Should You Buy an EV? A calculator to figure it out

If you have an accessible 120v outlet, it's extremely likely you can charge just with that. Evidence - had an ev since 2012, using only 120 volts. Only the most inefficient recent evs argue for higher voltage.

The reasons 120v garage charging won't work for you:

1. You commonly drive 200+ miles, need to come home, charge, driving 200 or 300 miles almost immediately.

When I need to do this I can go to a supercharger or fast dc charger, but that's rare. There's another alternative, I have used my house's dryer vent to charge at 30 amps, 220v maybe a dozen times in 10 years.

The wsj article was kind of from an idiot. At the same time, it's true there aren't enough chargers and we are building them out and it should be as easy as "just drive".

Separate from that, if you have a tesla, this problem is not there because they have enough chargers and they are maintained. It's the clown car mixed private ev chargers that are broken, in bad locations and have low power. When tesla opens up their network (by adding the other common plug) I expect many of the other ev charger companies will go out of business or have to significantly improve their speed and quality. My 2012 tesla had around 250 miles range (drove it for 50k miles, after 3 years upgraded to the awd, still have that one, still has 265/270 original miles range.

I guess I don’t understand why that’s acceptable. 15% degradation takes you from what 350 miles from full to just shy of 300. How much worse is it in the winter? None of those things happen in ICE vehicles that are much cheaper than even the cheapest BEV.

Even the least efficient EVs still get some charge at 120v. One of the worst offenders only gets 1 mile per kWh so that's roughly 1 mile every hour at home. Even if your inefficient EV is only plugged in for the roughly 8 hours you need to sleep, that's still 8 more miles of range when you wake up than you had before you went to bed. A lot of people like to discount that as "basically nothing", but a gas car isn't going to have 8 more miles it can drive when you wake up. It's a subtle seeming shift, but it's still a useful shift, because it adds up. 8 extra miles a night is still 56 miles a week you don't need to "fast charge", even with the most inefficient sort of EV and the least time at home.

Cars spend more time parked than in use by a great margin, even among those drivers that drive hundreds of miles every week. The US is at a disadvantage with our 120v standard and that a lot of people don't think 120v is "adequate" for EV charging ("it's only an additional mile per hour range in my inefficient EV Hummer!"), but we should normalize 120v charging because it should be easy and affordable to almost every household and a lot of shared parking. We've more than a century of experience installing "regular plugs" everywhere. We could start there and do a lot of good in the US to encourage charging everywhere a car is parked. We have to reduce the stigma that it "isn't good enough" because people can't think fourth dimensionally that 1 mile per hour is "adequate" because it is still more than the car would have had otherwise.

Dryer plugs are great, too, but we don't have as many free circuits in our fuse boxes and circuit breaker boxes as we'd all like to put extra dryer plugs in all our garages, because the US made the mistake of standardizing on 120v instead of 220/240v like most of the rest of the world. (Thanks, Edison.~) We can start with regular plugs, and need to destagmatize it/normalize it if we want cheap charging everywhere and less focus on "how do we install chargers" as if it's this deeply complicated bootstrap process. We have outlets everywhere, let's use them better. We install new outlets all the time for relatively pennies (the labor investments far dwarfs the supplies/capital investments), we can install them near every parking lot a lot cheaper than we can add 240v circuits to parking lots (or "fast chargers"). If we can start to think of it as "adequate" because it is still additive.

> I'm sure that tow trucks will get to the point where they also have a charger, but we're in new territory here.

Tow trucks don't need chargers, they just need to drop your car off at the nearest charger.

This isn't even "new" territory: tow trucks tow things from point A to point B all the time. That's what tow trucks were built for.

It isn't "new" territory for EVs: Anecdotally, I had a friend tell me working as a tow truck near a "blind spot" at the time in Tesla's charging maps along an Interstate through one of the Plains states. (A blind spot that has since been filled.) There was a driver that drove that stretch regularly and couldn't get enough charge to make it to the next station so would regularly call for tow. (So regularly in that case that they'd call a day ahead or so and schedule it like an appointment and the tow truck would just be waiting around the "usual spot".)

> Aside from the "you're there for 5x longer", this means that to get the same throughput of vehicles served at the station it needs 5x to 10x more space than the gas station. This is where its going to be real interesting.

Though it likely will not ever need the exact same throughput because home charging and destination charging remove a lot of "local traffic" through fast chargers that gas stations still have to regularly serve.

Even in long distance travel destination chargers will shake up and decentralize a lot of the "station need". On a road trip you might not need "park at a Fry's while you shop", but you might still find use in "park at a restaurant while you sit down and eat" and "park at a cool gift shop while you shop for souvenirs" and "park at the neat tourist trap and explore a mini museum" and maybe even "park at a motel where you can catch a quick nap".

EVs could herald a return to the sorts of weird destinations that Route 66, as one clear nostalgia-filled example, made US long distance travel such an "exciting thing" and that lots of people have great nostalgia for even if most of today's Route 66 is a rusted memory of itself. I know plenty of long distance drivers that might like a small return to that Americana tradition of weird tourist traps and strange excuses to stop, and even AAA still thinks you should pay them for trip tiks even in the internet age of GPS because they still think they can find some of that nostalgia for you.

With EVs, we don't have to cluster around the logistics of gas stations anymore and could have all sorts of chargers "off the beaten path" (of the Interstates). What sort of weird local and regional places could install chargers? There's all sorts of creativity to be explored here.