Yeah, if you charge on the road then it costs roughly what gas costs depending on the usual factors. But I almost never charge anywhere except home so on average I pay very little.
I had… crap, I think about 65% charge when I pulled in so I started charging just north of 100kW and finished around 60kW. Had I pulled in with a 10-20% charge then it would do 250kW for a while and ten minutes would add a lot more.
Or you could make it even more interesting with <5% (my best is 2%}
I’m at a mall in KC. I don’t need to charge but figured I’d try out their EV Go chargers. There are four chargers here. Two are occupied, the other two are busted. What a mess.
There’s no waiting over at the Shell and BP stations…
Wondering when AAA will provide charging service. Probably already do.
We will probably go with a plug-in hybrid (Prius), I’ll sell my old junk, drive wife’s car around (40mpg), while my wife does daily driving in newer car. As much as I’d like tooling around in a CTR or ITS or GRC, I don’t want to do it at 25mpg anymore (which I do now in my old car).
AAA does that, at least in some markets.
Getting a hybrid or plug in hybrid makes a lot of sense for many. I had the Volt for years and it was great, no hassle and it took my from 500 gallons of gas per year down to about 50.
Casey’s and 7-11 are also getting in the game. I’m also seeing car dealerships installing them. The Kia dealer in town has one, and two Chevy dealers in southeast Kansas recently installed them. So now when I go to see family, the longest stretch I have to cover is down to 96 miles. No sweat.
We did the big trip from Boston to Seattle (via Kansas and New Mexico) last month. Funnily enough, the worst fast charging experience was at Independence, MO on the outskirts of KC. There were chargers available but they never really got above 40kW. Chargers in KS (Topeka, Salina and Wichita) were excellent.
Damn. Thats a loong trip. Which part of NM did you swing by?
Just in Albuquerque. Kept expecting to see Better Call Saul/Breaking Bad characters. Rode the Sandia Peak Tramway, which was awesome. Next year hope to hike up the peak and get up to Santa Fe for a couple of days.
I love Santa Fe. Among non-major cities, it is one of the top food destinations I’ve been to.
December is a lovely time to visit there as the town is decorated with farolitas for Christmas.
Nice article about the state of EV battery technology (Hint: It’s not yet solid - that’s likely to be a decade away):
https://www.investors.com/news/ev-battery-technology-hunting-for-the-next-big-thing/
Gogoro-brand swappable batteries are big in Asia for electric scooters. It takes just a few seconds to swap out each battery (one or two per scooter). Now they’re scaling up to microcars, that might need four to six batteries. They’re also introducing solid state batteries, which will increase the range.
Gogoro unveils world's first swappable solid state electric vehicle battery.
https://www.axios.com/2022/02/02/a-roadway-will-charge-your-ev-while-youre-driving
1-mile proof of concept. Still, a real-life functional example.
How much charge and in how many minutes? And how much extra does it cost to build the roadway?
It doesn’t sound like this is likely to solve the road trip problem, at least not in my lifetime. But I can see certain cases being useful. At the airport where taxis are queuing for customers, for example.
I can’t recall if it was posted here or if I saw it on Reddit, not seeing it here. Electric scooters in Asia is a Big Thing. The number one selling vehicle of all time is the Honda Super Cub scooter, link below (goes by various names around the world). Moving millions and millions of scooters from gas to EV will be pretty sizeable in terms of emissions.
I can’t say, but as with any tech I’m assuming this roadway might be 50% the eventual capacity and 1000% the eventual price of a model to release.
Gotta say that the “subscriber model” feels like a suspect way to release this. Like, go build your $MMs in road and hope that people download your app for an optional way to charge? This feels most useful in either metro gridlock areas like LA (good luck with major construction in the worst areas) or areas for long road trips. But in the latter case I don’t know if a couple miles in the middle of Kansas is going to have the usage to be profitable.
I see this more likely to be, once EV vehicles are more common, wireless-charging-enabled vehicles will drive on toll roads for one cost, and potentially ICE and non-wireless EVs would still have a smaller toll. I already get charged post-facto by camera and mail for driving in the wrong place in Canada without realizing it. So charge something like $.30/mile for charging EVs and $0.10/mile for wear and tear for other vehicles, etc. Price may be wildly inappropriate there.
I think a lot of that has already happened. I was in Chengdu, China about 12 years ago and they already had thousands of electric scooters.
Scooters where you can swap out the battery in seconds, like they do in Taiwan, rather than wait an hour for a charge (with the associated battery fire risk) should make it even more compelling.
Yeah, and if the batteries can be swapped in a minute or so, that’s pretty convenient too.
I’ve seen a video or two from China. There are loads of electric bikes and scooters. It makes for a nice, quiet city!