EV skeptic becomes a convert

From This is Not Cool

Christopher Mims in Wall Street Journal:


A week of relying on a new class of family-size electric vehicle taught me a revealing lesson: A lot of us are all wrong in how we think about electric vehicles and charging.

The narrative for many of us has gone something like this: EV adoption will remain inconvenient and incremental until America has an adequate away-from-home charging infrastructure, including a great many fast chargers capable of filling up our vehicles in not much more time than we would normally spend at a gas station. Without such a network, range anxiety and America’s culture of road trips, super commuting and endless errands will make EVs a nonstarter for many people.

I know this logic well, because I’ve articulated it myself.

But then I opted to test a Kia EV9 for a week. This required charging a vehicle with a nearly 100 kilowatt-hour battery—twice the size of a base Tesla Model 3—from a conventional home outdoor outlet that usually isn’t handling anything more intense than a string of Christmas lights. The surprise was that—for seven days of errands, pickups, and even a lengthy road trip—being limited to charging at the slowest possible rate was just fine, and my inability to fast charge away from home was a nonissue.

I knew that surveys show EV fans generally love the experience of charging their vehicle at home—as long as they pay hundreds of dollars for a dedicated level 2 fast charger, and more to have it installed—like my fellow tech columnist Joanna Stern.

The fact that I didn’t need such a fast home charger at all was a minor revelation. It has fundamentally changed my view of the prospects of EV adoption in the U.S.

In particular, what made my week of EV use possible was the relatively high real-world efficiency of this vehicle, as measured by how many miles it can travel for every unit of charge I put into it. This efficiency is a feature of many new EVs, and especially surprising given the fact that the EV9 has the dimensions and rough outline of a Chevy Suburban.

This was true even on days when I was clocking upward of 30 miles. Combine that with the EV9’s relatively large battery pack—another increasingly standard feature of new EVs—and it meant that I had a more than adequate buffer of range for days when I wanted to go further, as I did on a day trip to the beach.

All of this is due to a long string of incremental improvements to the tech in EVs—not just their batteries but their power electronics, aerodynamics, and the efficiency of systems like cabin heating and cooling. Collectively, these innovations and improvements mean that it’s now possible for millions of Americans to slot an EV into our lives with little more than an extension cord—as long as we have a place to charge it at home.

One thing that’s important to note: While online forums are full of people who have been just fine with level 1 charging at home, some vehicles can have trouble with it, so it is important to note that not every EV can handle this approach in all circumstances.

The average American travels more than 40 miles a day, according to one estimate, but that varies a great deal, with many commuters driving less, and a smaller number driving far more. Based on conversations with experts on EV adoption and range, my experience isn’t atypical.

Put simply: the driving patterns of most Americans mean that most of us will rarely exceed the range of today’s modern, longer-range electric vehicles. As Ford CEO Jim Farley—a self-confessed “petrolhead” now making EVs—recently wrote: “our research shows that roughly half of Americans take trips over 150 miles only four days or fewer per year.”

This means that as long as someone can charge a vehicle at home, and they’re not a super commuter, the state of America’s charging infrastructure isn’t a big impediment. Since 60% of Americans live in detached family homes, most of whom could at least run an extension cord as the EV-driving neighbors in my garage-less village in Maryland do, that means a significant proportion of us could switch to charging an EV at home with little fuss.

For my experiment, I parked the Kia in the driveway alongside my house and attached the charging cord that came with the vehicle to a standard extension cord that reached the outdoor outlet by my front door. When I first plugged in after a long day trip, during which I almost completely discharged the battery, the vehicle helpfully informed me that it would only take 70 hours to fully recharge at the paltry rate my standard 120-volt outlet could handle. This seemed like a disaster, but as the week unfolded, it was anything but.

As it turns out, charging the vehicle overnight added more than 15% capacity, or about 40 miles of range, more than twice what I needed for the subsequent day’s errands. The accumulated surplus charging over the course of the week of daily driving meant that by the end the vehicle was nearly 70% charged.

Keep in mind that if I had hooked the vehicle up to a home level 2 charger it would charge six times as fast. That would mean I could go from empty to 100% overnight.