Renting on Capitol Hill in Seattle, no garage, but I got lucky — the building's off-street lot has a regular 120V outlet close enough to my usual spot that I've been running a Level 1 cord to the car since I got the Model 3 in the spring. Commute is about 22 miles round trip to Bellevue, plus whatever errands happen on top of that.
I track cost-per-mile obsessively (it's basically my hobby at this point, my partner thinks it's ridiculous), and on paper the Level 1 numbers look almost too good — Seattle City Light residential rates are cheap since it's mostly hydro, something like 11-12 cents a kWh, and overnight the car just quietly tops back up while I sleep. No drama so far.
But I keep going back and forth on whether I'm being naive. Is this actually sustainable long-term, or am I one busy week / one weekend trip to Portland away from finding out Level 1 was never really enough and I should've been pricing out a landlord-funded Level 2 circuit from day one? I don't want to spend real money chasing an upgrade I don't need, but I also don't want to keep pretending everything's fine if the math only works because I haven't stress-tested it yet.
For people who've actually lived on Level 1 in an apartment for a while — did the numbers hold up, or did something eventually break the plan?
