But you didn't answer my question. How many of those home chargers are going to be in high-traffic/high-commercial areas with paid parking and very close proximity to those public/commercial businesses and services? Your entire model relies on people with L2 residential chargers very very close to paid parking commercial areas (i.e. walking distance).
That seems like a very very small number of available chargers. And again, how many of those qualifying charger owners would sign up for strangers parking in their home driveway for hours on end?
You also don't factor in liability or insurance. If a person is renting out their home parking space and charger, and something happens to the renting vehicle (say a tree falls on it), who's liable? You can bet for sure that the homeowners policy isn't going to cover that since it's a parking space+charging rental business. What if there's a charger malfunction? What if someone parks in your home driveway parking spot connected to your charger and disappears for two days. Or as mentioned above, what if someone is assulted or robbed while parked at your home charging on your charger.
As I said, bonkers.
Love that we're getting into the details, this is exactly how ideas get tested and improved!
To address your question about the number of home chargers downtown, I'll break it down to two factors:
1- Do these privately owned spots exist near high demand locations where parking fees are high?
- Around Toronto they definitely do. Except right at the core where it's all condo towers, there are houses all over the city within a couple blocks of paid parking zones and many have driveways, laneway garages, etc...
- Condo towers also have tons of underground parking. Most places here allow renting long term and in the later part of the business plan I write about how the access management (Clickers, fobs, etc...) could be resolved.
2- Would homeowners be willing to rent these out?
- That's a matter of cost-benefit. If the user experience is easy, owners have to do nearly nothing, and they make thousands a year from their spot when unused, that's a good amount of nearly free money, especially with people feeling cash squeezed today.
- Renting out a parking spot is far less intrusive than renting out a spare room or your whole house and AirBnB has already proven that millions of people are happy to do that. Not everyone, but more than enough to make a great business. The economics of AirBnB have also caused a lot of people to buy and put units on market specifically to make money from it.
- With revenues being attractive enough (say $4-5K/yr) downtown, it becomes viable for a lot more condo owners to invest in adding a charger ( more expensive in condos because of added wiring and metering). Today's high cost discourages EV ownership downtown... but wouldn't if chargers pay for themselves in 2 years from rental revenue.
Now for the liability and quality of service (eg. broken charger) questions:
1- Tesla already has a pooled car insurance business in several states and AirBnB has demonstrated a successful insurance model for rentals with AirCover. It's also common practice for terms and conditions to limit edge case liability (Eg. If a tornado wrecks your car while parked). Just gets rolled into Tesla's CarBnB operating costs.
2- However Tesla has a major advantage with 24/7 360 degree cameras on every car. These can be remotely instructed to back up arrival/departure videos and any sentry mode events during the parking session to prove who is at fault. That's way better than AirBnB could ever do and would discourage bad behaviour. Plus Tesla's vision AI can automatically assess whether a spot is safe, well lit, and accessible to instantly disqualify spots that aren't.
3- Tesla home chargers are already built today for online management and can easily signal Tesla and their owner if there is a malfunction. Allowing renters to be re-routed to another spot.
As for someone staying beyond the time slot the owner has made available, I talk about that in the business plan. Painful per-minute penalty fees (like at superchargers) that go to the owner to compensate them for the inconvenience.
Keep up the questions and challenges, this is great!