The #1 thing (in my opinion) that makes a difference in how easy it is to own an EV is whether you have a driveway or predictable parking spot overnight. Then you just stop thinking about this sort of stuff, ever.
In fact, since I got an EV (I have a two-car garage), I have forgotten to even check my gas car's fuel levels and have driven it near empty a handful of times, I simply forget to even check.
And as others have said, unless you're driving 250mi a day, a regular commute, you can recharge your car on a wall outlet. It does about 12 miles of range per hour, you can easily get about 100 miles of range every night.
> It does about 12 miles of range per hour, you can easily get about 100 miles of range every night.
I wonder if the residential 230v standard in many parts of the world contributes to EV adoption. A standard household outlet can do up to 3.5kw on 230v whereas in North America a standard outlet is 15A at 120v which only gives you a max of 1.8kw (realistically more like 1.6kw). To get increased power you need a 240v circuit which is typically only for selected appliances like dryers, induction cooktops, heat pumps, etc.
We have had an EV for two years and it’s not a problem at all. We don’t even have a charger at home (apartment complex).
A lot of parking spots have chargers. So we only charge it when e.g. bringing our daughter to sports or when my wife is at her choir. That way the car practically always has enough juice.
When traveling, we’ve found that we are generally more efficient. We stop every three hours anyway to get a drink or eat something and hook it up to a fast charger. Since we would have these breaks with an ICE vehicle as well, we skip the separate stop for refueling.
It’s funny, the first time we made a long trip with our EV we tried to plan where to charge, etc. Now we just go without thinking about it, because there are always some fast charging options when you need it (though e.g. NL is much better than DE).
I drive a PHEV with about 22kWh of usable battery and 80km EV only range. I typically do 50-70km a day and a 3.5kW charger covers most days handily. The stock ~1.4kW charger absolutely did not. I can always burn a little petrol if needed, though.
Faster charging gives you more options. 1kW might be fine on the average day for a small, efficient EV but it’d occasionally be limiting.
3.5kW might be enough but you conclusion that 1kW is also enough is absurd.
12kWh is 40 miles, closer to 25-30 in cold climate.
This is absolutely not a range that the average person would be happy with. And no, this isn't range anxiety or bad faith, it's literally less than the average daily commute (30 miles round trip).
"Stop and go drains the battery faster": my understanding is that it's not the case. You recover a good chunk of the energy with regen braking, and EV motor are more efficient at low speed (hyper miling drivers are driving slow).
The average one way commute distance in the US is only 14.4 miles and the median is around 9 [1]. The one way average commute time is about 27 minutes.
As such, I don't think that "most" commutes in US cities are 30+ miles and 45 minutes or more.
It actually doesn’t (at least for me) due to regen braking and reduced drag. I use about 10-15% less juice on a 28km trip in heavy traffic than at a steady 105km/h.
Why do you care how long home charging takes? It’s not like you have to hang out in or around your car while it’s charging, the way you do when filling it at a gas station. As long as your car charges enough overnight to make up for your average daily usage, you’ll be good.
I had level 1, but it was just ridiculously slow. Still charging on a Tuesday, from going low the weekend before, was stupid, and made me unable to go some places. If you go above your average, it super sucks. I don't want to fill up, and I don't want to sit 10x longer than filling up with gas, at a charging station.
In Ireland there are electricity tariffs with an extremely cheap window of 2-4 hours at night, that’s one of the main reasons people want faster charging here anyway.
i do charge at home, i have 50 Amps , fairly average around my area. I do charge at supercharges once every 3 months. I do travel ~20k miles a year. I never limit myself on when to go just because of charging.
You're assuming a perfectly spherical driver who responsibly comes home after work every day at 6 pm and never forgets to plug in the charger, and leaves every morning at 7am, with a fixed 30 mile commute, and never has any deviation from that plan. In that case, L1 trickle charging overnight is totally viable. For people with more varied personal lives such that they come home late, forget or are too tired to plug in the charger, leave early to take a friend to the airport, or come home, change clothes/take a shower and then go back out for a couple of hours to see friends, the car doesn't charge sufficiently before next day's trip. This is easily solved by installing an L2/L3 charger at home, but those aren't free so want to be factored into the TCO calculation. Pretending otherwise is ignoring the reality of how real people live.
You don’t need to get to 100% every night if your vehicle has hundreds of miles of range. If you’re charging 40 miles overnight and using 20 miles on average, and your vehicle has 250 miles of range, that gives you massive margin to do stuff that consumes lots of additional miles on random days. In the rare edge case that you actually use up your entire range, you can then go to an L3 charging station and top off quickly.
Obviously, if you’re the kind of person who often drives 100+ miles day after day, then L1 charging isn’t going to meet your needs. Those people should budget for an L2 charger at home. Otherwise, upgrading your home charger is a fun optimization for nerds, but not a prerequisite to own an electric car.
All you have to do is to plug in at work or home once every few days. Even at <5kW, you can easily make up for a few days of commuting in a few hours.
Even the cheapest cars have ranges of around 400 km. That's several days of commuting. You can forget to charge for three days and you'll still be fine.
And if you really do forget to charge three days in a row, just drive to a nearby fast charger, wait for 10 minutes, and then you're set to go.
