Here’s Why Charging an Electric Car Can Suck - And It’s Not The Reason You Think!

Filling up a car with gas is very simple and the vast majority of Americans have been doing it for years you pay with a credit card or cash press a button or two insert a standardized nozzle into the filler and well, now, in theory,

charging

an ev is even simpler plug in the car and wait a while if you live somew

here

with regular access to 240 volt power it's possible to recharge in just a few hours but the reality is most people don't have ev high voltage in your garage, plus

charging

a standard 120 volt outlet can take several days, while installing these 240 volt outlets is becoming more affordable.

Fall Into This Boat How do you keep your car well charged in the year 2019? Charging stations seem to pop up more frequently than update notifications on an iPhone, so just a swipe of the credit card and a standardized recharge Plug-in charging on the go should be simple, well, you see, not quite, This is called a charging point and

here

in our city of Boulder Colorado it is by far the most popular company that supplies these charging stations for public use and let me show you quickly. how it works so there's an app on your phone you open it up and there are literally hundreds in the denver metro area and if you zoom in there has to be 20 30 40 here in boulder colorado so the way it works is you click at one of the charging stations you can open it in Google Maps and it takes you here but it's even cooler than that because if I zoom in I can click on the station and see if it's available so this one has two stations it says both are available and it says it will charge at five kilowatts or about 15 miles per hour so to start charging it's just a matter of swiping your credit card right unfortunately no there are dozens of companies that produce these chargers but every One has It's your own account, your own payment method, and your own app.

It's like Sinclair Shell and Maverick made you check in at their station before you could refill your tank. This is how the charging point works. I have my credit card information connected to my phone. and it actually uses apple pay for the charger to work now. You can also use a small swipe card if I had one, but since I have the app, that's what I'm going to use, so I just hold my phone near the charge. period and there it goes it's authorizing my credit card which is stored in the app and check that click and now my charger should be available like this but right away we run into another problem because remember how I said all these new manufacturers use a standard plug the j1772 plug well it looks like this but unfortunately i lied to you because tesla uses their own proprietary plug which really

suck

s but luckily there is a workaround because included with the model x was this little adapter so if i plug my adapter in the tesla now i should be able to use this 1772 charge point plug i plug it in it's flashing green now come look at this if we look here at the screen it will actually tell us how fast we're charging and how much it's costing us there you can see 0.02 kilowatts, a smiley face that tells us that we are charging and what our current cost is, so we haven't charged anything at this time, but here you go 0.003 kilowatt hours we rev up to 1.19 5.13 kilowatts so now we're charging at a pretty decent rate and you can see it's plugging in today we're charging at 24 amps and here at the tesla that means about 17 miles per hour so every hour we gain about 16 to 17 miles of range where will you find these charging points?

Well to be honest they are everywhere, city governments and parks can make them put them in popular areas, in this case we are facing a residential complex a large apartment complex so this apartment com plex had one installed here but you can also find them in malls you can find them in city centers they're everywhere even as we'll see next in industrial areas you can see it here on my phone this is the charging rate just under six kilowatts we've added almost a half kilowatt hour and it's estimated that we've added about a mile to the tesla now let's say we've been here for a couple of hours and we're done charging we do well we just get up here and do click stop and it sends a signal in theory to our little station and tells it we're done uploading, it's contacting the station, it says it's working done and done it just stopped the charging session stopped successfully so now what i do is just come over here and unplug the vehicle and you'll notice that here it's actually going to give me little instructions with this jean there you go and you can see that he charged me eight cents. it gained a half kilowatt hour of charging in six minutes so i just co Plug it in like this and voila they will send a receipt to my phone to know how much it will cost but how much does it cost well it depends a lot because the apartment complex or the mall or whoever installed the charger. will normally set the rate.

The interesting thing about these charging points is that they all cost different amounts, so if I click on one, we just stop it. Here you can see the price is 15 cents per kilowatt hour which means recharging the tesla in half would cost around 7.50 while this is super affordable at a rate of 15 miles gained per hour it would take around 10 hours per half load let's take a look at the one in the industrial park we're going to next which should be down here now this one is actually a little bit different this one will cost a dollar an hour so sometimes it's because of the amount of power , sometimes it's set by the hour and you can see we have two available so we should be ready to go there next so re here at another charging point t yours is i kept saying industrial area this is a business park , but it's a very advanced business park I'd say it's probably about three or four square miles and they have like 12 of these charging point stations so let's see what this one charges up to 6.6 kilowatts I

think

we're going it always starts off a little slow and then it'll pick up pretty fast 1.6 4.26 5.38 okay we've got more than five let's see if we can get over six 5.75 5.85 I

think

we're a couple things off to note that they are close to maxing out a couple of things is that because these charging points are usually commissioned by the mall, park, city, or developer where they are installed, they can actually set their own rules, e.g. example the first charge the point we went to said limited to residents and guests only um of course it wasn't any of those and still let me charge they can even set their own hours so you are at the mercy of whoever having installed it in general the charging points are actually very intuitive and surprisingly reliable, but what about other charging companies?

Now one of my favorite apps is an app called plug share and none of these companies nowadays pay us to say this. This is my honest opinion, but I want to give you a little. a bit of useful info if you're thinking about buying an ev or already have one so plug share is an app like a social network for outlets and charging stations you open it on looks like some kind of google map but there are just thousands of outlets and chargers and superchargers and tesla superchargers and fast chargers it's just a bunch of charging opportunities and it actually brought me to this one now this is another company it's made by a company called chargepro through uh sema connect and this is going to work a little differently.

The nice thing about Plug Share is that in this case it actually works with the station and I don't have to go to a separate app. or i open my plug share app just like i said there are just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stations but this is one of the suggestions it's actually the one we're at right now gun barrel center apartments and there's a picture of the plug you can see people have posted about their experiences arnesha had a good experience draw had a good experience so i know it should be ok i can see it's a j1772 and the cost is a dollar an hour for the first four hours and two dollars an hour hour for the next four hours yeah I'm stuck so one of the problems with these charging stations that are meant for all new vehicles and not just Tesla is that they are usually placed in the front of the vehicle because many new cars charge in the front but tesla trail in the back so i'll have to go back and try again ok let's try charging with the charge pro so same procedure then it's the same j1772 plug so the tesla adapter and then the plug now here's a challenge there are literally dozens of charging companies out there and they all have their own separate apps they all have their own separate interfaces so one app of charging point won't work on this device but plug share the app i use to find the station so let's see if that works i got it all connected let me open my plug share here it is the station is a bit off in terms of location but i'll try anyway pay with plug share my credit card info is plugged in so this is going to be oh man this is where it gets a little counterintuitive i think this is building 14 in this complex and it will be 14 north so lemme try to activate it by activating the station make sure your car is plugged in yeah so this is the problem we have a company that is Plug Sh I'm trying to talk to another company giving them my credit card information to start the charge and it's all done over the internet so sometimes it doesn't work as well as just going to the individual charging stations app and doing it that way unfortunately i couldn't get plug share to connect to the station and start charging it says timeout credit card pre-authorization will move so let's try one that's a little further down this parking and let's see if we have any more luck ok so round two with the charge pro i think that's what it's called yeah charge pro so far no luck but this is our second try this one feels a little more promising , so pay with plug share ok we're plugged in it says authorized ah come on so second time it's the charm we got a flashing green light on there now we don't have a very nice LCD like the last one ma, the charging point, but you can see the kilowatt hours. ramping up and then we're charging at about 5.6 kilowatts so classic level two is typically between five and six kilowatts so the plug share app using the charge pro here went online and we managed to start charging the tesla so far we have Tier 2 chargers on display and while they are appearing more and more in the US, they are still too slow for most who need to charge more than 15 miles of range in an hour the solution DC fast charging now is the time for level three this is called DC fast charging and level one and two are ac chargers so ac is the current you get from your standard wall socket now these are dc chargers or direct current on the level two we top out about five or six kilowatts look at this level three 50 kilowatts pretty wild but there are some issues with level three charging and I'll show you what it is so this is a company called evgo evgo does fast charging and especially here in our town they are the only fast charging player that is not a tesla supercharger so for this to happen i have to open the evgo app.

Now I will show you the different types of plugs. Unfortunately, there are three different types of DC charging plugs and they don't necessarily play together. or the first type is called a chatimo now this is a chatimo plug and it's completely different from the tesla plug it's completely different from the j1772 plug this is a dc fast charger plug you'd find on something like a nissan leaf or maybe even something older like a mitsubishi i mean these seem to be slowly losing popularity for a tesla you have to get a special adapter to use this flat plug and it's this kind of big chunky thing that would plug into the back of the car.

Unfortunately, I don't have one of those, but it is possible to charge a tesla using this plug; however the next one is not possible to use this is called a ccs plug and it is also a fast charging plug; however tesla won't sell you a ccs to tesla adapter which is a shame but the funny thing is that in Europe tesla actually uses this same plug so unfortunately it also varies by country but just plug it into the car and Get up to 50 kilowatts of real world charging speed on a charger like th This will get you back a hundred or more miles of charging in about 30 minutes.

It's similar to a supercharger, well, yeahI'm honest, a bit slower and speaking of superchargers, this solution is by far the easiest and for most. from us the fastest way to recharge that third plug i mentioned is the tesla specific plug that only works with tesla cars a supercharger no apps or credit card required just plug in the tesla and charge at speeds of 2 3 even 400 miles range gained every hour tesla then remotely bills your tesla accounts super simple but you're out of luck unless you have a model s model x or model 3 that will allow you to supercharge there you have a quick look at different types of chargers fast now let me know in the comments section below if you think you can live like this i mean i think it all depends on the city a place like rock charging outlets charging stations are very prevalent these fast chargers from CC are changing the game so I'm very excited I'm happy to say yes you absolutely can but more rural areas where the evgos or charging points or whatever Any other company they are less frequent it could be a bit difficult you might be stuck charging at home this is the ultimate challenge manufacturers face converting internal combustion customers to ev according to toyota the automaker biggest in the world. world and a recent survey they did of customers found that 34 of the respondents were not positive Battery Electric Vehicles did not have an internal combustion engine, so in other words, 34 of the people surveyed were not entirely sure whether or not

electric

vehicles had a gasoline or diesel engine and while many looking are probably car enthusiasts who are fully aware that bev vehicles or battery

electric

vehicles do not have a gasoline engine and may even be willing to put up with juggling four or five apps and potentially a charging adapter to keep their cars charged a lot of people like my mom and my family in general just won't have the understanding or bandwidth to go through this process again to tflcar.com for more real-world cargo reviews and news views