Owning and charging an electric vehicle is much more difficult for people living in apartments. There's growing pressure for governments to support body corporates to retrofit apartment block car parks and allow for EV charging.
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00:00 Adam Scott has bought two electric vehicles within the last year.
00:05 Despite living in an apartment, he wasn't worried about how to keep them going.
00:10 Charging then was pretty good, charging at superchargers around Canberra,
00:16 but as more and more people have bought EVs, it's been getting more and more difficult.
00:21 Now the building he lives in has retrofitted its basement to allow for EV charging.
00:26 It involved months of rewiring and installing new technology to manage the extra demand for power.
00:33 For Adam and his family, it's been life changing.
00:37 Generally on a good day or a good week it would be about three and a half hours for both of us,
00:40 if you include travelling to go and charge, but now it's about four minutes.
00:45 Convenient, but not cheap. The whole project cost the owners corporation about $200,000.
00:52 As electric vehicles make up a greater share of the market,
00:56 the owners here hope this investment will increase their property value.
01:00 People are going to want to charge their cars in their parking spots at home.
01:06 It doesn't matter whether it's a bungalow or a high rise.
01:10 Updated national construction standards will soon mandate EV charging capacity in all new apartment buildings.
01:18 As for existing buildings, a recent inquiry in the ACT recommended the government provide grants to body corporates to investigate retrofitting them.
01:28 The ACT government is looking at pilots in terms of what we might be able to do to provide support,
01:34 particularly for some of these trickier transitions.
01:37 With one in five new cars in the capital an electric car, that transition will only pick up pace.
01:43 [BLANK_AUDIO]