Unplugging the Myths: An Honest Interview on the EV Charging Reality
Download MP3For those who do not have an electric vehicle, what are you looking at in terms of logistics for getting your trips fully charged? If you have an electric vehicle, well, ABC News did an excellent article about getting a chain of charging stations for certain trips. They interviewed a person who is a YouTube personality, Steve Hams, and he leased a Hyundai Kona for his 17-year-old daughter for three reasons: she needed a commuter vehicle, it needed to be affordable, and she wanted to save money towards college by not paying for gas.
Now, there’s a dilemma that many EV owners can relate to: finding charging stations far away from home. They were talking about how to get from Albany to Gettysburg College, where she’s going to be going to college, and how easily they can charge the car. They want fast chargers to take 30 to 40 minutes. This is a key that a lot of people are overlooking—there are charging stations everywhere you look. If you looked at any route from one city to another, maybe 300 miles away, you’ll find charging stations. Many of them, though, are Level 2, and Level 2 means you might have to stay at that charging station for hours.
Sometimes, the maps of charging stations won’t tell you if it’s a Level 2 or Level 3. Because of the fact that his 17-year-old daughter is on this long trip, and she might have to be sitting in some parking lot for hours, according to the article, it makes me a little nervous. I can’t imagine that. It’s not surprising. They want fast chargers. Having a network of fast chargers is going to make a big difference in how fast people adopt these vehicles.
Right now, many electric vehicle owners have an EV as their second vehicle, or one of many vehicles they have, including gasoline vehicles. So, if they’re going on a long trip, they can drive their gas car, where they don’t have to worry about sitting for two or three hours to recharge on that long trip. Because if you have to do that three times, that’s a day’s worth of extra driving time waiting for chargers.
Drop some comments below and let us know what you think. If you’re an EV owner, are you experiencing this? If you are not an owner of an electric vehicle, what are your thoughts on what it would take for a charging network to be available to make you want to buy one?
One of the things that the government is talking about is having the Tesla Supercharger network be able to be used by non-Tesla owners. The problem is, Tesla does not want its highly reliable and integrated charging network to be clogged with people who can’t charge a car that fast. That makes sense—if you’re a Tesla owner, you wouldn’t be really happy if your parking spots were taken up by people sitting there for hours instead of 20 minutes.
The government is working on a project to install 500,000 new chargers across the U.S. and boosting EV sales by 2030. Sounds like a long distance away, but it’s really only about five model years. We’re in 2023, and within a few months, we’ll start seeing 2024 models out there. So we’re within five model years of having boosted EV sales.
Now, keep in mind, 500,000 chargers are not 500,000 locations—those are the actual number of plugs. So if you have one location that has five plugs, that is counting five towards that 500,000. How does that relate to gas stations? Well, right now, there are about 150,000 gas stations in the U.S. You might think, well, 500,000 is more, but it’s kind of a tricky number. Because at a gas station, how many gas pumps are there? How many nozzles? Even a small gas station is going to have eight—two sides of four. Most of them have 10, 12, or even 24.
So having 500,000 new chargers, even if you divide it by five, that’s only 100,000 charging stations—that’s less than the number of gas stations. You’ve got to keep in mind, too, that when you go to a gas station, you put in gas, and you’re there for maybe three or four minutes, maybe five minutes, and you’re gone. Charging stations take a lot longer. So having 500,000 by 2030 may seem like a lot. First of all, it’s unlikely they’re going to reach that number, but even if they do, it’s still a lot less than there are gas stations.
They want to have electric vehicles be really all that’s being sold by 2030. Tell me how you think that math and those numbers add up. Whether or not you think electric vehicles are a good idea, is this migration being thought out? Are the numbers being thought out? Is it going to work for the vast majority of the population? And if it doesn’t, what’s going to happen when you can’t buy a gasoline car, and it’s all electric cars but there’s no place to charge them?
On the other side, you can charge your electric vehicle at home. You don’t need to charge it outside your home all the time, but if you live in an apartment or a condo or have to park on the street, it might not be practical. But a lot of people can charge up overnight and then just drive the next day on their electricity from home.
So, there’s a lot of moving parts to this. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. We’d love to hear your comments below on what you think about electric vehicles, charging, and the logistics of getting from A to B without having to sit for two or three hours in a parking lot.