1 in 5 EV owners in California switched back to gas because charging is a hassle

&gt; Public charging stations may look like the electric version of the gas station, but nearly two-thirds of PEV drivers in the survey said they didn&#x27;t use them. Exactly why they didn&#x27;t use the public stalls was not specified.<p>because they charge at home! this article is quite silly.<p>if you cant level 2 charge at home then yes... having an EV may be quite inconvenient. but all this &quot;i can fill my SUV in three minutes&quot; stuff is... dumb. know what&#x27;s even more convenient? never stopping at a stupid gas station ever again. i wait 0 minutes for my car to charge because i plug it in when i get home and then go inside and forget all about it.

A lot of folks in here in CA rent homes and apartments because the cost of living out here is so insane. You can&#x27;t really get a 240V EV charger installed in your garage or driveway unless you own a home &#x2F;w vehicle parking and can make such modifications. Having charging infrastructure nearby becomes very critical for anyone in this situation. Charging infrastructure has not kept up with the EVs that are now on the road.<p>A lot of folks also leased their EVs and got great deals on charging with the lease. As these leases have expired along with their charging discounts, it&#x27;s not surprising that these folks are returning the cars and switching back to gas powered vehicles with better ROI.<p>More government incentives are needed to build charging infrastructure and make EV ownership more viable for people that don&#x27;t own a single family home. Otherwise the EV revolution will be dead in the water.

Apartment landlords often now disallow anyone to charge in garages that they pay rent for. They have to use provided charging spots, which absolutely sucks for every day use and is totally unrealistic unless you have a large battery EV.<p>There are outlets everywhere but folks aren’t allowed to use them. Electric cars are not normalized.<p>Teslas and PHEVs are the only electric cars I can unreservedly recommend. Teslas (new ones at least) have substantial batteries, often comparable to standard gas cars, and extensive charging networks at high speed. Still kind of sucks if you can’t charge at home or work, but possible.<p>PHEVs are really where we need to go to massively normalize EVs. We could, today, replace everyone’s vehicle with a PHEV version (like a Volt) &amp; everything would work fine. People would nag landlords to let them plug in, and it’d become a legitimate differentiation if apartments allowed plugging in (as it’d reduce the cost of energy for transport by a factor of 2-3), so competitive pressure would accomplish what landlords currently don’t allow because they’re lazy, poorly informed, and&#x2F;or ambivalent about it.<p>Pure EVs should be at LEAST ~250 miles in range, and probably at least 100kW charge speed, too.<p>What we need is a mandate that by 2030, all new vehicles must be at least plug in hybrid. That’s way better than the 60% zero emissions cars by 2030 I’ve seen going around.

As an EV owner with the luxury of having a charger in my garage, one of the joys is having a “full tank” in the morning, as EV owners like to say. It truly is life-changing. I was ready to dismiss this article as nonsense.<p>There must be some reform for those living with a condo association.

Very curious about what the breakdown of that 20% is by manufacturer. A friend of mine traded his i3 for a Model Y and said the experience has been like night and day. Access to Supercharger network is a game charger. No other fast charging network is really even close.

I can understand why a lot of apartment dwellers would find it a hassle, currently.<p>I live Copenhagen, and I&#x27;ve been looking at buying a car again, due to a job offer from a company a little ways outside the city, 25 minutes by car. Due to an unfortunate combination of where I live, the location of the company and public transit route planning, that same trip would necessitate going by bus, then two trains and another bus, a little over 1 hour in total.<p>So with that commute in mind, an electric car would be absolutely perfect. Even a smaller model with basic range would be plenty, <i>if only I had somewhere to reasonably charge it</i>. As with most other apartment buildings in Copenhagen, there is no dedicated parking, so we share a bunch of street parking with the surrounding buildings. I can&#x27;t even park a car beneath my apartment window and run a power cable, since I would have to drape it across a sidewalk and a bike path.<p>Perhaps a nearby charging point could make it work, but the nearest public charging point is around 1km away, so I&#x27;d have to plug in the car, walk home, wait a bit, then walk back and get the car, since you can&#x27;t just block a charging point forever once your car is charged.<p>If I had a garage, carport or dedicated parking spot, I would absolutely install a charger and drive an electric car, but that&#x27;s not possible when you&#x27;re not the owner of the spot where you park your car.<p>Instead I&#x27;ll probably get a hybrid of some sort, but it feels like a cop-out when I absolutely <i>could</i> drive an electric car, based on my commute and even the 1,5-hour drive to visit my family.<p>We need more charging infrastructure, especially for apartment dwellers.

4 in 5 did not switch back. This says a lot!

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I would pay higher taxes to subsidize this infrastructure. I haven&#x27;t switched from a hybrid (Prius) to an EV because I&#x27;d have to treat the EV as a second &quot;luxury&quot; vehicle.

Honestly this sounds more like what I&#x27;d regularly expect for _any_ new purchase of high value. Many people rush into buying &quot;the hottest thing&quot; without doing their proper research ahead of time, determining what the impact on their life will be, etc. This says less to me about EV charging being a &quot;hassle&quot; and more about humans being resistant to change, not to mention the lack of general public acceptance (landlords) of charging infrastructure.

Articles about anything electricity related always seem to contain many fundamental errors. Example: &quot;120 volts of power&quot;. Volts is a unit of voltage,

Charging at home with solar is absolutely amazing. We used to wake up to an empty tank and drive on fumes and prayers to the overpriced Shell down the street. Now we wake up to a full tank, every time!

I m curious, how many in 4&#x2F;5 are home owners? I love EV cars. But the biggest pain point is my apartment doesn&#x27;t have charging spots. So, I need to factor in car charging into my day to day. Thats another decision&#x2F;plan to make in my life. I dont have to worry about gas at all.

Hassle? &quot;over 70% lacked access to Level 2 charging at home.&quot; Maybe dealers could help out with a (mandatory?!) at-cost installation.<p>Many&#x2F;most homes have access to 220v service. 80 amps at 220v will supply 40kW in 2-1&#x2F;2 hours. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;garagechargers.com&#x2F;ev-charging-calculations" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;garagechargers.com&#x2F;ev-charging-calculations</a><p>Edit: This site estimates EV-station install costs by Zip code. (US average $750. Or about 200 gal of $4 gasoline.) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.homeadvisor.com&#x2F;cost&#x2F;garages&#x2F;install-an-electric-vehicle-charging-station&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.homeadvisor.com&#x2F;cost&#x2F;garages&#x2F;install-an-electric...</a>

Back in my gearhead-while-renting days I constructed a massive HD extension cable to access the indoor split-phase dryer outlet from out in the garage for non-invasively running my TIG welder.<p>If I had an EV back then the same practice would have worked perfectly fine.<p>But judging from the amount of negativity I received back then WRT powering my welder, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if very few are being resourceful in this way. Even if they have an attached garage and access to appliance outlets somewhere in a rental, people seem to have an irrational fear of electricity.

My neighbor asked to rent a parking spot from me for an EV. She was planning to set up a charging station. That would involve a double (220 V) breaker, outdoor rated outlet AND some 50 feet of 4 conductor cable, conduit and trenching. $3,000 would be ballpark. I turned her down because once my son gets a car, I&#x27;d have to take the spot back and she&#x27;d be out the installation cost.<p>I&#x27;ve heard the term &quot;garage orphan&quot;. There&#x27;s lots of inner city neighborhoods where the closest legal parking spot is too far to run an extension cord. Here in Canada there&#x27;s a number of creative arrangements to run extension cords to block heaters in the winter if you need to get to work in a -30C morning. Bylaws can be an obstacle.

One would think it would make more sense marketing EVs to businesses with large fleets like bussing and trucking that could help with the capital investment in recharging infrastructure that then could be built upon by individual consumers.

Charging stations will be as easy to find as gas stations are now, when EV&#x27;s go beyond niche. They most certainly will, but folks who adopt new technologies first usually run into daily usage hassles.

I was wondering about this lately. I lease an ICE car in a major northeast metro where I use on street parking often several blocks from my place. If I went to an EV where would I charge my car?

Does anyone here know someone (in California) who purchased an EV between 2012 and 2018 and then went back to a gas car? The results of this study do not jive with my anecdotal experience.

Can&#x27;t wait till everyone comes home from work and tries to plug in all of their batteries at the same time that&#x27;s really going to work out well

Note that the survey included owners who purchased between 2012 and 2018. The article doesn&#x27;t specify, but it&#x27;s possible that the 20% who switched were weighted towards early adopters who purchased in the first few years of the survey window. It would be interesting to see whether that switch-back rate is declining over time, and whether the decline is accelerating. I would bet yes on both.

That number is actually lower than I thought it could be...

I&#x27;d like to know what their criteria for &quot;abandoning&quot; EVs is; is it that twenty percent buy an EV and then sell or return it in favor of owning only gas-powered vehicles, or are they also including people who buy an EV and then buy a gas-powered car in addition to the EV they already have?<p>There are a lot of reasons for people to do the latter that don&#x27;t necessarily mean they&#x27;re dissatisfied with their EV.<p>The article links to an abstract which is ambiguously worded, and the article is paywalled.

I suppose this isn&#x27;t the time or place to suggest that the author is gas-lighting us with this title?

First reality check?

&gt;Of those who switched, over 70% lacked access to Level 2 charging at home, and slightly fewer than that lacked Level 2 connections at their workplace.<p>What in the... A Level 2 charger is less than $500 online, and requires some rather simple wiring, even if you wanted to use an electrician&#x27;s services, it would only take them a couple of hours maximum. Can the people purchasing the $43,000 Mustang Mach-E mentioned in the article really not afford the extra $1000 it takes to install Level 2 charging?