Chargepoint and EVGO Ruin EV Experience

[emoore]

It amazes me how much people are willing to endure in order to drive an EV. Can you imagine calling a 75% success rate at a gas station mostly fine?

Compare the experiences. With a gas powered car, five minutes and you have a "full charge" 99.9% of the time. With an electric car, in many places, you can't really know when or even whether you are going to make it to your destination. We are a long way from getting the whole country on EV's. A very long way. The Tesla deals will help, but there are going to have to be a whole lot more stations built.

Thousands of gas powered cars roll by the typical gas station every day on a busy highway. There are maybe 6 or 8 cars filling up at once at each station, all day long, with stations every 5-10 miles. If we convert them all to electric, we will need far more electric stations than we have gas stations, because the fill-up time is 30-45 minutes, not 5 minutes.

I see gas powered vehicles being the norm for travel length longer than one tank of gas for the foreseeable future. I think Akio Toyoda is right.

The ideal use case for an EV is one in which you park it in your garage every night. In that case, you don't need the 300 mile range. We should be building EV's with 1/3 the range. That would be far better for the planet than trying to get as big a battery as possible in every car made, when the vast majority of driving is local. The first R. Reduce, reuse, recycle.

My local gas stations rarely have all the pumps working and sometimes the run out of gas. Annoying but not the end of the world. Similar to charging stations.

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[MXA121]

Good feedback, keep it coming!


I did casually shop ICE trucks but I'm willing to deal with some charging issues over everything that comes with ICE ownership (weekly gas station visits, transmissions, noise, smell, slow, etc) plus we know that the charging experience is getting better over time. Rivian's new ABRP planning tool in the app looks great!

 

[MM in South TX]

MY experience with an EV is:
- I come home, pull in the driveway and plug in it every third time I drive it. Then I walk inside. About 15 seconds total. I am NOT just sitting there in the blazing sun, driving rain or freezing cold waiting to fill the tank. I have been saying for years that I HATE going to the gas station (had a gas pick up for my rentals) and standing there like an idiot waiting for it to gas up.

I also had a 4.2 second car when only a few supercars could do that. It was very cool, I got LOTS of attention (and I am petty enough to enjoy it), and I could out accelerate nearly everything else out there (I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE acceleration!).

I have been telling people who ask about driving an EV 2 things:
1. They're not for everyone. IF you are driving 300+ miles every day they really aren't a good fit. If you take many long roadtrips or pull trailers long distances, they're not for you. But that really is a small percentage of the world. Before my brother had an EV he used to rent a car for his long road trips simply to keep the miles off his car and to get a bigger vehicle for the week.
2. Drive an EV and you never will want to drive a gas car again. OK, there are a few exceptions, but in general once you feel the acceleration, (don't) hear the noise, don't have to deal with the maintenance of an engine you really won't want to go back to a stinkin' fume spewing gas car.

You have a good point about not everyone needing a 300 mi range car, but that will be harder to change than just the switch to the EVs. It's so deeply embedded in our expectations that very few people will be satisfied with just buying a car with 90mi range. It's like small city cars. They have many advantages, but very few people buy them for the 3% of the time they won't work.

EVs are fantastic. The CCS charging situation is crap (so I've read). Let's fix the real problem - the charging.

We are not far apart in our opinions. Love my Lightning, but we will probably always have an ICE vehicle. Take a look at ABRP and see what the options are for leaving out of Corpus Christi. Adding Tesla will help, but not much. So in retrospect, if I did it again, I would probably have bought the Lightning with a smaller battery, because I'm really not traveling with it.

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