The Expert Podcast

Okay, so what is going to be the game plan for electric vehicle adoption for non-homeowners? If you are a renter, somebody who lives in an apartment or even a condominium, how are you going to own an electric vehicle and have reliable charging? Here's a great article from the Associated Press talking about the charging dilemma for renters.

Here's a woman, her name is Stephanie Terrell. She bought a used Nissan Leaf this fall and was excited to join a wave of drivers adopting electric vehicles to save on gas and reduce the carbon footprint. But she quickly encountered a bump in the road. She doesn't have a private garage where she can power up overnight, and the public charging stations near her are often in use with long wait times. One day, she ran out of power on the freeway because a public charging station she was counting on was busy. It was really scary, and I was worried I wasn't going to make it.

So here's the thing: you can look at an app and see where all the charging stations are, but unlike a gas station, it may not be instantly available. If you pull into a gas station and there are five cars at the pumps, you might have to wait a couple of minutes for somebody to finish filling up their tank. But an electric vehicle can take an hour or more to charge up, and if the person is plugged in and walks away (because a lot of people charging electric vehicles are not going to sit in the vehicle for an hour), they may walk over to a store or down the street to a restaurant to get a cup of coffee. So it's not like the person might be right there when the car's done charging. It might be another 20 or 30 minutes until they get back to their vehicle.

If you're in a situation like this particular owner and you need to charge up your vehicle, what are you going to do? Sometimes you might have to just park and wait for that to become available, and that can affect your schedule. So at some point, there needs to be a plan for people who don't have daily access to a charger in your residence. Your homeowner with a garage? Look, a lot of single-family homes don't even have garages in some parts of the country. Some townhouses don't have garages. So maybe even some homeowners may run into this. Certainly, there are some rental-type structures like apartment buildings that have chargers, but they probably don't have one for every single parking space. There may be an electric charger in the garage or maybe two, but there might be 100 cars. They don't have one plug-in charger for every space, at least not yet.

So what's the outlook for this? Are they going to put chargers for every space in apartment buildings? What about on-street parking? How are they going to charge those vehicles? Because one of the strategies and one of the plans for people to be able to have electric vehicles and use them on a regular basis is to plug in at night. It's very convenient, which it is if you have a garage and you own your home. But if you are a renter or have an apartment, it may not be that convenient. Tell us what your thoughts are on how this is going to play out and what the possible solutions might be.