I think that is a good idea. If you don’t do it now you, or the future owners of your house, will have to do it in the future. Plan for a minimum of 30 amps, but if you have the capacity, put in a 50 or 60 amp outlet. The cable will cost a bit more, but you’ll appreciate it when you have two 4Runner electrics, and an old Model X as a plow truck.
Mercedes-Benz switching to NACS:
- Mercedes-Benz to integrate North American Charging Standard (NACS) in its electric vehicle line-up – introduction in North America starting 2025
- Mercedes-Benz drivers gain access to more than 12,000 Tesla Superchargers across North America beginning in 2024
It’s the first of the Germans, which seems significant.
If putting it on the side of your house is inconvenient, have them* run it to wherever will work. It’s not a big deal to put an outlet (and EVSE) on a 4x4 sticking a few feet out of the ground next to the driveway. Pretty much exactly like this.
Also, I don’t remember off the top of my head if you need a neutral for this. Even if you don’t, I’d have the electrician run one out there anyway to future proof it. That was a mistake I made years ago. I ran 240 to my garage and a few years later had to run a neutral wire out there as well. Hardly a big deal, but it would have been easier to do it all at once.
*In a perfect world, you’d have the electrician do all of that. However, since you don’t need it yet, you could have the electrician run it to a box on the outside of your house. Then when you are ready, you can worry about running the wires the rest of the way, but at least part of it is done.
You don’t. At least not for the Tesla wall charger. In my case, I didn’t have a neutral available at all, since I shared the circuit with my A/C and it didn’t have a neutral either. I’d mostly agree though that it’s a decent idea if the cost difference is marginal.
With plowing, and having to use a tractor to help out the plow truck when the snow gets too deep, a simple set up with a post is going to be problematic. We get to the point in winter where we can’t throw the snow down off our deck. A post would be buried in short order. I may have a place or two that I could set that up though.
So I may very well just make sure another outlet is available. Been wondering if a real type system that is used for air hoses are made. Pull the cord out, and it retracts when you are done.
Nissan’s next on NACS:
I wonder when Volkswagen will announce. I think it’s basically inevitable at this point, but they are the main force behind Electrify America, and while EA has announced that they’re supporting NACS, clearly most of the existing chargers are CCS. They’ll need to come up with some plan for upgrading the old chargers to support NACS.
It seems Tesla wasn’t just optimistic in their vehicle range estimates, but actively rigged things to give rosy numbers. In 2022, they actually created a team specifically to get Tesla owners to cancel service appointments when the customers complained about range.
Inside the Nevada team’s office, some employees celebrated canceling service appointments by putting their phones on mute and striking a metal xylophone, triggering applause from coworkers who sometimes stood on desks.
In a follow-up to the Reuters article, Slate discusses the damage this has done to EV design and adoption, by focusing on range and trying to portray EVs as a one-to-one replacement for ICE vehicles.
Thanks to Tesla’s leadership, consumers are buying the biggest battery EVs they can, thinking that they’re saving the planet when they’re actually hoarding unused batteries to ward off their personal range anxiety. Because Americans only drive 40 miles a day on average, and because 95 percent of car trips are 30 miles or less, the range figures Tesla has normalized are wildly overkill and exacerbate battery supply chain issues that are only just starting to bite. Only wild inefficiency can make it feel like EVs can replace gas cars perfectly, and even then, with the best charging network available, long-distance journeys will still never be as fast and efficient as they are with gas cars, because it will always take longer to juice up an EV.
The big lie at the heart of Tesla’s big-battery approach is that EVs can directly replace gas cars without any real behavioral change on the part of consumers. But no matter how desperate the public and lawmakers are to believe this—it would be nice!—it simply isn’t so: Internal combustion and battery electric vehicles are fundamentally different technologies, with different strengths and weaknesses. No battery electric will ever be as good at unplanned, long-range trips in remote areas as a gas car, just as no gas car will ever refill its tank overnight.
I think EV adoption would surely be much slower without Tesla leading the pack on expanded ranges, but maybe we’d be in a better spot today (or 10 years from now) if we’d accepted the differences between EV and ICE instead of pretending an EV could act just like an ICE vehicle on road trips.
We know the answer to this, because it was tried and rejected by the public. Automakers pushed their golf-cart vehicles like the BMW i3, Ford Focus EV, Chevy Spark, and so on. No one except true believers wanted them.
It’s true that the other end of the spectrum is also ridiculous. We’ve seen people on this very board claim that they need 1000-mile range and 5-minute recharging or whatever. And some automakers are trying to take advantage of this by constantly touting next gen batteries that will never exist. For example:
Toyota is actively damaging the EV industry by making promises that they can’t keep. It’s obvious that they have no purpose other than to slow down adoption of their competitor’s products.
But in the middle of these extremes we have the 250-350 mile cars, Tesla or otherwise, that provide a genuinely good balance. If the choice was between a 70-mile EV and an ICE car, I’d have to pick the ICE. Because even though most of my trips are under 70 miles, enough of them aren’t that it would be a significant inconvenience to not have that ability. But 300-ish miles? Perfect. Even on long trips, that’s enough that it drives like an ICE.
Slate seems to want it both ways. Is 300 miles too much or too little? If they were exaggerating the range, then the cars should have come with bigger batteries. But they also want to claim the batteries were too big.
Oh, I just noticed. The article is by Edward Neidermeyer. He’s made an entire career lying about Tesla. He’s been wrong about just about everything he’s said, ever. Nothing to see here.
Incidentally, I can easily get the stated range on my Model 3. It means driving at 65 mph in warm weather with the aero rims. I have the sport rims installed and often drive faster on the highway, which means about a 20% loss vs rated. It’s not a giant mystery. The same was true of my past ICE cars and EPA mpg.
I decided that the longest trip I’m likely to want to do with my daily driver, without wanting to recharge, is about 130 miles, there and back, with a diversion to pick up friends. And i might want to do it in the winter, with 4 people in the car, when the battery isn’t brand new. And I’ll want to travel most of that at highway speeds.
I think a claimed-range of 250 will cover me nicely, and 200 might be enough. There are a lot of EVs in that bucket.
I’m definitely in the “40 miles per day” camp for a usual day (often less). But yeah, i want to be able to do this kind of thing without worrying about it.
Regarding that argument (that the focus on long range EVs unnecessarily concentrates precious resources), I think that PHEVs are a good solution. They can do the typical daily drive of 30-40 miles using only electricity while still being able to drive long distances. I know that I am thinking of buying a plug-in hybrid myself.
My work commutes is ~5 miles (I commute by bicycle quite often). I travel ~30 miles once a month. So a 100 mile range would easily cover most of my trips. However, I do take longer trips on occasion, and to sparsely populated areas (northern Wisconsin, UP Michigan) which I don’t think have many charging areas and I usually camp in places without electricity so even level 1 charging is not easy.
I COULD just rent an ICE for these ~3 times a year trips, but that seems a bother.
I’m definitely eyeing a PHEV for my next vehicle (right now I have a non plug-in Prius)
Although PHEV add complexity (and you are lugging a heavy engine when in electric mode), they fit my use case well. It is arguable it would be better to have 5 people switch to PHEV than 1 to a pure EV (not sure what the exact battery ratio is)
Brian
We had a PHEV for a while, and if it hadn’t been a lemon, we’d still have it. It had a claimed-range of 20 miles, and it actually went 10-15 miles on the battery by the time we ditched it (depending on weather) and i calculated that half of all our miles had been electric over the life of the car.
If i only had one car, that would be my choice. I’d look for 60-80 miles on the battery, (and probably settle for 40) and I’d almost never burn gas.
Well, here’s good news (not): the guv of Texas has imposed a yearly fee of $200 on electric cars because you owners are robbing state coffers of gasoline taxes. There’s also a $400 one-time fee, but I’m not sure if that’s for all residents or just people moving into the state; I’m not sure because my brain fogged over with rage (and I don’t even live in TX anymore).
That just means Texas is late to the game. Several other states already impose annual registration fees for EVs that are higher than ICEs. Those gas taxes have to be made up somewhere. Though $200 a year seems to be higher than most states.
Right, since 2020 Virginia has a “Highway Use Fee” paid as a surcharge to the registration – and not just for EVs: For electric cars, it is a flat $88.20 fee, but also designated fuel-efficient (>25mpg) gas vehicles pay either a flat $35 or can opt to prorate it based on the miles per gallon and how far the driver travels in a year, multiplied by the gas tax rate the previous year (i.e. based on how much fuel you “failed” to buy and thus to pay tax on).
We had a Prius Prime. I really liked that car. We went all EV, and gave it to our kids. They still drive it and love it.
It’s perfectly reasonable to tax owners of autos and trucks for highway maintenance. Trucks do a lot more damage, and should pay more, but everyone who uses the public roads should pay something. And “tax gas” is no longer an equitable way to do that.
I have no problem with such fees, unless they are designed to be punitive.
Yes, and I believe eventually it will have to go to the miles-driven based system being the primary source, which will definitely have to hit heavy trucks more (thus will have that industry pushing against it).
It should be a combination of miles and weight. Heavy trucks do a lot more damage to the roads, mile for mile, than passenger cars.