Good money after green

Written by OP ED Watch on May 8, 2025. Posted in Current News

EVs continue to hypnotize everyone… other than buyers. Thus Canary Media hypes an outfit that aims to cash in on the burgeoning market for (wait for it) multifamily housing EV chargers.

See “By 2030, EVs are expected to make up close to half of all new U.S. car sales.” Read no further. Or do, because weird trends sometimes matter.

OK, you’re reading on. Including that the Axios news aggregator, despite a mission statement “Axios gets you smarter, faster on what matters”, shares a TechCrunch piece saying “Kia is pitching Americans an affordable EV sedan with EV4 debut”. Great.

Even that piece admits that:

“Whether U.S. customers will gravitate toward a sedan is an open question – and one Kia isn’t necessarily betting on. The company launched sales of the EV4 in South Korea and plans to bring it to Europe by the end of the year. Sales in the United States are expected to begin in the last quarter of 2025 or first quarter of 2026, a Kia spokesperson told TechCrunch. Kia’s primary pitch with the EV4 is affordability, and with a respectable range, interior features, and tech touches, it could finally give consumers another option. While Kia hasn’t yet shared U.S. pricing, some have estimated that it would start at around $35,000, adding another competitor to the Tesla Model 3.”

The assumption is that consumers really truly crave “another option” for a kind of car they don’t want. We wouldn’t invest in the car or the plug. Especially since:

“Tom Kearns, Kia’s chief designer, said Wednesday that what ‘many EVs have in common is the pricing that leans more towards the higher end. But our ultimate goal is to make electrified attainable driving for everyone.’”

There’s something weirdly charming about “leans more towards the higher end” to describe price tags that make prospective buyers faint or flee.

Which might not just mean the car. Assuming the U.S. can build some massive new power grid in five years to deliver volts to the half of new buyers someone thinks will be choosing an EV in five years, what will it cost?

Canary Media gushes that this exciting new startup, 3V Infrastructure, will break through by breaking through. Right now there’s a big issue since about a third of Americans live in “multifamily housing”, which seems to be sociology-speak for “an apartment or condo”. As for that special plug:

“Tenants don’t pay to install EV charging, though — property owners do, and they aren’t in the business of financing, installing, or operating complex EV charging projects.”

Well no. They’re not fools. So here comes 3V, scooping up investment capital and:

“installing chargers at hundreds of sites in 17 states, and hopes to expand to thousands by 2030… Getting big is key to 3V’s business model, [CEO Aubrey] Gunnels said.”

Well yes. When a firm sells a lot of its products or services at a profit, it gets big. But it’s not so much a business strategy as the result of a successful strategy. Unless you are a pyramid scheme, intentionally or otherwise. And how much would it cost? See:

“3V isn’t asking property owners for any money at all, she explained – just a 10-year contract to let it build chargers on the site and charge customers for using them.”

Which brings us to the business plan:

“That means it’s up to 3V to pick the right properties, install the right number of chargers in the right locations, keep them in good working order, and decide how much it needs to charge users to make its money back.”

Well, that and having people actually buy EVs and then agree to pay those prices. Details, details.

One of which is the range, a perennial problem. Even though sedans Americans used to buy are lighter than the SUVs they now prefer, and thus get better mileage (and may we note as an aside that even in countries that bowed to the political dictate to use metric nobody says kilometrage), in TechCrunch’s exciting new Kia EV4:

“The standard 58.3 kWh battery, which comes with the ‘Light’ trim, has a range of 235 miles, and the long-range 81.4 kWh battery, which comes with the ‘Wind’ or ‘GT-Line’ trims, can go up to 330 miles.”

Ideal for city driving, depending on charging speed, and perhaps for smaller European countries. But a tough sell in Canada, the United States or Australia, we would assume, because a tank of gas will take an SUV more than twice even the “Wind” option.

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