me) or L2 charging at a workplace is much cheaper and can bring that cost down from $2,250 to <$700/yr.
I think the reality is that most people home charge. You typically only use fast chargers when you go on road trips, or do an unusual amount of driving.
Sure. I home charge. But many American's drive for work. Trades people, people going on vacation, sales people. Many vehicles can't just charge at home. Because there is no home, or apartments, or whatever. Get out on the road and see the broad mix of vehicles out there. I see tons of people flying down the road in F-150s getting maybe 8 / mpg. Those people - and those are most of the people out there - will never move to electric vehicles unless it is so fucking easy to charge, gas has to be prohibitively expensive, and you can charge anywhere and not think about it.
> Trades people, people going on vacation, sales people
Many tradespeople and salespeople sleep at home every day, and the work vehicle (van or car) is parked at home. They can charge it at home — there are already systems to allow the employer to reimburse for the cost of electricity.
For people with occasional nights spent elsewhere fast chargers or destination chargers might be sufficient. Same for the vacation.
For someone who travels all over the place all the time, a petrol vehicle is probably still more convenient. That's OK, electric vehicles don't need to solve 100% of usage patterns just yet.
You're way off with Ford F-150 fuel economy. The least efficient new model has a combined fuel economy of 16 mpg and would only get down in the 8 mpg range when towing a heavy trailer. Even the older models didn't burn 8 mpg in normal use.
let me put it this way. As an EVSE owner I see a direct correlation between how far I can go between chargers if I drive 65 vs 75. Because I have to stretch out where I am going to hit a fast charger. I see F150s going 80. Do you think they are calculating their MPG like my parents used to back in the early 80s? I don't think they are. So maybe it is 16 in some cases, but people drive them really really fast.
Most EV owners charge at home because it's priced as a high end vehicle (some mid-range ones exist - I drive one of the few low-priced ones).
However a sizable portion of the population (35%) live in apartments - which are notoriously against any upgrades.
Without that population EVs will not be "mainstream". It's a chicken/egg problem where you need affordable EV chargers for that population to migrate to EVs and EV density so EV charger build-out can be justified.
Governments typically front this kind of shift (e.g.: 2022 IRA - mild support).
Controversial take, but if you have an EV, should do most of your charging at home. If you're taking a trip sure, you'll have to pay more for charging stations, but in general, travel always costs more (food, housing, etc).
With the large amount of wind energy in Texas the best time to start charging is like 1-2AM. You still have tons of wind energy, but the demand has fallen considerably. This is usually the time where Texas experiences negative wholesale electric rates.
Sure, there's lots of solar potential during the day, but that's also the peak energy use by a good amount. You're already wanting solar to smooth out that curve instead of making that demand peak even peakier.
In the end they are selling you BTUs which limits how much price difference there can be.
Diesel used to be a lot cheaper than gasoline because it was something of a waste product: the refining process produced an oversupply. Refining technology improved and now we can make more gasoline and less diesel from a barrel of oil. So diesel has become more expensive, but roughly equivalent to gasoline if you consider the energy content per gallon.
Nearly everyone can charge at home. EV charging is for those rare trips when you need to top up. Like drinking water at home (home charging) vs water bottle from a vending machine, $1.50.
I'm surprised to still see such uninformed claims. Many drivers have no practical way to charge at home due to lack of an available garage or even a dedicated parking space where a charger can be installed. The available of chargers in places like apartment complex parking lots and street spaces will gradually improve over time but this will take decades until "nearly everyone can charge at home."
The availability of reliable high speed chargers in other places will be crucial for EV adoption. Last time I had an EV rental car, multiple chargers that I tried to use simply didn't work at all.
As a bonus the public chargers are about 2-4x as expensive as home charging (at least where I live), and that is without possibilities like solar power etc.
Incorrect. I rent in Austin. I think about 50% of the population here rents. I'm sure some newly built multi family mid & high-rises have EV charging infrastructure, and some single family home rentals as well. During recent lease hunting, nothing in my price range had even a single EV charging point, never mind infrastructure to support the the majority of renters.
When I've brought this up to people making this argument, they suddenly switch tacks to "well, just charge at the public locations, they are everywhere!" Every time I respond by asking, well sure - but would you make that same compromise if this was your only vehicle and you didn't have DCFC at home? Guess their response...
Was their response “you can plug it into an outlet”? Not the fastest charge you will ever get but doable as long as you can get what you need in the time the car is parked.
It's slower than for houses, but apartment parking can have charging points.
The parking where I live in Copenhagen has two spots with chargers, and they (like all the spots) are reserved for specific cars. I suspect the people paid at least part of the installation cost. They were installed 7-8 years ago. The electricity cost should be very low. This is no different to owning a house.
More recently I've seen commercial low-power (~7kW, standard three-phase supply in Europe) overnight chargers by apartment buildings, in the parking reserved for residents. Presumably people try and get one of these spots often enough, but as demand increases they will need to install more. The electricity cost is probably a bit more, to cover the overheads of the company maintaining the charger. If the spots are a free-for-all, I'd not want to rely on needing one every night, but it could be OK for a car that only needs charging once a week or so.
Also, most of those who already choose to not own a car are already in that 35%, so of "people looking to buy a car" its even more weighted towards that 65% who don't live in an apartment.
No one runs numbers thinking the non-apartment dwelling population is going 100% EV. So 30% EV adoption is pretty mainstream, but not if it's 30% of 65%.
If 50% of non-apartment households got an EV, that would be ~33% of all households with an EV. With your definition of 30% == "pretty mainstream", it is pretty achievable to have EVs be mainstream while excluding every apartment dwelling household.
Roughly 8% of US households have zero cars. What do you imagine the breakdown is between apartment and single-family households? I'd guess probably all dense apartment, the main cohort we're talking about that would lack charging access. So for those actually looking to charge a car, if 50% of single family homes moved to an EV that would in reality be even more than just ~33% of the market, because 8 of the 35% of apartment dwellers weren't shopping for a car to begin with. It is really more like 27% of households want a car and live in an apartment that would be challenging to charge a car in. But hey unless we solve it for 27% of the population it just can't possibly be considered "mainstream".
It surprises me that coffee shops, restaurants and rest stops haven't picked up on the gas station model of fuel/energy as loss leader/sold at cost, and making the money on a captive audience. Hell, even local business groups should be trying to get them on main streets of small towns.
I'm not an EV owner, but I would definitely plan my charging around meal stops if I knew that some restaurant always had chargers for customers.
I always see EV chargers put in spots that I would never want to spend 30 minutes.
Otoh, a gas pump install is in that range. I know that the non-profit that manages my local airport had to pay around $50k CAD to get a new cardlock system, and that didn't even include the pumps.
If we really care about climate change, Electric vehicles and infrastructure should be incredible not profitable for 10+ years
If we really cared about climate change, might consumers also bear at least some of that lack of profitability? Maybe it costs us a few more cents per mile for the next 10 years to bootstrap the world into sustainable transportation.
Most of the money in non-Tesla charging stations was in collecting government subsidies to install them. There's no incentive to see them utilized or even keep them working.
Last year there was a big update, creating a National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Standards and Requirements trust anyone getting federal money needs to meet. Reliability requirements are added, and chargers need public realtime & historical status reporting, so consumers can make informed choices about charging. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/02/28/2023-03...
It will be tough to get the public on the side of taxing gas to subsidize electric charging. At least where I am, Teslas and other fancy electric cars are still seen as a "rich person's flex." Poor and middle class people tend to drive gas cars and rich people tend to drive electric. So asking people to vote to increase gasoline tax on themselves so that a few rich EV owners can be subsidized--you can imagine how that will go down.
Here in SF, electricity prices are $0.41/kWh while gas is ~$4.0-6.0 (depending on time of year and whether you are filling up regular or premium). So even $0.64/kWh seems quite competitive in California and gas prices are unlikely to lower until relations with Russia normalize and sanctions lift (seems unlikely but a Trump victory might change things). People make these kinds of decisions based on the feeling of conditions today + people also care about the environment and view electric cars as better for that (i.e. multiple decision axis and the price of the EV is going to matter more than the cost of fuel).
Sanctions on Russia and US presidential politics have no significant impact on gasoline prices in California. Russian petroleum exports haven't been cut off, just redirected towards neutral countries like India and China. Crude oil is a (mostly) fungible commodity so from a world market standpoint it doesn't matter where the oil is going as long as it gets out somewhere. The USA didn't import much Russian oil even before the war. Gas prices are high in California almost entirely due to state government policies: taxes are the highest in the country, no new refineries have been approved for many years, and the CARB mandates a unique blend which isn't produced in significant quantities anywhere else (and which does little or nothing to reduce overall pollution relative to other blends).
Longer term we might see some reduction in Russian crude oil exports because they have been under investing in exploration and infrastructure maintenance. Their system is slowly breaking down without the support they used to receive from more competent foreign oil companies. But that isn't impacting the current market yet.
There’s also been global inflation since then for various reasons, not least of which is that destabilization in Europe has ripple effects. It’s not the sole reason, but it’s a big one and energy markets are tied even if the commodity is different (e.g cut off natural gas to Europe & their demand for other sources of energy goes up & higher prices there means higher prices for their goods and refineries). Prices have come down because Biden released strategic oil reserves to combat higher prices.
Your explanations explain why gas is higher in California than the rest of the country, but fails to explain why it’s also higher US-wide and globally.
And yes, it does matter how the fungible commodity gets out - if India / China were a better price, Russia would have been sending their crude there in the first place. That means India / China is more expensive whether it’s because it has to be shipped a longer and more expensive route or because the partner’s form of payment is not as valuable (e.g. Russia tried accepting the Rupee for oil payments for a while but has since stopped). So yes, while there are headwinds that mitigate the impact, there is still a negative impact to price.
Anyway, my main point was that there are geographic locales where EVs are cheaper regardless of whatever local and geopolitical factors are involved.
You want people's taxes to subsidise cheap charging. Of course you are fine with taxes on gas. I guess whatever the state says, goes. Reality be damned. The state's reality be blessed.
What about food subsidies? Or the massive subsidy we give drivers in the form of paved, maintained roads? Are only the subsidies you personally benefit from okay or can we sometimes give subsidies to other people?
I'm not really fine with taxes or subsidies at all. I certainly don't think that state officials have some special insight to judge the best way to spend communal funds... of course their pensions feature highly in worthy expenditures.
Have you ever heard of community gardens, or community anything really? This is where people voluntarily contribute to what is perceived as some communal good.
The key word is 'voluntary', ie without coercion, force or manipulation. If you don't pay taxes, you will be forced to pay, regardless of whether you agree with the attack (not defence) budget, or whether you would like the money to be used on actual communally valued goals as opposed to lining an ever increasing number of government workers' pockets, or the cradle-to-grave propaganda effort, etc.
Yeah, in fact the area I live in has several of those. But I'm talking about building things like roads, water systems, sanitation, etc.. How do you propose those things get built?
There is more than one way to do things, and its far from clear that the state mandated way is the right way. Its pretty obvious that this is the most expensive way though - as most of the tax take goes on paying off existing debts, and superfluous expenses such as supporting a huge administrative state 'service' - pay, pensions, army, police, teachers, etc.
With roads, in the first place these existed before the state adopted the infrastructure - someone made these. New roads were created to encourage a specific type of corporate industrialisation, with petrol companies heavily supporting gas burning cars. And nowadays, roads are being constrained and pedestrianised to discourage cars - so this infrastructure (that has already been paid for) is being rolled back (at further expense). So, how is that a good use of money; what value is the state adding here? By the way, having an extensive road network is probably why we don't have flying cars.
Water systems and sanitation are sort of the same thing. Perhaps you think taking all the sewage and grouping it into a river of muck to then discharge it at sea is a good idea. I don't. Have you considered that human excrement might be processed more locally, and then re-used as fertiliser - as we do for animal waste? Probably this is how things were done (I know this was the case even recently in China) but instead we are taught the gross story that 300 years ago people in cities threw their sewage into the streets, walking into their homes, etc. I'm sure some of that occurred - forced industrialisation happened very quickly, moving people off common (acts of enclosure, etc - this is state sanctioned theft, btw) forced people into cities. I'm sure peoples' peasant habits could not work in the city.
Force, brutality and tight control underlie the state system. Humans are perfectly capable of managing things without state intervention - but once you force people from a more natural state (living near the land to living in densely populated cities), the state seems to be the only management option. The state is not actually there to help - it only needs to appear to be 'doing its best'. It is there to collectivise and harness the efforts of many people, regardless of how they feel about it. Most people simply accept the reality that they are presented and are happy to do what it tells them. The state uses schooling, culture etc to create the idea that it is beneficent, that it has a moral right to force another - it literally teaches people to adopt its self-serving immorality - and it works! Mostly.
The fundamental problem here is that 300 years ago the population was measured in hundreds of millions. Now it's measured in tens of billions. You are no doubt aware of the problems that cities and civilization faced while growing in that direction?
I'm not trying to argue with you about the merits of our current population size. But what I'm trying to point out is that your solutions of "local problems should have local solutions" don't work very well when you have 10,000 people in a 1000x1000 area. Suppose you were in New York City, where would you put the sewage to be processed by those 10,000 within that 1000x1000 area? I'm starting to wonder if you are considering these problems, or if you rather have a pet philosophy and a utopia that you want everything to conform to.
Just to let you know, utopias are not "ideal" in the sense that they are great societies to live in and I can think of examples of utopias that are very very bad for individuals. It's not something to be strived for it's a tool for thought experiment. You might appreciate most the concept of an Industrialist utopia, where all time is measured, efficiency is maximised, workers are tools, and resources are meant to be extracted.
To address one of your points regarding sanitation: we do not "[take] all the sewage and [group] it into a river of muck to discharge it at sea." If you look at how a modern sanitation system works, the sewage is very highly treated before discharge, and it flows through entirely separate, self-contained underground waterways before it reaches the processing center. To liken this to dumping untreated sewage into the sea is very disingenuous. Solids, chemicals, bacteria, salts, and other undesirable elements are extracted either in settling ponds or via aerobic or osmotic extraction. And it's utterly impossible to build and maintain something like this for a community without levying some tax from that community. Even something as simple as a community septic system requires ongoing maintenance and repair.
But everyone in the community benefits from not getting the diseases that are associated with having untreated sewage flowing on top of the ground. If one person in that community is allowed to opt out, what would they do with their sewage? In the worst case they might dump it on the ground, which makes everyone around them sick. What you propose is that they should be allowed to ignore externalities and do their own thing. That's not fair to the other 9,999 people in the 1000x1000 block who don't want to get cholera and typhoid and anything else from that 1 person's untreated sewage.
That's doomer nonsense parroting Big Oil propaganda. Mass electrification, a mixed grid of nuclear and renewables, and some concerted, but far from unachievable, investment into carbon capture (burying charcoal) could easily get us to a "not making things any worse" level.
Industrial civilization is a lifestyle that can never be sustainable.
I'm not "parroting Big Oil propaganda". They're one of the worst culprits, who managed to addict us to cheap energy. Now everybody expects access to cars, planes, and electric grids, no matter how destructive they are.
The oil companies have realized they're losing the fight on "global warming doesn't exist". That just leaves "global warming is bad, but giving up on fossil fuels would be worse", which is exactly what you're (presumably unintentionally) spreading.
The whole reason anyone should care about climate change is that it's going to make life worse for ourselves and our descendants. If your pitch for addressing climate change is "let's make our lives worse, proactively", then you're never going to win popular support.
Good messaging is "We can make our lives better, and give future generations the opportunity for even better lives, without fossil fuels". Anything else is inadvertently advocating for nihilistic hedonism as the world burns.
