How one condo complex installed EV charging for just $405 per parking spot
A condo complex in Northern California has installed charging for all of its 90 housing unit with an after-incentive cost of around $405 per unit – solving one of the only real problems with EV charging.
One of the main benefits of an electric vehicle is in the convenience of owning and charging the car. Instead of having to go out of your way to fuel it, you just park it at home, in the same place it spends at least 8 hours a day, and you leave the house every day with a full charge.
But this benefit only applies to those with a consistent parking space which they can easily install charging at. When talking about owners who live in apartment buildings, it can sometimes get more complicated.
While certain states have passed “right to charge” laws to give apartment-dwellers a solution for home charging, apartment charging is nevertheless a bit of a patchwork solution so far.
And so, when we heard about a condo complex that installed EV chargers for all of its units, and at an incredibly low cost of just $405 per space in one of the highest cost-of-living areas in the country, we had to find out more.
The condo complex is Woodland Creek, with 90 units in East Palo Alto, CA, in the heart of SIlicon Valley, the epicenter of electric vehicle adoption in the US.
The project was installed by Pando Electric, an EV charging company that focuses on multifamily and commercial buildings. We spoke with its CEO and founder, Aaron Li, for some insights into the project.
Pando says this is the largest “100% coverage” project in North America, but that it’s not stopping there. It’s the largest project the company has installed yet, but that record won’t stay for long.
It differs from others in that most multifamily projects will cover some percentage of available spaces, but this one decided to add outlets for every single parking spot on the property – 90 spots, each for one unit, and 2 handicap parking spots.
The chargers are small boxes, equipped with connectivity and a NEMA 14-50 outlet. Each charger doesn’t have a cable connected – that’s for the owner of the car to provide, in the form of a mobile charging connector. Most EVs either come with one of these cables, or one can be purchased separately for a few hundred dollars.
Pando says the benefit of going this route is that in a world with a wide variety of electric cars, OEM-supplied equipment will always be the most reliable, and will often come with a warranty from the vehicle manufacturer.
It also means that each owner is responsible for their own cable, which means you don’t need to have one maintenance guy on the property responsible for keeping all 90 units up and running, or people mistreating attached cables, because each person will take ownership over their own equipment and take better care of it (there’s a similar provision in the new NACS/J3400 spec that should help with public charging). And that there will be no need to update systems if charging standard change – as we’re seeing currently as the industry transitions to NACS.
Instead of adding dedicated service to each spot, Pando’s system shares electricity between all the outlets on the property. In this way, it can use 300 amps of three-phase commercial service to charge all 90 cars overnight – albeit not as quickly as if each vehicle had its own dedicated 7-10kW level 2 charger. And it said installation costs went down by 80% when connecting to communal electricity rather than adding service to each individual unit.
It accomplishes this by implementing a queue through Pando’s charging app. When a car wants to charge, you plug in, initiate a charging session through the app (or through a “tap-to-charge” NFC system), and get added to a queue. If you have a particular need for immediate charging, you can jump to the front of the queue and pay a premium (of around 20%) for faster charging. Charging costs the same amount as electricity would normally cost in the area, and your electricity usage is monitored through the Pando app.
For most owners, this queue won’t really make a difference – most people are driving some ~40 miles per day and would only need an hour or two of charging per night anyway. So the effect is the same: you get home, you plug in, and you wake up to a full charge.
And having centralized control over charging does open up possibilities for grid services. We’ve seen services like virtual power plants that are able to leverage grid-connected storage to feed the grid on demand, and Pando would like to move in that direction eventually – but its current NEMA 14-50 solution is not bidirectional-capable.
However, dynamic load management is still useful, as the system can try to deliver maximum power at times of lower demand, then scale back when demand (and prices, and grid stress) are high. Some utilities have started offering incentives for users to cut back usage at certain times (or asked everyone to cut back on usage to avoid blackouts), so a centralized system can help to manage power automatically in these situations without having to get every resident onboard.
The most impressive part about the project is the price that Pando was able to achieve. It did take advantage of a hefty utility credit from Peninsula Clean Energy, the local electric utility co-operative, which covered $2,000 per unit installed.
After that incentive, the all-in cost including the charging units themselves (~$500 each), project design, installation, conduit, permitting, labor, etc, was only $405 per unit. This is less than a month’s worth of HOA fees at the condo complex, where units cost between $500k-$1m. So, a drop in the bucket, really, in order to add new capability to every unit (and thus, better resale value, especially given the popularity of EVs in the area).
Typically, adding traditional level 2 charging can cost a lot more than that for an apartment complex, especially if there’s a need to pull more capacity from the utility (which takes more time, too, adding further to project costs). So this load-sharing method results in great benefits on cost.
And by covering every unit, residents won’t need to worry about sharing chargers, or needing to wait for upgrades if all of a sudden there are more EVs than there are spots. It future-proofs the complex so that even if everyone gets an EV (it is Silicon Valley, after all), there will still be places for them all to charge.
Electrek’s Take
I’ve long said that the only real problem with EVs is charging for people who don’t have access to their own garage. Whether this be apartment-dwellers, street-parkers or the like, the electric car charging experience is often less-than-ideal outside of single family homes, at least in North America.
There are workarounds available, like charging at work, or using Superchargers in “third places” where you often spend time, but these still aren’t optimal. The best bet is just to charge your car wherever it spends most of its time, which is your home. When you do that, EVs outshine everything in convenience.
So there’s a need for solutions in this space, and Pando’s seems like a pretty good one. There are other companies doing installations for multifamily dwellings, but we haven’t heard of one that was this cheap before. It really makes it seem economical to install these units for every single parking spot, instead of fussing about with some smaller percentage of units and having to do additional upgrades later.
The one problem with it that I see is that it’s attached to an app. While Pando says that it’s worked to ensure the app is reliable even if the system goes down (e.g., it communicates locally instead of needing to connect to the internet at all times), an app is just an unnecessary step after plugging in that I’d like to see removed.
Pando says that it’s working on bringing a “plug-and-charge-like experience” to using its chargers – which I’d imagine would be possible by doing local bluetooth communication with a phone when a charging session is started, much like the phone-as-key system on Teslas and some other EVs these days. You’d still need an app, you just wouldn’t need to open it every time, which would be good enough in my opinion.
But overall, I’m quite excited about this project, because it solves a big problem, and I cant wait to see more multifamily communities install something like this. And, frankly, we also need legislation/building codes to hop in and require this sort of thing, so it becomes the rule rather than the exception and apartment dwellers can feel secure that they’ll be able to find a place to charge – and if install costs can get as low as $405/unit, that makes a regulatory answer much more possible.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company will remove “safety monitors” from the passenger seats of Tesla’s Robotaxi vehicles in “about three weeks,” which would mean we’d see completely driverless Teslas in the Austin area potentially by the end of the year – if that timeline sticks.
Tesla has been working on a system that would allow vehicles to drive themselves, which has been in “beta” release for over a decade now. It calls this system “Full Self-Driving,” despite the fact that the system does not currently drive itself.
That has not stopped Musk from consistently promising more and more of the system, despite its stagnating capabilities. Over the course of the last decade, Musk has consistently promised driverless vehicles within the coming year, with deadlines consistently passing by without achieving that goal.
One of those promises has been the creation of a driverless taxi network, which Tesla used to call “Tesla Network” and is now calling “Robotaxi.” The idea originally came with the promise that owners could use their cars to make money by running them as taxis, but that hasn’t panned out.
Tesla did roll out its own version of a taxi network, though, in Austin, in June of this year. While it’s done a few cool things, the cars each have a “safety monitor” in the passenger seat who can take control at any time, which means the cars aren’t truly “driverless” since there is an operator, they’ve just been moved to the passenger seat.
In the time since Robotaxi’s rollout, it’s made quite a few mistakes and had a high crash rate. But Tesla also delivered one fully unoccupied vehicle from the factory to a local buyer, which was a cool (and, as yet, still unique) stunt.
Throughout the year, Musk has claimed loudly that the system would improve rapidly, stating that by the end of the year Robotaxis would be available to half of the US population (they are not) and that Tesla’s fleet would grow by more than 10x by the end of the year (it has not).
But now we have another bold prediction from Musk, stating that the safety monitors will be out of a job by the end of the year.
During a videoconference at a hackathon event for xAI, one of Musk’s other companies (which he is trying to get Tesla shareholders to bail out), Musk was asked a question about the barriers to unsupervised full self-driving. Musk answered:
Unsupervised is pretty much solved at this point. There will be Tesla Robotaxis operating in Austin with no one in them, not even anyone in the passenger seat, in about three weeks. I think it’s pretty much a solved problem, we’re just going through validation right now.
The “three weeks” timeline is familiar to longtime Tesla followers. Over the years, Musk has often promised fixes or software updates in “two weeks,” and they often take longer than that.
Three weeks is a lot closer than the “next year” promise that we’ve heard so many times for full autonomy, but given its proximity to the oft-inaccurate two-week timeline, we’re not sure these vehicles will actually be ready in time for New Year’s Eve celebrations.
Nevertheless, it’s a closer timeline than Musk has usually given, so there may be truly driverless Teslas operating sometime soon™.
Also, reading the statement more closely, it sounds like they won’t necessarily remove safety operators from every vehicle, but some vehicles. This could be similar to the singular driverless vehicle delivery that Tesla did – a PR stunt, rather than a full rollout. We’ll have to wait and see.
Tesla’s main competitor in the robotaxi space is Waymo, which has been operating truly driverless vehicles for several years now. The company has also been operating autonomous, driverless vehicles in Austin since March of this year.
Musk went on to talk about future improvements to Tesla’s software and hardware in his answer.
The company is currently on hardware previously deemed HW4, though to cash in on the AI stock market bubble, it now refers to that system as AI4. He said that AI5 will be 10-40 times better than HW4 and go into volume production in 2027, with AI6 coming soon after.
Musk’s mention of future hardware improvements neglects one important aspect of these improvements, which is that for every hardware improvement Tesla puts into its fleet, the more vehicles it will have to upgrade later.
Tesla long promised that its vehicles had all the hardware for self-driving, which means it’s going to have to upgrade a lot of cars – and there are court cases around the world seeking to force the company to do so. Together, these lawsuits and other potential challenges could mean billions of dollars in liabilities for the company.
Musk then closed his statements by claiming that “our” goal is to “to understand the meaning of life and… propagate consciousness out to the stars,” which is not Tesla’s goal. Tesla’s actual goal is to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy. He may have been referring to xAI’s goal, but given the answer was about Tesla, perhaps he was confused (or perhaps he doesn’t care about Tesla anymore, and isn’t a good CEO for the company as a result…)
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VW’s retro-tastic minivan hasn’t been the sales success the company might have wanted, and a lot of that has to do with the van’s sky high price tag. Now, VW is asking: will a $10,000 discount be enough to create some buzz for the ID.Buzz?
Volkswagen is offering $7,500 in Retail Customer Bonus cash this month – up from the $2,500 the company offered its Black Friday customers – that, along with an additional $2,500 unadvertised dealer cash incentive that CarsDirect is reporting absolutely, definitely exists, adds up to a stout $10,000 total discount on the all-electric VW ID.Buzz … and that’s before you start haggling with your dealer over the MSRP.
It’s a lot
As much as I like the the Volkswagen ID.Buzz, its starting MSRP around $61,545 (incl. destination) puts it at nearly twice what you’d probably expect a minivan to cost if the last time you shopped for one was at a Dodge store. Still, that hefty price tag is some $20,000 higher than the baseline Toyota Sienna hybrid or Honda Odyssey.
That 50% higher price is a lot to swallow even if you do buy into the nostalgia. Still, the ID.Buzz is capable enough, and with ~230 miles of range and 282 hp on offer from its battery/electric motor combo – plus Supercharger access – it’s at least able to keep up with the minivan competition.
So, while that $10,000 discount isn’t going to turn the ID.Buzz into the second coming of the affordable, family-hauling Caravan, it does bring VW’s electric people-mover a little closer to earth. In fact, with a $50K price tag, it’s right in line with the average transaction price of a new vehicles. So, if nothing else, that reduced price could finally gives electric minivan buyers something to buzz about (I tried so hard to work that in, you guys).
If you’ve been shopping for a family-hauler and dig the retro vibe over something like the (excellent) Kia EV9, click through the link below and set up a test drive at your local VW dealer.
SOURCE: CarsDirect; images via VW.
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Peterbilt has jumped into the MD truck ring with the launch three new medium-duty electric trucks that deliver zero-emissions power, ultra-fast 350 kW charging, and proven, versatile platforms for delivery, utility service, and vocational upfitting.
The new Peterbilt 536EV, 537EV, and 548EV medium-duty trucks slot into the same versatile medium-duty segments the company’s fleets already know, but swap diesel power for latest PACCAR ePowertrain, with up to 605 hp and 1,850 lb-ft of torque available at 0 rpm. That big motor draws power from a variety of LFP battery packs and be fitted with ePTO options rated for either 25 kW (two-battery option) or 150 kW (three-battery option), making them suitable for that can be sized for daily delivery routes, urban utility work, and municipal fleets looking to cut both emissions and maintenance costs.
What’s more, the new Peterbilt’s flexible architecture allows for integration with existing PACCAR suspension bits to make 4×2 and 6×4 configurations, and any wheelbase of 163 inches or longer, and up to 82,000 lbs. gross combined weight ratings possible.
“[The new trucks are] optimized for the demands of the medium duty segment, the next generation of Peterbilt electric vehicles deliver excellent efficiency, rapid charging and versatile configurations elevating customer productivity across a wide range of applications,” said Erik Johnson, Peterbilt assistant general manager, Sales & Marketing.
In addition to all those goodies, the PACCAR EV tech continues to be top-notch, with the previously-mentioned 350 kW charging, regenerative braking, and industry-leading ergonomics.
Peterbilt’s new MDEVs ship with a blue accented crown and grille for a distinctive exterior look, as well as EV-exclusive panels on the side of the hood. The interior design features laser-etched trim panels on the EV-exclusive Magneto Gray interior, just in case the driver in the quiet, smooth, and stink-free cabin forgets they’re in an electric truck.
Electrek’s Take
Ignore the headlines. The death of the commercial EV market simply hasn’t happened, and won’t happen any time soon.
If you believe the engineers and analysts at MAN Trucks and Orange EV (and, you should), an EV like this can pay for itself in reduced fuel and maintenance costs even without incentives, then you should already know what I’m about to say: the future of trucking is 100% electric.
SOURCE | IMAGES: PACCAR.
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