Really excellent article here on the biggest problem with EVs: charging stations.
Jennifer Granholm—you know, the Secretary of Energy—took an extended trip and found out for herself as she headed for a Georgia suburb.
(This actually precipitated a citizen’s call to the police…who couldn’t do anything about it.)
And the story goes on to enumerate those worries:
- Having to plan to find charging stations
- The quantity (or lack thereof) of same
- Slow charging speeds at some stations
- Reliability of those stations
It’s highly illustrative, though. Props to Granholm for being open enough to share her adventures with the media. But if even
she can’t find enough chargers….
They should have made that assessment before the EV incentives, LOL. (they did, there's plenty of gov analysis and recommendations for actions).
The math is simple:
An EV can do a 2.5-4.2 miles for each 1 KWh spent. My large electronic SUV averages on 3.1mi/KWh.
Level 1 chargers (regular wall plug) fill 5-12.5mi for each hour (2-3KW), also called as trickle charge.
Level 2 will charge 12.5-36mi for each hour of charging (5-9 KW)
Level 3 (DC Fast) can do anywhere from 35 to 200 miles in
30 min. But this is murky, because most cars' DC Fast charging curve is non-linear and there
There are 2 issues and 2 broad solutions.
Issue #1: How to best cover average daily charging needs. For most Americans, even a regular wall plug could do it, TBH. Considering that our cars are parking for more than 20 hours a day that would be doable. As
@SouprMatt is saying, if governments provided a plug with lighting poles that already have the wiring even for level 2.
Issue #2: How to deal with road tripping, when you want to charge a lot and quick. This is where there are ton of major issues on both the Charging vendor and Carmaker perspective. For example, my car's nominal max charging speed is 175 KW. My record has been 182 KW, i.e. the car went from 1% to 50% (~140 mi range) in about 15 minutes. But above 50% it gets throttled down. So the charging curves are non-linear. But with Electrify America, it tends to be more like 80KW, so the 30 minute free charging session would take me from 20% to 70% charge.
One of the annoying things is 30 minutes is longer than the 3-5minute fill up stop, but also too short to do some shopping, unless one orders food up front, plugs the car in, picks up the food and eats it in the car. Right now I can squeeze out about 280mi from the car on a full charge driving 65MPH, and charge 40 minutes, to get another 200 miles. So you can do a 400 mi leg roadtrip with overnight charging easily...unless there is torrential rainfall, the most brutal range killer.
EA sucks though. They don't seem to have a fault sensor system, so they can't tell which chargers are down. Their speeds tend to be 50% of what they claim, i.e. ~80 for the 150KW and about 200 KW tops for the 300KW chargers. Tesla's charger network is far superior... for a billion reasons. But carmakers switching to tesla's port standard will fix nothing on its own. It's like we switched from micro USB to Lightning in the mid 2010. It would only have benefited Apple without a real net gain for everybody else.
