New York CNN –
It should always be easy to power your car, whether you fuel it with electrons or gasoline. If it’s an electric car, you should be able to swipe a credit card, plug in the cable, and your vehicle will just…charge. And in fact, it works like that quite often.
Unfortunately, not always. There are incompatible charger designs, different charging speeds, and overload shortcuts. (Is that a CCS or NACS? Why can’t I find CHAdeMO when I need it and why is it spelled that way?) There are fast chargers that aren’t always very fast – but it’s not always the charger’s fault. And how do I pay for that? Where is a charger anyway?
Many problems are being solved and a lot of pointless confusion is being eliminated as the industry expands and agrees on standards. But other differences simply arise with technology and will likely always remain so.
JD Power surveys show that electric vehicle owners are actually less satisfied with public charging, despite more and more electric vehicle chargers becoming available. When it comes to consumer satisfaction, EV charging is a very poor company.
“They’re still at the low end compared to some notoriously unhappy industries like telecommunications and cable providers,” said Brent Gruber, managing director of electric vehicle experience at JD Power.
However, the biggest criticism remains the lack of chargers, said Gruber. According to the Department of Energy, there are approximately 144,000 public electric vehicle chargers in the United States. About 42,000 of them are in California. States like Mississippi and Montana — admittedly far less populous, but people still have to drive there — have only a few hundred.
Charging public electric vehicles is particularly complicated. First of all, there are currently different types of chargers. Do you have a Tesla or something else? Most major automakers have said they will switch to Tesla’s NACS (North American Charging System) format in a few years, but that hasn’t happened yet. Luckily, most of these non-Tesla automakers have some type of charging port called a Combined Charging System, or CCS.
Charging Ports: What All the Letters Mean
With CCS you can be confident that you can use a charger that is not a Tesla charger. Well, unless you have a Nissan Leaf that has a ChaDeMo (or Charge de Move) port for fast charging. In this case, you may have a harder time finding a place to plug in.
The beauty of an electric vehicle is that it can be charged at home if you can install a home charger. Having a home charger is like having a gas pump in your garage. Just plug it in and wake up in the morning with a “full tank” that costs much less per mile than gas.
Charging your electric vehicle outside your home costs more than charging at home, sometimes even twice as much. (Someone also has to pay for the maintenance of that charger in addition to the electricity itself.) There’s a lot more to consider.
First: How fast is the charger? There are mainly two types of public chargers: Level 2 and Level 3. (Level 1 basically just means plugging into a regular power outlet.) Level 2, relatively slow, comes in handy when you go to the movies or a restaurant, let’s say , and you just want to get some power while you’re parked.
The math and myth of fast charging
If you’re on a long trip and want to quickly recharge so you can get back on the highway, Level 3 chargers are for you. However, there are a few things to keep in mind. How fast is fast? With a really fast charger, some cars can go from 10% to 80% charge in just about 15 minutes, and cover another 100 miles every few minutes. (Charging is typically slowed to more than 80% to prevent damage to batteries.) However, many fast chargers are much slower. 50 kilowatt fast chargers are common, but take much longer than 150 or 250 kW chargers.
Cars also have their own limitations and not every car can charge as quickly as every charger. Your electric car and the charger communicate with each other to solve the problem.
When you first plug in an electric car, a lot of information is passed back and forth between the vehicle and the charger before any power even starts moving, said Nathan Wang, project manager at the UL Solutions Advanced Electric Vehicles Charging Lab. For one, the vehicle must tell the charger how fast it can safely charge, and the charger must adhere to that speed limit.
The popular Chevrolet Bolt EV, for example, can only charge with up to 55 kilowatts. You can connect a faster charger, but you won’t get it done faster. The charger simply slows down according to the needs of the vehicle.
In addition, even if your electric vehicle and charger can charge up to 250 kilowatts, you may experience a slower speed. For example, this could be because you are at a location with six fast chargers and a car is plugged into each one. The chargers could reduce the power of all vehicles instead of overloading the system, Wang said.
Of course, random technical problems can also occur. With so much energy, if it feels like something is wrong, the system could simply put everything on hold.
“Safety is number one,” said Rick Wilmer, chief operating officer of EV charging provider ChargePoint. “Obviously you don’t want to hurt anyone or set a car on fire, so anything that looks like that could pose a risk of any kind… we’ll obviously shut everything down automatically.”
Still, ChargePoint’s chargers are operational most of the time, Wilmer said.
What’s next?
Then there are the various charging networks for electric vehicles. If you need some gas, it doesn’t make too much difference where you get it from. Whether it’s Shell, BP, Exxon or whatever, they pretty much all work the same way.
For electric vehicle chargers, using a different charging network may mean downloading a new smartphone app and opening an account with a different service before you can charge. However, charging industry groups have been working to clarify this.
Surveys from JD Power suggest that drivers who plan to charge in advance appear to be happier than those who don’t, Gruber said. Various apps and in-vehicle navigation systems now make it quite easy to plan routes with charging stops. You can see what type of chargers are located where and whether they are currently available.
Charging companies are working to provide even more detailed information, such as how long it will take for a car that is currently using a charger to be ready, said Mark Hawkinson, head of the technical solutions group at ABM, a company that builds charging stations.
And as complicated as charging an electric vehicle can be, every little bit of additional information helps.