- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Summary
Starting in 2026, California will require all new residential units with parking spaces to be EV charger-ready, significantly increasing access to electric vehicle charging.
Multi-family developments must equip at least one EV-ready spot per unit, while hotels, commercial lots, and parking renovations will also face new EV charging mandates.
Advocacy groups praise the policy, emphasizing its balanced approach to affordability and infrastructure needs.
The initiative aligns with California’s 2035 ban on new gas-powered car sales, aiming to address key barriers to EV adoption and support the state’s transition to electrification.
I think there’s some merit to both sides of this. Using codes to mandate quality construction is a good thing IMHO. Even when it increases building cost.
What I dislike is the fact that every little municipality has their own individual special snowflake set of building codes. Some use one version of the national code, others use another version of the national code, others use the national code with a whole bunch of special stuff added on, etc. Then throw in wildly different enforcement and inspections and a handful of inspectors who just want to see it done their way code be damned and it becomes a confusing morass that needlessly increases cost.
Finally, a nuanced answer to my comment. This is exactly what I’m getting at. By the time you deal with the whole scope of the project, every little thing adds to the cost way out of proportion to just doing it. I can slap a 50A plug in, the code isn’t complicated, but if you don’t want to have a go around with an inspector, you pay an electrician exorbitantly to get the final result. When you get everyone on a project involved in getting that done, it’s several times the hundred dollars of the actual materials. Even if it’s just part of an initial project scope.
You start getting region-specific bullshit like EMT conduit for powerlines in the mix, and inspectors that will contradict themselves in the same sentence, and in the end, you’re paying $400-500/sf for putting up a house when 20 years ago it was $150-200. It’s gotten crazy, and so little of it makes an appreciable safety or efficiency difference anymore. Look at arc-fault breaker code now, these aren’t preventing any significant amounts of fires, but every breaker is 10X the cost of a normal breaker. And there are only a couple circuits that don’t need them now according to code.
Yeah I’m also not a fan of the arc fault breaker thing. I get the concept, but there should be a calculation of expense caused versus safety increase.
A good example of that in another field is NHTSA is going to start requiring seat belt reminders and nag beeps for every seat in the vehicle. This will increase the cost of every single vehicle, annoy the hell out of drivers who store cargo in the backseat, and the problem it addresses? Yearly 50 deaths and a few hundred injuries caused by unbelted passengers. Most of whom will probably ignore the nag beep anyway- it’s 2024, if you don’t wear your seatbelt because you want to stay alive you’re not going to start wearing it because of a nag beep. Thus you have yet another regulation, yet another little specification box that has to be checked building a new car, and yet another bundle of sensors and wires and harnesses and programming for every single vehicle (which isn’t free, those costs will be passed on to the person who buys the car) all for a change that will probably have zero practical benefit whatsoever but will cause a ton of annoyance when drivers throw their groceries in the back seat. And it may even make the problem worse- The driver who puts groceries in the back will probably buy one of those defeat devices that’s like a seat belt buckle but with no seatbelt and you put it in the slut so the car thinks you are buckled in. And that might actually reduce the number of people who wear the seatbelt in the back.