EV Charging at Packard Row and Around Ann Arbor

Plenty of Ann Arbor apartment listings call themselves "EV friendly." What they usually mean is a public DC fast charger half a mile down the road. Packard Row has charging on the property, attached to the building's own parking. Sounds like a small distinction. In daily use it's a different category of experience.

This one's for renters who already drive an EV, or are about to, and want to know what charging looks like at home on the southeast side of Ann Arbor.

What "on-site" actually means here

The charging stations at 2111 Packard sit in the building's parking. Residents who drive EVs park, plug in, and walk upstairs. The distance from car to apartment is the same as from a gas car to the apartment.

That sounds obvious. It matters more than it sounds. A public station half a mile away means driving there, sitting while it charges, and driving back. A station in your own lot means you charge while you sleep. Across a year the time difference adds up to hundreds of hours.

The building went up in 2025 with EV charging in the original spec. Not a retrofit. The electrical service was sized for it, the parking layout was drawn around it, and capacity can scale as more residents plug in.

The broader Ann Arbor picture

The city has a mix of public and semi-private chargers. Public stations sit downtown, at Briarwood Mall, near the Big House on game days, and at a handful of grocery stores. The most reliable network around the southeast side runs along South State and the Eisenhower corridor, with chargers near the U-M Hospital campus.

Public-charger reliability in Ann Arbor is what it is everywhere. Sometimes the station's up, sometimes it isn't. Apps and PlugShare help, but if the public network is your only option, you'll have at least one bad week a year. A home charger isolates you from that week.

DC fast chargers, the ones that fill a battery in twenty to thirty minutes, are thin on the ground inside Ann Arbor itself. The closest reliable bank is out on I-94 near the Jackson Road exit. For road trips, that's the practical fast charge before you leave town.

Rooftop solar interacts with this

The same building has rooftop solar panels running common areas. Solar generation upstairs and EV charging downstairs aren't a closed system. Your car isn't directly fed by the rooftop. But the energy story is coherent. If sustainability is the reason you drive an EV, the building isn't undermining that choice with a coal-powered parking deck.

What charging at home looks like day to day

Most apartment-dwelling EV drivers settle into a routine within a few weeks. Park. Plug in. Walk away. Next morning the battery is full or close to it. For a normal Ann Arbor commute pattern of twenty to forty miles a day, an overnight Level 2 session is overkill in the best way.

Level 2 is the standard for residential overnight charging. It puts back roughly twenty to thirty miles of range per hour, so an eight-hour stretch covers any commute. The on-site charging at Packard Row is Level 2.

Drivers who do longer weekend trips, Detroit, Lansing, up to the lake, top off on public DC fast chargers along the highway. From Ann Arbor, US-23 and I-94 both have stops within twenty miles in either direction.

Cost and billing

Charging at the building is billed separately to the residents who use it. The exact structure gets confirmed at lease signing. Against Michigan grid rates, electricity per mile is well under gasoline per mile. A driver doing 12,000 miles a year typically spends $400 to $600 on electricity instead of $1,500 to $2,000 on gas at current Michigan pump prices.

The math improves further when you stack in the smart home features that come with every Packard Row apartment. Smart thermostats trim overall building load, which improves the cost basis for everything you plug in.

How this compares to other Ann Arbor apartments

On-site EV charging is uncommon in Ann Arbor's rental stock. The housing inventory skews older. Many buildings predate the modern EV market, and rewiring a multi-unit electrical system for car charging costs enough that most landlords have left it alone.

A handful of newer buildings have charging. Most are downtown or up around Plymouth Road. On the southeast side, on the Packard corridor specifically, Packard Row is one of the few Class A buildings with on-site EV charging on the menu.

The other route is to lease a building without charging and rely on public stations. That works fine if you don't drive much, or if your office has charging. Google's downtown office does. Plenty of other tech offices don't. For a daily driver, the home-station setup is the easier life.

Practical questions on a tour

A few worth asking. How many chargers are currently in use versus available; the building can scale with demand. What the billing setup is; the leasing team can walk through the per-resident structure. Whether you can reserve a specific station. Some buildings assign chargers to specific units. Others run first-come, first-served. The answer changes how your evening routine works.

Also worth asking about the adjacent details. Whether parking is included with the unit. The exterior layout. Whether there's a guest charging option for visitors. An on-site setup makes all of these manageable. A building with off-site or partial charging makes any one of them complicated.

The setup, plainly

For a driver who wants somewhere quiet and modern, a short commute from work, and no weekly puzzle about where to charge, the package is straightforward. An apartment with on-site Level 2 charging in the building's own parking, in a residential neighborhood near the major employers. The pieces line up.

For the rest of the spec, rooftop solar, smart thermostats, a smoke-free modern envelope. They pair naturally with how most EV drivers already live.

If you'd like to see the parking and the chargers in person, the leasing team can include them on the tour. Tour the building and they'll walk you through it.