So an L1 charger comes with every EV. It plugs into a regular wall outlet and you add about 3 miles of range each hour. This charger is free because you paid for it with your car.
L2 chargers are what the vast majority of EV owners have at home and are also found at hotels, grocery stores, etc. They add about 30 miles of range per hour. An install of this can vary from $500 to $2,500 for a home installation, depending on a ton of factors.
L3 chargers, of which Superchargers are one type, add around 200 miles of charge in about 3 minutes. We are talking tens of thousands of dollars.
So earlier when you talked about installing a supercharger at home, it made zero sense. Literally nobody ever would do such a thing.
The most important point that many people don’t get about EVs is that the driving experience is vastly superior to an equivalent ICE car. Sure, many people think that they absolutely need some number of range. Maybe some do. But I’d bet you that a decent percentage of these people would change their opinions if they tried driving an EV because they are that much better.
To use an analogy, 10 years ago many people would question why they would trade their flip phone with four days of battery life for a smartphone that maybe lasts a day. Today, it’s a no brainer. Most people will trade off more frequent charging for an iPhone to get the vastly superior performance, even if they said at one time that four days of battery life was a MUST HAVE!!!
If you are going to go with a Rivian R1T, you would definitely do yourself a favor to get acquainted with the charging network near you. It will make your life much easier and fun.
Check out https://www.plugshare.com/ and look up where CCS DC fast charging places are. Figure out where the L2 stations are near you as well. The DC fast chargers will add 200 miles of range in 30 minutes. You seriously should not plan a trip by looking at your total range, and then figuring you need to fully charge on arrival. This is not how you drive an EV. Plan your trip.
You’re still thinking like a gasoline truck driver.
Now I have another concern. I have 200 amp service to my house. I just looked at my panel, and it’s pretty full already - if I’m reading it correctly, I have a single 30 amp slot that isn’t already dedicated. That means if I have to have a dedicated circuit I’m limited to a max of 30 amps (and a single slot means 120V, correct?) for a charger.
But a 120V charger seems to be hopelessly inadequate for anything other than topping off. If I have any hope of seriously recharging a low battery overnight, I need 240V and more than 30 amps, correct?
Does that mean I’d need to bridge off an already-dedicated circuit (the one for the electric oven seems to be the biggest, except for the AC)? So I can’t use the oven and charge my car at the same time? Do I have to buy a gas oven if I want to have an electric car?
Odds are that a licensed electrician can work this out for you at a reasonable price. The biggest cost would be if you have to run a 240v line to a distant place.
But really, a 30 amp charger would be just fine for most folks. Honestly if an electrician told me it would be $200 to get the 30 amp plug working, or $1,000 to install a 50 amp, I’d take the 30 amp in a heartbeat. No question.
Ya, so the only public charger within 30 min of my house is a J-1772 at a Walgreens the is a block away. Luckily the next closes charger is a CCS at a harley dealer. There isn’t a single CCS on the drive to my in-laws though there is a tesla supercharger station on the drive. Are the J-1772 the L2s that will get us 40 miles per hour? I’m not sure I like the mind set of the EV driver of “how do I make this work” rather than my current “what is the fastest way to get from A to B so I can start my vacation”. I am excited about the better driving experience particularly the low end torque and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited about doing 0-60 in 3.2 seconds.
Ravenman I talked to my electrician about getting a 3 phase drop to my house for a workshop and a supercharger but the nearest 3 phase is more than a mile away so it was out if my ball park. Particularly if we ever get 2 EVs each of them charging on a 240Vx 50 amp outlet will come very close to maxing out my home’s power draw over night (luckily we just upgraded from the original 100 amp max). Being able to charge two cars to max in a little over 2 hours (wiki numbers not yours) is a nice thought and while it may be a niche use being able to come home from vacation with my tank empty and wake up with 600 miles of range in 8 hours is certainly enough for me to justify 240v 100a charging if it exists and I had an EV with a 600 mile range.
I’m telling you - there is no damn way that anyone in their right mind would install an L3 supercharger at their home. Nobody. Not even Elon Musk would do such a thing. It’s a huge expense with extremely little utility.
A 50 amp, 240 volt circuit for each charger will suit 99.9999% of scenarios for EV owners. I would bet that a 30 amp circuit would suit like 95 percent of charging use.
I’m most certainly not trying to convince you to go out and buy an EV today - it sounds like the technology isn’t there for you to be comfortable with it.
The only point I’m trying to make is that with this new technology, many people have a hard time judging what they need because much of the concept of how you use a car is just fundamentally different, so they have a hard time judging what they actually need.
For example, your scenario of coming home late from a vacation and then needing 600 miles of range by 8 am the next morning. This is such an unrealistic scenario to me: someone comes home from vacation and then immediately needs to take a 10 hour road trip with no possibility of stops for fast charging? I just don’t believe this is a thing.
I have this problem. I don’t have room on the panel to add an outlet for L2 – I already hired the electrician and settled for L1, which is good enough for my plug-in hybrid, since it doesn’t have a very large battery.
I have two possible solutions:
Run more power to the house. I could upgrade from 120amp to 200 amp service. That would be extremely expensive, as there’s a gas line next to the existing power line, which is no longer to code, so I’ve have to cut a hole in a cement wall, run a new trench, and deal with the new power source in the house. I’m thinking about it, but probably won’t.
swap out the power-hungry halogen lights I had installed in the dining room for LEDs, and move a bunch of wires around. I haven’t yet approached an electrician about this option (which could be done by an electrician, without hiring a general contractor and a mason, like option (1)) but we had to grab a circuit to put those lights in, so if we took them out again, we could probably do it.
Both are non-trivial, although the latter is a lot cheaper, if I can do it.
I do have a gas oven and a gas drier, by the way. The power for the drier turned into power for the dining room.
I definitely see how it is different adjusting your mind set to new technologies and judging what you need. I certainly have never come back from vacation and immediately driven 600 the next day though I do drive ~200 miles the day after vacation almost every time. I have a hard time wrapping my head around not having a full “tank” at the start of the day we an EV since that is one of the supposed benefits. Sure the 300 mile charge will do the job but we’re back to range anxiety. Same on the front end. If I want to work all day, then drop my dogs with my parents then hit the road I start my road trip 200 miles in the hole and I don’t have a ability to top off before we go since it would take all night.
5o get off talking about my very niche case and back to the topic of why people aren’t quick to pick up EVs I think that asking for a mindset switch is a lot to ask for. Range anxiety certainly is a catch all term but it works as well for planning your drive around where you’re going to fill up instead of the shortest or fastest route as it does for people who can’t be below half a “tank” and must fill up. I think the solution is the same either more range or lots of fast fill ups or a combination of the two. As ws demonstrated you can do an 8 hour drive with current EVs by filling up every 3 hours for 15 minutes (there has got to be an east coast/west coast thing there since even LA to SF would have you mostly doing 80 on I5) . If there was that kind of station density and speed across the country I don’t think range anxiety would be as much of a deterrent . If on the other hand the 8 hour drive could be done without stopping for fuel there would also be less range anxiety. Personally, I’d look to the ICE world where 400 miles between fill ups seems to be the sweet spot but 30 min fill ups seem really long.
Aside from range anxiety what do you guys think is the biggest factor holding EVs at 2% market share? Price? Something else?
Unless you want a Leaf or a Bolt, they could be hard to find. We waited 3 months to get our Prius Prime. My iPace isn’t available at a lot of dealers. You can’t buy a Tesla the “usual” way. Plus, the price. And the fact they’re not for everyone. If I lived in Montana, I wouldn’t get an EV.
If I understand what you’re asking - you’re adding up the ratings of all the breakers in your panel. You don’t have to do that. The total current rating in your panel can exceed (by a lot) the service rating, because you’re not drawing the max current on every circuit simultaneously. (Most of them will never draw the max current.)
So you should be able to easily add a 50-amp breaker as long as you have two free slots in the panel. (If you don’t, you don’t have to replace the whole panel. You can add a small subpanel instead, or potentially replace some single-slot breakers with tandem breakers.)
Canada’s most populous city – Toronto – and its largest populated statistical reporting area – the Greater Toronto Area – doesn’t have all of these plugs everywhere, because it’s not typical for “Canada” as a whole, any more than it’s typical for the “United States” as a whole because a few cold, northern states have outlets.
I’ve only lived in Toronto/GTA, so I can speak for other large, cold Canadian cities.
I have never owned a car that could be driven 8 hours without stopping for fuel. And for that matter, I’ve never owned a butt that could sit for 8 hours without a break. I always get up and walk around on long airplane flights.
I think of 400 miles as a big tank for an ICE. That’s longer than I ever want to drive in one sitting. Four hours is about my max bum-in-seat time.
I don’t usually take a break when I fuel my ICE car, but that’s because I usually top off at the start of my trip, and rarely drive more than 3 hours at a stretch. When I used to drive from Princeton, NJ to Boston, MA, which is theoretically a 4.5-5 hour drive, I always stopped for a meal, and it typically took up 6 hours. Because we had to stop for gas anyway, and sitting that long was really unpleasant.
I fall squarely into the ‘average driver’. On a busy day, I drive about 30 to 40 miles. I get home, plug my car into a 110v outlet, and from 8pm to 6am I get that 40 miles right back.
I had intended to install a L2 charger when I got the car, but a little after the fact discovery showed that the unused 30 amp dryer circuit had actually been repurposed to run an AC unit. The outlet I meant to use was not actually live. And it turns out I’m fine with that. I don’t even actually charge every night.
On the rare occasions that I need more than my home setup can provide, I’ll just use one of the free or inexpensive L2 chargers in town and use that as an excuse for my wife and I to go out for dinner or something.
If we didn’t need a super-easy-to-drive mid-seized sedan for our adult daughter, we would have a smallish gas SUV (Toyata RAV or similar) and a small electric car that was just large enough for four passengers on a short trip, or two people with groceries.
