this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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Because if you live in an apartment your only option for charging is to go to a charging location. You can't just plug it in overnight.
Which I can see as a big hurdle for a lot of people.
What percentage of people live in apartments?
Surely those people should be taking public transport anyway not buying a car when they live downtown.
An enormous percentage, especially in the current housing market, however...
Many (most?) American cities have wildly inadequate public transit and are prone to sprawl. Many Americans live in apartments, but are a multiple mile walk from their grocery store. If there's any public transit at all it's probably an infrequent and unreliable bus line that may not go anywhere near their home to begin with. They live in apartments, but are not anywhere near 'downtown'.
These are problems that need to be solved, and quickly, but public transit is best grown with a city, which didn't happen. Inserting a subway after the fact is difficult, expensive, and slow.
The reality of right-now (which is all a renter is likely to be able to consider financially) is that a reliable car is an essential item in most parts of the country.
According to Quota its ~80% of people live in houses.
Classic 80:20 rule. Making excuses for why the most difficult 20% doesn't work is the wrong way of thinking about it. Most of the result for least effort cones from dealing with the 80%.
You explicitly asked about apartments tho
The title is about why "Americans" aren't buying EV's. The excuse of them living in an apartment only applies to ~20% of the population.
That's not enough to explain why Americans aren't buying, just why 20% if Americans aren't.
And like I said you don't start with the most difficult and you don't push a solution onto a problem when it isn't the right solution anyway.
Great, and I’m sure the same applies to public chargers, for those making the excuse that there aren’t any near them.
Yes, we need a lot more public chargers, especially to make charging convenient, but there really are some near most of the population