I am moving into an apartment in the Seattle area next month that does not have charging infrastructure. Does anyone have advice as to a good path to convincing them to get it installed?
Helpful items would be:
Good company to contact: Chargepoint? I don't believe Tesla actually does apartment buildings?
Tesla does partner with apartments -- or at least, their
Destination Charging Partners page seems to suggest they do; but that could be out of date or inapplicable to your particular apartment. (See the Multi-Family heading.) That said, going with a more generic J1772 EVSE would be better in the sense that it could be used by any EV owner, not just a Tesla owner, so an apartment's owner might be more willing to invest in a J1772 unit. OTOH, my understanding is that Tesla gives away their EVSEs, and will even throw in one J1772 EVSE for every two Tesla EVSEs, so if it's a big apartment building, they could get three EVSEs for free. The apartment would still need to pay for installation and electricity, though, and that's the wall into which you're likely to run.
One way around that wall might be to suggest installing a non-free EVSE. In my area, most ChargePoint J1772 units are free, but some of them are not. ChargePoint collects the money on behalf of the property owner and then gives the money to the owner (I assume minus a fee). Thus, a ChargePoint commercial EVSE could in theory pay for itself. That might take quite a long time, though, since these EVSEs are not cheap, and the cost to charge one EV for a year is low in comparison, unless the fee charged by the property owner was ridiculously high. It might help if the apartment had another couple of EV owners, since that would reduce the payout period for the apartment's owner.
How to best pitch it - and what are the benefits to them. I know that obviously it makes their building easier to live in for people with EVs. But I haven't found an apartment listing website that actually lets me search via that service so its not something that would be easy for them to sell. How they could recoup the installation cost, or how fast they might do that, or any other things that I haven't thought of.
If the EVSE is placed somewhere that's publicly accessible, then a for-pay EVSE might bring in some money from non-residents. OTOH, that might also make it harder for you to use, since you might be competing for access with non-residents.
As EVs become more common, EVSEs in apartment parking lots will become a sought-after benefit. I'm sure they'll appear on apartment-hunting apps as an amenity before too long, even if they don't show up already. In the meantime, I'd expect EV owners looking for apartments to rent to use PlugShare or similar apps to cross-reference potential apartments to see what sort of charging infrastructure exists nearby, so even without "EVSE" showing up as an amenity, EV owners can track them --
if the EVSE is listed on ChargePoint's app, PlugShare, or some other common tool.
Really, though, this could be a hard sell. If installation is easy, you might offer to cover some or all of the installation cost, and a little more on your monthly rent to cover the electricity (if it's not a for-pay EVSE). If you're living in a big apartment building, you might want to survey the parking lot some time to see if there are any other EVs in it (including plug-in hybrids). If there are, then having two or more tenants approach the owner/manager might be more convincing than just you alone, and might make it easier to cover the installation costs yourself, if it comes to that.
