Does anyone have personal experience or insights into getting an EV without a home charging setup?
Thinking about getting one with a 300 mile plus range, but we don’t have a driveway or garage. I have a short, approximately 5-7 miles total, round trip commute to work. My work garage has chargers. There are numerous city chargers and chargers at grocery stores all within a few miles of home.
Apologize if there is already a similar thread, but couldn’t find one. If there is, feel free to merge.
If you can do your charging at work, it’s not a horrible short term solution. Long term, I’d want charging at home.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to rely on public chargers as a primary charging source though.
@perdana has a mini EV with no home L2.
Dad will be using work chargers for a short bit, he has a $1/hr ChargePoint combined with parking deal (at 7.8kw/hr, that works out to 12.8c/kWh assuming max charge, which is close to what we pay).
That’s kind of my concern. We don’t plan on moving anytime soon, but wondering if a two year lease would give me an idea of whether it’s doable without too long of a commitment if it’s not the best. Just not sure what to expect.
The work charging helps, do you have a dedicated spot that you can depend on all the time? Like its your own spot, if you are fighting for it, it wont be as easy as you hope.
For me, I dont charge daily, I start at 275miles and drive to around 200 miles without charging. On a standard home socket, this would take more than 12 hours.
It can be done with planning, but whats the reason to move to EV without home charging?
I think it depends on the work charging situation. Is it a couple of chargers that people fight over or are there a lot of them? There are probably 30 chargers on my work campus and I plan to charge there on less busy office days, like Fridays, with my new Tesla. We recently installed a home charger, but why pay if you don’t have to?
It wouldn’t be a dedicated spot. I believe my work garage has 6-8 chargers, they seem to be open frequently, although there are hundreds of cars that park in my garage.
No particular reason. I think I can get a pretty good deal on a particular EV I’m looking at and my current lease is up in 4 months. Have been curious about EVs.
I think you are okay, if you have the ability to move the car during the day. If people just leave their car there the whole work day even after its full it may get annoying.
The main difference with EV, with ICE, is I usually never let the car have less than 65-70% charge (unless its one long trip). You rarely run it down without charging it back up. With ICE it goes to “E” then fill up. If work is easy to charge then it works out. The only issue is if you take a weekend trip,run it down and cant make it to work for the free charge monday. But even getting the battery to 15-20% to arrive to work empty still works out, as you can just leave the car on the charger all day.
Do you find public chargers are cost efficient and reliable. There are several chargers in a nearby grocery store parking lot that rarely seem in use. There are also several street chargers nearby too.
When we leased our EV, it came with some pre-paid fast charging. We used that up before plugging it in at home. Charging away from home exclusively works okay, but it will potentially limit your ability to take spontaneous trips as you will not be sure of having a full charge when you need it.
Got a tesla, 2 years in, Ive only used “Free” ones because well free. Or hotels that do it overnight. Otherwise I supercharge.
I dont like having an EVGO app/Charge point app/ whatever brand app.
The street ones in my town, like those ride share lots are not reliable. I tried to use them when i have a plug in hybrid…(I have home charging) but use the free ones because they often are often in the front of the parking lot.
Can you run and extension cord from your place to the car for “emergencies” for a few hours at a time?
This maybe enough to resolve all anxiety issues, at least u can limp to work/fast charger if theres an emergency.
On long trips when you have to “Wait” and theres nothing to do, i typically charge only enough to get to the next charger. This is the same concept that you would do on a weekend trip to get to work on Monday to charge.
Planning is important but this is easily doable. Have several coworkers who lived in apartments downtown and charged exclusively at the office, usually once a week or so. You should also find the most convenient supercharger/rapid charger locations for urgent use
I would suggest maybe renting one for a month to see how it goes? - That’s what we’re doing with a Hertz Tesla at the moment. There is an LADWP public charger right next to my office, so I’ve been able to charge there occasionally. We have a garage so we can also slow charge at home but I was interested to see how it would work with an EV. We’ve had it 3 weeks. I’ve used a supercharger once when on a roadtrip other than that it’s been the free one by work and home and it’s worked out really well.
Its important here to understand the difference between level 2 chargers and dc fast chargers.
Yes. Although I street park, it’s almost always directly in front of my house, which practically sits on top of the sidewalk. The cord would drape over the sidewalk though.
I absolutely need to educate myself more on this. For example, the three chargers that are in my grocery store parking lot, two are 100 kw and one is 350 kw.
Do they have branding?
What evs are you looking at?
I’ll have to check on work garage ones. Otherwise, I have EVgo, Chargepoint, and Greenspot locations in relatively close proximity to me.
How about just no? Idk why everyone is so hard pressed to make EVs work. They are great if you have the set up and daily commute to make it work , less so if you don’t.
Run an extension cord to the street? What if the 6-8 stalls at work are taken? Are these really solutions , I mean we’re talking about a car purchase here, kinda wild to me.
You sound like a far better candidate for a PHEV. When you get to charge, great , use electricity. When you don’t, no inconvenience.
It’s interesting to me that people use words like doable while framing buying a new car. Probably not great if you’re planning logistically around what your new car allows you to do.
timely thread OP. i just found out from my HOA that we’re not allowed to have chargers here because we don’t own our parking spots outside the house and the running of the charging cable would consist of a ‘hazard’ that would require liability insurance by me and the HOA. so that’s out…
a buddy of mine introduced me to this site:
they have an app as well. looks pretty reliable and shows there were way more charging stations than I thought.
This is exactly what I thought as well.
When I was considering a Taycan the plan was to charge it in the garage from a 110V outlet (I don’t drive much so I could leave it plugged in 24 hours a day 3-4 days a week, and 22+ hours on the other days. 
(Plus we have another car.)