By AJ Hyatt
I promise, this is the last one folks…..
~How long does it take to charge an EV?
There is no, no clear cut answers. What I have found out is the range is between 20 minutes and 8 hours…why?
The size of an EV’s battery, its overall efficiency, the speed of its onboard charger and the power source you’re plugging into are some of the more obvious variables, though there are countless others. Other notable variables that impact EV charging time include the weather, the temperature of the battery pack and the battery’s State of Charge (SoC) at the………..BREAK ~you get the idea. Each car and battery has its own requirements.
~Well where can I charge my car, beside at my home?
According to the Alternative Fuels Data Center, there are currently 56,256 EV charging stations across the country as of Nov. 8, 2022. Approximately 52,375 were available to the public, and of those 52,000 plus 3,816 of them are were private.
~There are approximately 33,000 super or fast chargers.
However, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, almost 21,000 of the roughly 33,000 public fast chargers currently up and running in the U.S. are Tesla Superchargers. Those chargers, like Tesla’s own destination chargers, use a unique plug design called NACS, short for North American Charging Standard.
~I have heard and read that charging stations are down and not working?
Well, that holds true across our fruited plains. See below
Data suggests that more than half all charging failures come from a station not being able to connect to its network for authentication. Because most EV charging networks use cellular links in their stations, they’re subject to the cell-service vagaries we’ve all suffered.
~From Politico, 2023:
“Last year, researchers every public fast charger in the San Francisco Bay Area and found that almost 23 percent of them had “unresponsive or unavailable screens, payment system failures, charge initiation failures, network failures, or broken connectors.” And in a survey of EV drivers, the auto consultancy J.D. Power found the public charging network “plagued with non functioning station.”
One in five sessions failed to deliver a charge. Almost three-quarters of those failures involved a station that malfunctioned or was offline.”
~According to a story in Vox:
A guys car fried while charging at a WalMart;
“Electrify America told him to tow the car at his own expense to the nearest dealer, where it sat for more than a week. He paid $350 to replace a high-voltage fuse in the car just so the dealer could diagnose it. The battery was toast. It would cost more than $20,000 to fix. He’d bought the car used a month earlier with 25,000 miles on the clock for $23,000.”
The negative stories vastly out number the positive ones. Again, in my humble opinion we are not there yet and wont be for sometime in the future.