The Expert Podcast

Will you even be able to buy a vehicle that's not an electric vehicle at some point very soon? It may not be possible to buy a gasoline vehicle anymore after some period of time. Why do we know this? Well, sales of internal combustion vehicles are now in permanent decline. The engineering that goes behind a gasoline vehicle stopped happening about five years ago, 2017. And that engine technology was abandoned by manufacturers. In fact, General Motors plans all-electric Buicks by 2030. Look, 2030 is not that far away.

That's only seven or so years, six model years of cars, and Buick is just the latest to say it will eliminate internal combustion engines. Many others have done that already, so it won't be available from Buick. How is that going to help you? Well, it may or may not. Here's an article from the Wall Street Journal: this editor rented an electric car for a four-day road trip and spent more time charging than I did sleeping. This person tested the feasibility of taking a road trip. She wouldn't do it again soon. Gee, that sounds interesting.

I thought it would be fun. That's what I told my friend Mac when I asked her to drive with me from New Orleans to Chicago and back in an electric car. I've made long road trips before, surviving popped tires, headlights, shredded wheel, all this kind of stuff, right? I figured driving the brand-new Kia electric car would be a piece of cake—if the public charging infrastructure cooperated. There's the key right there: there's not enough places to charge these vehicles, and it comes from a number of sources.

First of all, to have the facilities to charge the vehicles, you need the space for it—you need the real estate. I don't know when's the last time you looked, but there's not a lot of blank empty commercial real estate laying around that you can build something new on. Most commercial real estate has a building on it already. It may be empty, maybe vacant, but you can't put an electric vehicle charging station in a vacant building. It has to be an outdoor empty lot. And you might say, "Well, just get rid of all the gas stations and put the charging stations where regular fuel—gasoline, diesel—used to be sold." Well, you could do that, but it doesn't happen overnight.

If you decommission the gas station now, the people with gas cars can't charge them, so you have to kind of do it at the rate that you need this. But it's a catch-22. If you do the electric first before those cars, now the person with that property doesn't have any revenue stream right now. Electric vehicles are only one or two percent of all the vehicles on the road. So if you get rid of a gasoline station and put an electric charging station, you're going to be sitting around waiting like crickets for somebody to come pay you for electricity.

At the same time, it's going to cost you hundreds of thousands, maybe a million dollars, to decommission a gasoline station and make it an electric charging station, because it's not as a matter of just simply getting out of a gas pump and putting a charging station there. There are fuel tanks underground. Eliminating a fuel tank is a very serious environmental permitted process. There is a database of underground storage tanks—some of them are leaking—they call it LUST, the leaking underground storage tank database.

If you have a fuel station and you take out that gas tank, it has to be done with proper permits. You have to backfill a certain way. You have to mitigate any soil contamination. It's a lot of money. It's not just a matter of ripping out the pumps and putting in a plug for a charger. And if you spend all that money— a few hundred thousand, a million dollars, whatever it is— and now you're waiting for that one out of a hundred cars that's a charging EV vehicle to come pay you, you could be waiting a long time, because 99 percent of the cars on the road need gasoline, one percent need electricity.

And it's not a high turnover thing. If you park yourself in front of a gasoline station for five minutes and count the number of cars that come in and out, sometimes it could be a hundred cars at a busy gas station because you pull in, you pump gas in maybe two, three minutes, and you leave; another car pulls in two or three minutes and you leave. Good luck watching that at an electric vehicle charging station—it's like watching paint dry.

The car pulls up, he plugs in, that car might have to stay there half an hour, 45 minutes, or an hour to get any kind of a charge level. Level two chargers take a lot of time to get mileage—an hour for 25 miles is the average for a level two charger. Put a level three, but now you need more power grid supply, so cart before the horse.

In this story, they had a range of 310 miles and they plotted the route splitting days into four chunks of seven and a half hours each. They needed to charge once or twice each day and plug in near their hotel overnight, and they had an app to do this. While we'd be fine overnight, we required fast chargers during the day. Many fast charging stations charge in 30 minutes. That's a fast charging station—longer than stopping for gas but good for a bike or bathroom break. So that's a fast charging station.

If you need to charge every 300 miles, you have to stop for 20 or 30 minutes. That could be a lot of charging time. And plus, there's a cost. Over four days, we spent 175 dollars on charging. The equivalent cost for gas would have been 275, so yeah, it's a little cheaper. So they saved a hundred bucks on four days of solid driving. That 100 savings costs us many hours in waiting time—many hours of waiting time to save a hundred bucks.

There were no chargers where they started about four minutes away, so we used our Monday morning breakfast stop to top off on the way out of town. But when we took down 15 over 35 miles—that's scary. Quick charge should take five minutes but the dashboard told us it would take an hour. So the charging times sometimes are not accurate.

Here's a good example of a charging station: they can't find a Walmart charger at the Kia dealership, and they asked a mechanic who was working on an SUV—this is at the Kia dealership, the brand of car they bought. The mechanic says he doesn't know anything about the machine and points us inside, to the front desk. The receptionist asks if it's—we've checked in with the technician. Not many people use the charger, the mechanic said, and we soon see why.

Once up and running, our dashboard tells us a full charge from 18 to 100 will take three hours, and that's supposed to be a fast charger. Won't bore you with the rest of the details, but obviously you see what's happening. There was a lot of times when the estimated route that they could make it to the next leg on this map of a charger, they ran out of electricity before they got to that next place, so they had to scramble to find another place.

This is different than gasoline vehicles. If you've ever been on a long road trip and somehow forgot to look at your gas gauge and it went down below a quarter tank and you want to get gas, how hard is it to find a gas station? Any interstate highway or even major road, five minutes, you're at a gas station no matter where you are. Almost right? Every exit has the big sign with five or six gas stations at an exit and you can plan for gasoline range to drop.

You can see the needle going down with electric vehicles. Sometimes it drops faster than you thought. Many times on their trip they went from forty percent to twenty percent in like fifteen minutes, and who knows where the electricity goes.

So what's the punch line to all this? Well, according to our Technica, Americans say they want more electric vehicles, but everybody is wanting to have 50 percent by 2030. Remember that year? We saw that before: GM plans all-electric Buick lineup by 2030. Well, that's because the government and automakers are trying to meet that goal—2030.

Well, with that kind of charging network and range anxiety, is it realistic to say that we'll have fifty percent within six years? Even within the government, they may not reach that. The United States Postal Service is trying to switch to all electric, but they may only buy 5,000 electric vehicles during that time.

What do buyers want? Well, good news for those who want EV adoption says that there's a growth in customer searches for EVs, but it's not always a cheaper option if you're buying a new car, because the car itself is going to cost more even after the tax credits. And the cost of fueling isn't that much cheaper, like we saw that road trip saved them a hundred dollars on a four-day road trip, $25 a day to spend hours charging.

So is this going to be a good long-term solution? Certainly, there are advantages to electric vehicles and we're not taking an opinion either way. We're just doing the math on—is there enough realistic capacity to make this a thing that happens? Because if there are not enough places to charge them for people to drive around, either one of two things has to happen: people aren't going to be able to drive the car, it will just sit in their driveway; they won't be able to go on long trips and maybe that's part of the plan; or they're going to have to slow down their rate of change to switch over from gas to electric.

Let us know what you think in the comments. Love to hear your opinions. We'll see you on the next video.