On Charging

 We've recently started doing more road trips with our electric vehicles, and I have some thoughts.

Not with these guys, though it was nice to meet the owner of the other Leaf.

1. Home Is Where The Heart Is

The first thing that I want to emphasize is that this is a game changer, even for roadtrips.

We installed a level 2 charger at home, and while obviously we're not using that on the road (due to space and time) it means that we can plan a roadtrip without worrying about how much charge we end on when we get back, because the charger will for sure fill the car to a usable amount (usually even full) overnight.

We experienced the opposite when we visited my father-in-law and couldn't charge at his house at all (it was difficult to even set up a trickle charge on the portable charger that comes with the car at level 1). So even if we're talking roadtrips, it matters what is available at your home base. A lot.

2. Gas Stations Are Sort Of Your Friends?

I originally called this "not your friends," but they still are a necessary part of the charging infrastructure in much of the US. But unlike for a gas car, where a fill-up is a short pit stop of a few minutes, charging an EV can be an hour or more for real roadtrip lengths of charge. Now, that depends on charging speed and that's why higher-end EVs tend to focus more on increasing that speed than on increasing battery capacity (beyond a certain point). But it matters a lot to have something to do that isn't wandering the tiny aisles of a gas station like an increasingly bored tiger in a zoo. 

This guy doesn't have a ton to do in him while the car is charging, except for refilling your cup again and again.

3. Other Countries Still Do It Better

In both Europe and Canada I noticed something I have yet to see in a US city.

Can you spot it?

How about here?

That's right, it's street-parking chargers.

Yes, we have them in parking garages sometimes in the US, but they're not visible from the street, so you can't see if you can use it in advance. Just sliding a few of these onto the street makes a huge difference for visibility and usability for the chargers, and thus for the EV users.

It really helps if those are high-speed chargers (so that the spots turn over faster). I noticed in Lincoln, NE, that most of the charging infrastructure is level 2, not level 3 fast chargers, which limits how much charge you can get unless you're spending 3+ hours somewhere. If it wouldn't fill up my Leaf, with its tiny battery, it's not going to do much for bigger cars at all. 

But speed can be somewhat compensated for by ubiquity: if every place you stop has a charger, that adds up.

Overall, the state of play for EV charging along I-80 is improving, but not amazing (there's a highly notable gap between the Des Moines and Omaha metros, with basically one CCS charger at the Casey's in Avoca between). It's certainly better than it was 5 years ago. But we can and should do better, especially if we want to transition our car-centric urban design to electric cars.

We should also be looking more at trains, as always, but that's a different post.

EVs and Ebikes in Winter

 This article on electric buses in Wisconsin reminded me of the greatest flaw of electric battery-driven vehicles of all sorts: the changeability of battery power. 

Now, that article is about how the buses in Wisconsin are doing well despite this limitation, and I don't want to undersell that. It's good news! It's great news! We should be happy about it!

But I also want to speak to my own experience with how to best use these kinds of vehicles in winter, especially if you don't have public funding to improve your experience.

1. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

My first piece of advice is basically the same as it would be for any kind of trip in winter, up to and including walking--or a gas-powered car: the fewer trips, the better. The more you can double-up on a trip to include multiple purposes or destinations, the better. The less you have to leave the house in the bitter cold or heavy snow, the better.

This guy is gas-powered, all-wheel drive, and can get through anything. That doesn't mean I want to drive in those conditions!

Waiting for a train isn't always the worst in the snow, but it's still not the best.

EVs and ebikes might intensify this advice, with reduced ranges, but they don't originate it. 

2. Pick Your Spots

As I write this, we're supposed to get a hard to predict but noticeable amount of snow in the QCA this weekend along with a big drop in temperature. I would prefer not to drive or bike my electric vehicles, or charge them, in these conditions and those temperatures.

But guess what? I can drive and charge them now (I am charging them now) and they'll be fine! 

This picture was only a few days after the one of the Jeep above; note that the snow is entirely absent. 

There are always times and days you can pack your bigger trips and longer ones into, and times and days you want to stay at home. Having an EV might mean being more strategic about those, but it's important to note that you can still get everything done if you want to and you think about it.

3. Remember the Benefits

I never have to get out and pump gas in the cold or snow in my EV. I get places faster on an ebike than an unassisted bike. Both of those are benefits during the bad times in the winter, even if a gas tank or an acoustic bike might be more invariant relative to temperature.  

I didn't park this guy in the garage this time, but when I do, he can charge and stay both warm and dry, while making sure I don't have to fill up outside...literally ever.

This guy can live in the garage even with a car next to him, and the battery can unclip and come inside, and again--less need for me to be out in the cold.

These two both fit inside my back room, or my office, and so again--less walking outside to a car in the cold or snow, and they get me to my destination faster than a regular bike would.

Are there tradeoffs or even downsides to an EV in the winter? Certainly. But they aren't hard to work around, and there are benefits too. As Wisconsin has found, EVs aren't impossible in the winter for buses--or for the rest of us, if we take some care in the execution.

Build EV Charging Better

 I use two electric cars on the regular, and I've noticed a real problem with how we're deploying EV charger technology as a country here in the US: we're treating it like gasoline car filling technology, which it emphatically is not.

1. Better Places

Most basically: gasoline is toxic and so we have dedicated gas stations with tanks under the earth. Gasoline flows very quickly, so those stations are equipped for a light pitstop but not usually much more; where they are prepared to offer more, it's usually in the context of long-haul trucking (like our QCA neighbor the World's Largest Truckstop). And we're building out EV charging on the same model, often at the same locations. EV charging is often found at car dealerships and gas stations, spaces you would only go to for the charging, not on their own.

This is a serious mistake.

EV charging is not like gas: while I'm sure the batteries and electric charge can be dangerous if something goes wrong, they don't poison the ground, and they take much longer to charge (even at a Tesla Supercharger). 

So we should put them in spaces that people already want to visit, or will already spend a long time at. There are places this is already happening: Tesla has done some of its build-out here in the Midwest at Hy-Vee and other grocery stores; the Musser Public Library in Muscatine has a charger; around Rockford, IL a couple of Dairy Queens have chargers. But we're missing out on a lot of serious potential, especially if we treat EV charging as both a draw and an amenity (a reason to visit and a benefit of choosing one entertainment or location over another). Why don't movie theatres have EV chargers, since you'll be there for 2-3 hours anyway? Why not restaurants beyond fast food--since the longer the dining experience, the more you'll successfully charge? Why not more museums, libraries, and other venues where, again, the literal point is for people to spend hours there at a time?

To be clear, at this point we're not, in the US, at the level where any EV charging at all can be taken for granted. I'm not ungrateful for the EV chargers at rest stops, dealerships, and so on--but they could be better.

2. Everywhere

The real trick, though, is to go beyond specific-location-based charging. This is somewhat true in Iowa City, where every parking ramp has charging for EVs (though only 2 spaces/ramp, usually). There are proposals, already being piloted, to allow in-transit EV charging on highways (again, primarily aimed at long-haul trucking). But what I'm really suggesting is what I saw in a few European cities: EV charging available just...on the street. Where you'd park to visit any particular business in any area. Because an EV charging station isn't dangerous to the public in the way gas fumes are, you can do this, just like you can have a level-2 EV charger in your home but not (usually) a gas station there.

This kind of infrastructure really frees up EVs as a legitimate option, since they require more time to charge than a gas car does to be filled, but also have much more flexibility in where that time can be spent.

3. At Least A Place To Sit

Usually I try to build up in these little subsections, but here I'm going to go to a bare minimum: if we're only going to build out our EV infrastructure in places you don't want to spend your time, can we at least get somewhere to sit? Gas stations are really not built for spending even half an hour there (the minimum for the fastest EV charging, usually) let alone several (if you have a slower charger or a bigger battery--or more distance to the next stop). Can we at least get somewhere to be when it's raining, snowing, or freezing?

Basically, treating EVs as if they were gas cars in terms of where and how they fill means that the transition to EVs becomes less attractive and therefore slower: if we build it better, we can actually move in that direction.

An Annoyance of Electric Vehicles

I don't just use an e-bike to get around; we have two electric cars as well, and I recently had an opportunity to take one up from the Quad Cities to Milwaukee, a drive of about three and a half hours which, given current weather conditions (i.e. cold and wind) required one charging stop along the way. 

I want to talk here very briefly about how we aren't yet at the point of making these a real part of our transportation infrastructure--and how while I love my EVs, they aren't enough alone to solve the problems they're sometimes suggested as a solution for.

1. Infrastructure -- Soft and Hard

The biggest current hurdle is infrastructure for EVs--both hard infrastructure (actual charging stations) and what I want to call soft infrastructure: how we make that hard infrastructure visible and digestible for those using it.

Some Shell stations have EV chargers. There's even an app for that. Does this one?

No, it doesn't. But you don't know that from the sign: Shell stations with EV chargers also don't put the presence of EV chargers or the price of EV charging on the sign.

We need to have more EV chargers, as a start (and it's really a shame we have so many types of plugs not all of which are interoperable). But we also need to make it so that you can actually use an EV charger like you can use a gas charger: by a) knowing when there's one available without an app (since you are probably driving a car, and thus shouldn't be looking at a phone), b) knowing the price of the charger so that you can choose which one to use (just like that sign up there shows the price of gas), and c) making actually charging an EV simpler, primarily by allowing people to just use a credit card (as they can, again, with gas) or even cash, rather than a proprietary app that may not even work.

So we have a long way to go to make EV charging actually practical on the same level as gas chargers--and that's not even including the delay in charging times versus gas filling times.

2. What EVs Don't Fix

Of course, driving to Milwaukee wouldn't have been my preference in the first place if the US had actual train infrastructure. EVs are still cars; they take up the same space on the road, and they are just as individualized as a car in terms of where they run and how many people-miles they cover.

This guy is just as much of a car as anything that runs on gas.

That means that while EVs may help with some marginal elements of climate change (by reducing car emissions) they don't help with traffic (obviously) and they still require separate fuel and power for each individual, rather than allowing us to collectively group our outputs for greater efficiency.

A bus or a train still does better, in other words.

This is also a blue electric vehicle, but it moves a lot more people, a lot more efficiently.

3. Delays

Another consideration that I think gets sometimes missed along the way when comparing cars and other forms of transportation is that we attribute the issues we might run into in a car to the environment, but the delays of a train or a bus to the mode of transportation. 

I got stuck in Rockford for three hours because of faulty charging infrastructure. Admittedly, this could be seen as an EV-vs.-gas issue, but I've had bad gas pumps too, and bad traffic, and lots of delays in cars. But those tend to get treated as an issue for that trip.

If I had a train get in three hours late, the typical reaction is to treat it as a flaw in trains.

Oh no, NS is so unreliable. 

These buses are delayed. These cars? Just a bad trip; cars are so much faster than transit.

Until we can switch up our thinking on these issues, we won't really get to true efficient transit.