Charge!

It is the Achilles Heel of electricity-powered distance travel, why I bought a hybrid instead of an all-electric vehicle: limited range. Average electric vehicle range, with a few very expensive mega-battery-capacity cars and trucks, seldom realistically can achieve more than 200, maybe 250 miles of travel, no matter what the brochure claims. Charging stations still cannot “refuel” an electric car as quickly as a traditional gas/diesel filling station. Not to mention that there is still a major dearth of charging stations within reasonable distance of each other. In plotting an upcoming drive from Los Angeles to Santa Fe, NM, I was shocked that even some pretty reasonably upscale hotels lacked a vehicle charging capacity. 

Even as Biden’s infrastructure dreams envision a massive network of accessible and well-placed electric vehicle charging stations, we are a very long way away from that reality. For most of us, the commuting/running errands range requires generally no more than 40 miles for a round trip. Thus, if local driving is what is needed, electric cars are more than adequate. For longer distance travel, not so much.

There are some general principles in this reality. Cars with empty or near-empty batteries charge much faster, literally like electrical sponges. The higher the voltage of the charger, the faster the charge, assuming that the vehicle can accept those exceptional voltages. So here are some basics from PluginCars.com (presented by Brad Berman, 4/24/19):

The slowest form of electric car charging at 120 volts is called Level 1. And mid-range 240-volt charging is called Level 2. But ultrafast charging that can deliver juice between 50 and 350 kW is not called Level 3 as you might expect. According to official terminology from the Society of Automotive Engineering, it’s called DC Quick Charging or DC Fast Charging—sometimes abbreviated as DCQC. The decision to not use the term Level 3, and to call it "quick charging" instead makes some sense for two reasons:

 

• First, in Level 1 and Level 2 charging, common alternating current (AC) electricity is fed to the car where it is converted by an onboard charger to direct current (DC) before going to the battery pack. In DC quick charging, the charger is located outside the vehicle. This large piece of equipment handles the AC-to-DC conversion and supplies DC electricity to the battery at a much higher rate.

• Second, while all electric cars can accept the first two levels of charging, only EVs that carry special quick charging equipment can take advantage of those walloping big jolts of electric fuel. Quick charging is a different animal than Level 1 and Level 2.

 

On a technical basis, you could look at the voltage as an indication of charging speed. Each level of charging essentially doubles the voltage. Jumping from Level 1 to Level 2 means an increase from 120 volts to 240 volts. Likewise, quick charging doubles voltage once again to 480 volts, which is often rounded off to 500.

A more useful metric is the number of miles of range that are added for every hour of charging. Before firing off an angry email, please know that these numbers represent a general rule of thumb rather than any guarantee. With Level 1 120-volt charging, you can add about 4 miles of range every hour. That’s slow, just the way a car that drives 4 miles per hour is barely moving. Level 2 240-volt charging adds around 25 miles of range in an hour. That’s a better speed, just the way traveling 25 mph in a car is good for many city situations.

But quick charging theoretically increases things to Autobahn speed: 100 miles, or more, of added range per hour. The even faster DC quick chargers emerging in 2019 will slice that time down to 15 minutes or less. In practice, due to many factors, the speed of quick charging does not run at a steady pace.

We also know that whether or not an electric car is truly emission-free depends on where and how the electricity at the charging station is generated. If the electricity comes from a coal-fired plant, well, that car may itself be emission free, but the effect “real rate” of effluents is hardly “carbon neutral.” As we evolve alternative vehicles, the future may reverse that risk, perhaps justifying the cost and the effort.

But as Mark Wilson, writing for the July 14th FastCompany.com tells us, we better get used to this ascending reality: “By 2030, an estimated 20% of all cars sold will be electric vehicles. And by 2035, states like California will ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles. Soon, the gas station, as we know it, could be extinct, replaced by an exponential demand for electric vehicle charging stations. And that will change the way we go on road trips forever.” Concomitant with the switch to electrically powered vehicles is the parallel introduction of self-driving control systems, which certainly allow older infrastructure to carry more traffic.

Wilson also notes that since the rollout of charging stations will be exponential, having fixed signs pointing the way to nearby charging stations may be replaced with digital signs capable of reflecting an accelerating and constant addition of more such charging stations. The information is just updated as needed. “If your car has a self-driving vision system, it could even be programmed to recognize a code on this sign and route your GPS right to the sight. Meanwhile, a ring of LEDs around the display could glow red, green, or any other color to indicate if the attraction is open or closed.” Wilson.

And while engineers are developing larger-capacity batteries, perhaps with accelerating refueling times, maybe even without relying on rare, expensive and environmentally toxic rare earth metals, electric vehicles on longer trips face serious time parameters for the foreseeable future: “It takes just 2-3 minutes to gas up a car. Meanwhile, the common DC Fast Charging standard used by electric cars today requires 20-40 minutes to juice up the vehicle. That means people traveling across the country will have serious time to kill, the sort of time that would be wasted looking through mystery meats spinning on the truck stop’s roller grill.

“Given the fact you’ll need to spend half an hour charging, no matter what, why not take 5-10 minutes to see a new place?” says Gadi Amit, founder of NewDealDesign [which is creating those new digital signs].” Wilson. As they say, get used to it.

I’m Peter Dekom, and since we are moving into this alternative fuel era, I thought describing some of the variables might be useful to my readers.