Things I Wish I Knew Before Buying an EV
We’ve been an EV-only household for almost six months and would not want to return to driving gas-powered cars except under extreme duress. We’ve put a total of about 8,000 miles on our two EV’s (a 2023 Kia EV6 and a 2023 Ford F150 Lightning) and taken a number of moderate-distance road trips between 200 and 700 miles/day of driving.
With that experience I’ve only become more convinced that most Americans would prefer an EV over a dino-burner if they had the chance to try the EV. Electric vehicles are better than gas in almost every way (better, faster, and cheaper), but there are a few things prospective EV buyers should know before they make a decision.
Your range on road trips is never as far as expected
The official range estimates for EV’s are based on a mix of highway and city driving, but unlike gas cars, EVs get better mileage in city driving than on highways. That means that for highway driving you will rarely get the full range you expect. For city driving you may get more range—but most EV owners don’t care about their range for city driving because they plug in and recharge every night.
EV range also drops when the weather is very cold (because of the extra power needed to keep the cabin warm) or raining (because of the extra drag) or very hot (because of the air conditioning). Decorating your EV with flags, oversize mirrors, or off-road tires also hurts. And towing a camper or boat will really reduce how far you can drive on a charge.
Most EV’s are designed to focus your attention on a “range gauge” rather than the fuel gauge we’re used to seeing in a gas car. The seeming precision of the range estimate makes it very tempting to plan charging stops at the very limit of your range: if the car says it can go 200 miles, then it should be fine to recharge at 190 miles, right? In an EV where you can’t count on a fast charger at every off-ramp, it’s important to recharge while you’ve still got plenty of range. The most useless thing on an EV road trip is the charging station 25 miles behind you.
For road trips, charging speed is more important than range
Carmakers and buyers focus a lot on EV range (even though your “road trip range” won’t be as far as the sticker says), but rarely do you hear about charging speed. But for any trip where you need to make at least one charging stop, charging speed will be much more important in determining how long the trip takes.
Charging speed varies wildly between cars, and depends on both the car and the charger. EVs on the market today have maximum charge rates varying from under 100kw to 350kw, and you may have to dig to find out how fast a given model can suck in the juice. DC fast chargers—the only kind of charger useful for a charging stop—range from 25kw to 350kw.
(As an aside: slower “Level 2” chargers typically provide 5kw-10kw and are fairly common and often free. These are great for charging overnight, and if you find a place to stay with this kind of charger you can start each morning with a full charge. But they aren’t fast enough to give a useful amount of charge without charging for several hours.)
To give an example, suppose you’re planning a trip where you need to drive about 400 miles in a day, and you have a choice of driving Car A with a realistic road-trip range of 250 miles, or Pickup B with a realistic range of 200 miles. You’re starting from home so you begin the trip with a full charge. Car A gets 3.5 miles per kwh, and Pickup B gets 2.5 miles per kwh, so this trip will require charging about 43kwh for Car A, and Pickup B will require adding 80kwh.
It might seem obvious that Car A is the obvious choice for this trip. But if Car A can only charge at 40kw but Pickup B can charge at 150kw (either because Pickup B can charge faster, or because it can plug into faster charging stations), then you’re going to spend over an hour charging Car A, but only a little over 30 minutes charging Pickup B.
This is more-or-less the exact scenario we’ll be facing starting next year when we drive to Grand Marais: our F150 Lightning has less range and is less efficient than our Kia EV6, but in 2024 Tesla will start allowing Ford vehicles to access its Supercharger network. There are several Superchargers along the way allowing us to charge the pickup at it’s maximum 150kw, but the Kia will only be able to use the barely adequate 50kw public chargers which generally only deliver 40kw.
But if we were planning a different trip, one which took us in a direction with more plentiful and faster public chargers, the Kia would be able to charge at its maximum 250kw and be the clear choice. If all this sounds much more complicated than it needs to be, you’re right. The best EVs today charge fast enough that charging time for road trips should be a nonissue, but the infrastructure is still being built.
You can’t count on a charging station being available
Along major freeways across most of the country there’s actually fairly decent EV charging infrastructure, with fast public DC charging stations with several plugs at least every 50-75 miles. But if you get too far from those freeways, or if you’re in the Great EV Charging Desert covering Montana, the Dakotas, and the northern half of Minnesota, things get dodgy. The fast chargers often have only one plug, so if it’s broken or in use you may have to drive a long way to find another fast charger.
As I write this, there are multiple broken chargers along the route from the Twin Cities to Grand Marais, leaving exactly one working public DC fast charging plug in the 220 miles between North Branch at the edge of the Twin Cities metro area and Grand Marais. That one charger, as expected, is getting very heavily used and on a recent Sunday there was a two hour wait to plug in.
Fortunately the excellent PlugShare app provides up-to-date reports about which chargers are working and which aren’t, so it’s possible to plan ahead with a fair degree of confidence. But it’s still a good idea to not drive past a fast charging station unless you’re confident you have the range to get to the next two.
By the way, that’s also a good plan when driving a gas car—but you can usually count on there being a gas station at almost every freeway exit. Someday there will be an EV charging station at every exit and rest stop, too.
EV charging in Northern Minnesota is the worst (for now)
On the topic of not being able to count on charging stations being available, the public charging situation for anything North and West of the Twin Cities is absolutely terrible until you get all the way to Idaho. Truly fast chargers (150kw and up) are almost nonexistent, and the chargers that do exist tend to be one or two plugs at most. Driving to Grand Marais there are zero chargers available to us that deliver more than 50kw, and the ones that are working tend to get very heavily used. It can take weeks or months to fix a broken charging station.
The situation for Tesla owners is much better: Tesla has built out an extensive network of private charging stations open to Tesla owners only. On our drive to Grand Marais there are no less than three Tesla Sueprcharging locations (with a fourth coming soon), each with at least four plugs and delivering over 150kw.
Tesla has announced plans to open up its Supercharger network to other EV models. They’ve announced a deal with Ford and sometime in 2024 we should be able to get an adapter for our F150 Lightning which will allow us to use those Tesla charging stations. That will make the drive to Grand Marais much less dodgy. But so far there’s been no deal announced with Kia, so we will probably have to keep using the non-Tesla chargers when we take that car.
Most of the time, none of this matters
There are many many things better about the EV experience, and a few things that are worse, and I think that for most people with typical American driving habits the EV is the clear winner. For people who have a place to plug in and recharge either at home or at work, I have yet to find any downside to going electric for day-to-day driving.
The only place where there’s a real disadvantage to the EV is for those long distance road trips where you plan to cover hundreds of miles in a day. But even there, for most cars in most parts of the country, the only real downside is the need to plan ahead because we don’t yet have a fast charging station at every town and freeway exit.
This is changing quickly as the market for EVs grows, and as more charging stations are built we can expect the distance between chargers to shrink dramatically. In very rough terms today there is about one EV for every 200 gas-powered cars on the road, but new EVs are about 5% of total car sales so the number of EVs on the road will grow rapidly even if the current market share stays the same. It will take time for the charging infrastructure to catch up, and we’re still in the early stages.