Road trips w/ electric vehicles

Factual Questions
21

Ask yourself: when do people make long trips? And two very common times of the year are Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. So you end up with a situation like this where Tesla drivers are waiting four plus hours for a supercharger:

Since it takes vastly longer to charge an electric car than to fill up a car with gas and thus more expensive to build the infrastructure I think these kinds of delays will persist–as it is not economically feasible to spend the money to meet the excess demand when it only happens a few times a year.

22

Perhaps someone will develop a portable charger that they can deploy at locations of high demand? I expect there will be a market solution to the problem of intermittent high demand.

23

For comparison, what’s the cost for a new gas station? Or the cost of decommissioning a gas station? (To be clear, these are rhetorical questions, I don’t expect you to know the answers.)

I’m not sure those costs are unreasonable. High power equipment is dangerous if installed incorrectly and needs to be permitted and constructed carefully.

I’m surprised that power companies aren’t jumping into the business of vehicle-charging stations. It’s a rare growth opportunity for them.

24

All of those things are true, but the thing to remember about sparsely populated areas is that (tautology warning) not many people live there. The problems you mention may interfere with EV adoption by people in those areas, or by people who frequently need to cross those areas, but it will have little impact on general EV adoption.

Tesla’s supercharger network covers the vast majority of interstate highways in the lower 48. Almost anyplace that is accessible by interstate can be driven to with a Tesla. (I don’t know what the exceptions are, but I’m saying “almost,” because I’d be surprised if there aren’t a few exceptions.) Other charging networks will catch up.

As said by others, most EV charging is done at home, so the biggest obstacle to EV adoption is providing charging for the 25-33% (whatever it is) of Americans that live in apartments, and particularly those that only get street parking.

25

I think the electric utilities will get in the charger business. On the other hand, will that be anti-competitive? Would they instead want to be on the sidelines, and agnostic as to who provides the chargers?

26

There are some economies of scale and early adaptor costs involved in that. I don’t know how much they will come down, but I doubt that they will stay that high.

It’s hard to get a decent quote, but I see anything from $300,000 to 1 million to put in a gas station now.

27

But most of these people have jobs, so I expect a perk lots of companies will offer is charging facilities for their employees. And since employees are at work several hours a day low speed/low cost chargers are acceptable.

Apartments which provide off street parking will also add low speed/low cost chargers as a perk as electric vehicles become more widespread.

28

Just for the Tesla example, you can look at supercharge.info to view the current supercharging infrastructure. While there’s definitely holes in there (OK panhandle, northeastern Montana, central nebraska), it’s hard to find any rural location in the US that isn’t less than 300 miles from a supercharger in any given driving direction, and most major highways have them spaced no more than 100 miles apart.

For rural Oregon (your other example), I tried to pick something difficult like Lakeview OR going directly east (to Twin Falls, ID), but that trip normally routes you through Burns OR anyway (140 mi away) , which is currently a permitted site for a new supercharger construction.

With many new EVs now exceeding 300 miles of range, and future EVs projected to get 500 miles of range, even really rural locations of the country should at least be possible for widespread EV adoption, especially within 5-10 years - assuming there is charging (ie 240VAC, 30 amp service, same as an electric dryer) set up at home.

29

I have a Chevy Volt, my hubby will probably buy a Tesla in a few months. We have a level 2 charger at home. And I’m still not sure it’s possible to have a significant percentage of EVs on the highways at the same time, with today’s (well, 2019’s) usage patterns.

Take an ordinary highway connecting two large cities (say, Toronto and Montréal : 500 km or 310 statute miles). Basically, even if fully fueled/charged at the start, every car that travels highway 401 the entire length from Toronto to Montréal needs to refuel/recharge at least once.

For gasoline or diesel vehicles – including plug-in hybrids – it’s done with petrol stations that are located at most highway exits, whose size is a function of the expected traffic and how much time it takes every vehicle to refuel. The logistics of filling the stations themselves is complex and wasteful, but well-established.

For fully-electric cars, multiple charge centers will also be located along the highway, but since every car needs to remain plugged in for long periods, you’d need a lot of individual stalls.

Take the Tesla Supercharger center in Belleville, Ontario, with 20 stalls. I don’t know the specifics, but typically Tesla sets up the stalls in pairs, with 150 kW available per pair (so you charge faster if there’s no car in the adjoining stall). To power this charge center fully, you need a 1.5 MW power input. And with that level of power, when the center is full, each of the 20 cars will need to stay about 30 minutes to get to 60% charge (let’s assume that’s enough to get to the destination). So this center could handle at most 40 cars per hour. I’m guesstimating, it could be 50.

I can’t find the number of passenger cars that travel that entire 500-km route on a typical day. That would help in estimating how many stalls would be needed, and how much peak electrical power capacity would be needed. I think power will be a limiting factor, since the delivery infrastructure (power lines, transformers, etc.) needs to be built up to support the peak loads.

30

Already exists:

31

That’s probably overkill, though. Take your 310 mi route. Tesla makes a number of vehicles that are at or just below that figure. So they may want to stop, but only for a quick top-off. At low charge levels, you can add 80 miles in just 5 minutes at a Supercharger. Then finish the charge at the destination with an overnight charger.

32

I think the takeaway here is the bleeding obvious: that you really have to evaluate your personal circumstances, where you travel, and how often you travel really long distances. Honestly, I’m sure it’s been more than a decade since I drove far enough that an electric car range would have been an issue. OTOH, the times that I did would have posed a severe challenge. Such as, for example, trips to a cottage or marina in northern Ontario.

I remember one time having “range anxiety” even with an ICE vehicle. We had rented a cottage way up in the Muskoka cottage country region of northern Ontario. The night before we were due to leave, there was a severe thunderstorm and the power got knocked out, with no indication at all of when it might be restored. I didn’t have a lot of gas in the tank and the one or two gas stations in the local village had no power, so we departed with a child and a dog and all our possessions on that stormy night, in the hope that I had enough gas to reach somewhere that had power and a source of fuel. We made it, but that isn’t the sort of situation for an electric car until the supporting infrastructure becomes much, much more robust. I’m totally in favor of all-electric vehicles. My point is not that they’re impractical, but that we have a lot of work to do on the infrastructure side.

33

And of course the Tesla supercharger network is only for use by Tesla autos, which is, I think, only a couple million cars in the US. Last year, for instance, they sold about half a million cars, versus millions of others sold by other companies. As EVs get more common from various companies, I really expect that charging points will be available everywhere, even west of the Mississippi River. Remember that a charging point could possibly be added anywhere on the electrical grid, which is most places. Even Oregon.

34

One point to remember: How many families in the US already own more than one car? And in how many of those families does one of the drivers have a short commute? In every such family, you could easily replace one of the cars with an all-electric. On an ordinary day, you’d end up with one gasoline car on the road instead of two. And when you need to make a rare long road trip, you just use the gas car for that.

No, it wouldn’t be a complete replacement of the entire US auto fleet, but a replacement of half the cars isn’t exactly small potatoes. And once you’ve got half the cars on the road electric, it becomes a lot easier to build the infrastructure to expand it further.

35

That’s a good point, except that the way things are looking soon a family will have no option to buy an ICE vehicle and an electric vehicle- they will both have to be electric even if it in no way suits the families needs.

36

Renting a car is such an unbelievably expensive, unpleasant and inconvenient experience that most people buy enough car for all their needs, not just their most common needs. Buy a four wheel drive car for the 10 days a winter it snows, and then drive it the other 355 days when it doesn’t snow. Buy a pickup truck for towing the boat up to the cabin or picking up IKEA furniture on the weekend and then drive it empty to work every day rather than drive a sedan to work and rent a pickup on the weekends. I don’t forsee people buying a car with a 50 mile range for commuting creating the need to rent a different one every time they want to take a road trip.

37

That’s a bit of an exaggeration. The UK, for instance, said that starting in 2030 no new gas or diesel cars will be sold. So it says nothing about buying used gas or diesel vehicles. Second, is nine years from now “soon”?

38

Not in comparison. There’s a cutoff point of course, but driving a truck instead of a sedan will cost you thousands more per year in gas alone, not to mention the cost of the truck and general inconvenience of having a giant vehicle. That will pay for quite a few days of rentals, not to mention delivery charges.

For many, it still makes sense to go with the giant truck (or whatever), but people are also really bad at math. Lots of people drive way more car than really makes sense.

39

What makes renting a car so difficult for some? In a typical year, we’d rent one 3 or 4 times. I never thought of it as being so hard.

And if most of the market is electric, but there are niches where only an ICE vehicle will do, don’t you think manufacturers would want to make a vehicle for that market?

40

I live in Arizona. I’m often in some distant corner of the state, far from a city, and I’ll see a Tesla on the road. They’re everywhere. The owners have figured out something we haven’t, and they’re making it work. Where I don’t see Teslas is dead by the side of the road, or loaded on flatbeds because because they ran out of juice.
You can’t just look at access to charging stations when you consider rural use of EVs. If you live on a ranch, your primary charging station is home.