According to this, yes. No map or list though.
Tesla Superchargers are also considered level 3.
Sure they do. Go to PlugShare and filter on CCS/SAE for example. That’s the most common non-Tesla DC fast charging option in the US (and I believe is the standard that European Teslas use). Here in Southern California, there are a literal shit ton of them and I rarely have to plan my route around them. I did a trip last weekend from Santa Barbara to Long Beach and back and needed a charge on the way back. I stopped at a Target with five charging stations and picked up an additional hundred-ish miles of range while I did a quick shop. Well more than I needed to get home and not a waste of time as I needed to shop anyway.
The car is a Chevy Bolt, basically a generation back in terms of fast charging, but suits my needs well.
I’ve long loved electric vehicles. (Do my slot cars count? Or a warehouse cart I steered?) I expect road EVs are the future for many humans before long - but the other 80-90% won’t be included anytime soon. I expect autonomous EVs to be mandated before long in populous areas with supportive infrastructure. I do not expect such support to reach much of the world anytime soon.
The label EV covers many sins. Electric bikes, scooters, carts, rickshaws, autos, big and little trucks, et al, of varied price, quality, and capability. They’re not new; several held land speed records circa 1900. Take THAT, Breedlove! Battery capacity has been THE limiting factor since day one. Range is still costly and charging is slow. EVs will stay niche-critters till costs drop and infrastructure spreads. That’s a given.
Cheap EVs, like cheap ICE vehicles, will FAIL easily and often. A junker is a junker no matter if powered by battery, petrol, diesel, steam, nuke, hamster, pedals, perpetual motion, pelican, pulley, wind, or horse. I can cheaply build a ratty EV that will easily kill me and bystanders, no trouble.
We may have lunchbox-size fusion reactors eventually, sending clean energy directly to the motors on each wheel. THEN we’ll know that EVs have won.
It’s worse than that! I’ve seen people driving cars that you have to put exploding liquids in. That might cost upwards of $22,000 over the life of the car, or you might have to dig a hole in the ground a few hundred feet down, set the stuff on fire, and build a $22 billion dollar factory just to refine it into the exploding liquid!
Seriously, the fact that there exist more expensive L2 chargers doesn’t make the cheaper ones stop existing. You can by 25 thousand dollar gold-plated audio cables, too.
Ya’ll have convinced me. The last 14,000 miles must have been some weird fluke. I’m going to sell my EV and go back to gas.
You want to avoid the point that you have to have an electrician come in and put a 240V line into your garage (or somewhere on the outside of the house) just so you can get a decent overnight charge. Tell you what, I have an electrician coming in a couple of weeks to do some other work, and I’ll ask him how much it would take to make my house EV-ready. If this thread is still going then, I’ll post it. Maybe it will be what we all consider a small amount, maybe it won’t.
I’m really getting fed up with the EV advocates in this thread hand-waving away legitimate concerns about cost, range, infrastructure, etc. Every place in the U.S. ain’t southern California, and every EV car ain’t a Tesla.
I didn’t realize that I needed a 240v outlet in order to successfully own and operate my Bolt. I don’t know how I’ve been getting along this past year with just the standard 120v outlet.
Anyway, I have an informal quote from my electrician for a 240 outlet. He said to put one right below the breaker panel would cost me “a couple hundred bucks.” Dunno if I’m going to bother.
I will acknowledge any legitimate concerns. There certainly are some, and I am fully aware that at the present time, an EV is not a good choice for many.
However, I will not stand for complete bullshit concerns. I will not stand for someone giving a blanket assertion of “EV’s do not work well on rough roads”, and then walking that statement back by saying what they meant was “really cheap EV’s” or what they really meant was “Rough roads with no access to chargers whatsoever”
That’s bullshit.
The average commute for someone in the USA is 32 miles round trip; Your commute may be much longer (well above average). An EV may not work for you. But don’t tell me that it will not work for others because YOUR commute is long.
You may not be able to charge at home because you live in an apartment, and there are no convenient public chargers anywhere near you. An EV may not work for you. But don’t tell me that it won’t work for others because of YOUR situation.
An EV may be out of your price range. Hell, a car may be out of your price range if you are making $10/day. An EV may not work for you. But don’t tell me that an EV is unaffordable for anyone else because YOU can’t afford one.
And please, please don’t try to convince me that public charging infrastructure will not improve - that it is as good as it’s ever going to get RIGHT NOW. And don’t try to convince me that EV’s are as efficient and as cheap as they are ever going to get and that range will not improve in future EV’s ever. Because I will laugh in your face.
Making a decision between multiple options based on your preferences is pretty much the opposite of planning your life around the car. You had to make only one stop, said stop only needed to be 10 minutes long, could make it at pretty much any town along the I-80 corridor or at your destination, and if the gas station you prefer was out of service for whatever reason could easily just go to another.
No no, you must be mistaken. Kent Clark says that EV owners have to stop for four hours in major metropolitan areas to recharge 270 miles. He wouldn’t say that if he wasn’t dispelling the fake news that level 3 chargers exist in the US.
I mean, other than seeing pictures of them on the Internet and using them, I don’t have any proof that level 3 chargers exist in the US. Hats off to Kent Clark for busting that myth!
so if I wanted a 240VAC circuit run to my garage to power an arc welder, that would be a ruinous, crazy expense too? We’re talking about running a circuit similar to two you likely already have in your house for a dryer and a range. There’s nothing special about making things “EV Ready” unless you insist on having a hard-wired charging station installed. The Mustang Mach-E includes a charge cable which can plug into the same 240VAC NEMA 14-50 receptacle that electric ranges do.
but yes, if getting a circuit run to where you park your vehicle is a problem, then maybe an EV isn’t for you.
Similar might apply for most of the world, or at least in large cities where the average commute might be only around 4 to 8 km. EVs, especially as PUVs, can do very well.
The problem lies with places with rough roads and/or insufficient infrastructure for electric grids, etc., and these include the outskirts of several towns and cities. That’s where ICEVs come in.
Finally, the same applies to the extensive supply chains (usually, thousands of km across oceans and land masses, and involving many countries) to distribute raw materials, components, and finished manufactured goods in general, including ICEVs and EVs, not to mention the materials and components needed for roads, electric grids, related infrastructure, power generation, etc. Substantial levels of ICEs are needed for them, including a large chunk of mining, manufacturing, and transport (e.g., container ships and long-haul trucks). Similar even applies to mechanized agriculture and food processing.
Thus, both EVs supporters and their critics are right. There are limited uses for EVs, but if ICEVs can still increase in use, then that should help in developing EVs.
My circuit panel is not in my garage. It’s in my basement, on a different wall. And at some point, a line to my garage is going to have to cross the foundation of my house. But like I said, I’ll ask my electrician. Maybe it’s a small expense, maybe it isn’t.
I’m getting frustrated trying to learn the Straight Dope here. Because I keep running across posts like this.
Ravenman, I’m a skeptic, not a shill for the oil industry. I’m not dispelling anything, thank you very much.
Here’splugshare.com. Let’s say I want to drive from St. Louis to Branson, Mo. That’s a pretty common excursion for us hicks. Google maps says it’s 251 miles. Maybe I can make it without recharging. Let’s say I can. But when I get to Branson, I’ll definitely need to recharge. The map says no Level 3 chargers in Branson. How long will it take me to recharge before I head back to St. Louis?There’s a Tesla Supercharger in Springfield, but what if I don’t own a Tesla? Now, there IS a Level 3 charger in Lebanon, Mo, which is 101 miles from Branson. Not convenient, but at least it’s between Branson and St. Louis, so I guess I should stop there on the way down and back.
A further look at the map tells me it’s an even worse situation from Kansas City to Branson. One Tesla supercharger in Springfield, no non-Tesla superchargers once you get out of KC.
St. Louis-Des Moines. 340 miles, no Level 3 chargers or Tesla superchargers along the best route.
This ain’t southern California, folks.
WTF do you keep saying “rough roads” are a problem?
The problem as I see it ralfy, is you’re expanding the scope of the OP far beyond the discussion. Many of the points that have been made are still true, however. The trickle down is going to happen in third world countries (which is what you’ve been talking about for the most part) the same as it will in places like W.Europe and California. As the technology gets better, it will become more common place everywhere.
In some respects , areas that have limited infrastructure have an advantage.
Telco services in parts of Africa have virtually no landlines and almost everyone carries a cell phone. Why? Landline infrastructure is expensive, easy to incapacitate, difficult to install, and disruptive to landowners. Running up cell towers is comparatively easy. Same goes for power distribution. Decentralized power is the way to go in areas where power lines are either difficult to install or prohibitively expensive.
Anything vehicle can be electric or some type of ICE; most of this discussion has been confined to cars because most of us here drive them. Talking about container ships and tuk tuks is ultimately a discussion of another type.
Harping on the expense of installing a 240v charger in your house is really not the hill to die on. It’s something that most people are going to be able to do for under $1000 one time and maybe spend $250 every decade for maintenance, which is IMO negligible when talking about supporting a vehicle even though I’m using significantly inflated estimates. I think that for the sake of discussion it’s really, really safe to assume anyone can put a L2 charger in their own owned house without issue. Where installing chargers becomes problematic is other situations, like if you don’t own the property or don’t have assigned parking, or if you’re someone who spends a significant number of nights parked somewhere other than home.
Using an EV for what could be called ‘basic local driving’ is one style of use, this is where you have a short or medium commute and make short drives ending at home, like ‘home to work then back and some less-far-than-work errands or events, end up parked at home’. This kind of trip can actually work on 120v charging (which only gets 2-4 miles of range per hour), because the daily usage is small and the charging time is long. This kind of driving is what I think Pork Rind is doing with his Volt, and actually works off of a 120v wall charger.
Where the faster charging comes in is if the EV is doing anything past ‘basic local driving’. As you start to make longer trips, or to extend the time between charges by spending time at a residence that doesn’t have charging available, the 20-50 miles of range you can get from a 120v outlet won’t keep the car topped off, and a full charge might not even make the trip (Volt only has 50 miles of electric range, for example). Obviously this comes up on 200+ mile trips, but can also easily be an issue on shorter trips (like my first example which has received so much hostile attention). When I was talking about ‘wall charging won’t cut it’, this is the situation I’m talking about.
The more vocal EV proponents tend to talk as though the ‘basic local driving’ use case is the only one that most people ever encounter, and dismiss the other ones as weird edge cases. I think that is hilariously inaccurate for most people, and that it’s quite likely to end up not charging an EV every day for a variety of reasons and to make trips that don’t fit neatly into EV ranges. For another real world example, my parents have needed to make a 220 mile round trip once ever two weeks for the past few months for medical treatment. This is no big deal in an ICE vehicle, even if they decide to add 50 miles to the trip for something fun which they often do (going to the farmer’s market, visiting someone in the area, etc). In an EV, unless we’re assuming a 2019 model brand new extended range Tesla they can’t just make the trip and come home, they’re going to have to add in an hour or more of time for charging.
I have had a Nissan Leaf for about a year now. There is a (free!) level 3 Chademo about a mile from my house that I use weekly to get up to 80% in about 30 minutes, and then I use my 120 V home trickle charge to top it off. There are chargers nearly everywhere I go (level 2 or 3), so I also take advantage of these (often free!) chargers when I am at the supermarket or movie theater. I live in the SF bay area, so maybe this is the leading edge of what is to come soon in other areas.
Or, if I’m feeling lazy, I just fill it up with the home 120 V trickle charge and leave it plugged in for awhile. I don’t see the need for a 240, as this has all been fine for me so far.
Never been close to running empty.
Fair comments for the most part. I think the only thing we’re trying to hammer out is exactly where that line of use for an EV falls for “most people”, and how quickly EV’s and infrastructure will change to make that group larger.
Personally, I don’t think that it’s “hilariously inaccurate for most people” But I recognize that’s just my opinion. EV’s are not a good choice right now for many, particularly in remote, rural areas. But they are a very good choice for many others.
And don’t forget people that REALLY use 4x4 and need good ground clearance 6 months out of the year. It will be interesting what comes around on the EV market.
That crossovers are marketed as off road vehicles is a joke.