SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Electric car charging stations head to Love's Travel Stops across the US:
[Electrify America] announced Tuesday a new collaborative effort with Love's to install charging stations at its stops across the US. Five locations are already open as of today in Oklahoma, New Mexico, Utah and Florida. Crucially, the stops now open helped complete a nationwide charging route from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.
The new stations will charge at rates up to 350 kilowatts and can add up to 20 miles of range per minute. Ultimately, Electrify America's goal is to continue chipping away at America's range anxiety about electric cars. With more places to charge, it will be mighty difficult to run out of juice. Of course, the company's also bound to invest the cash as part of a Volkswagen dieselgate settlement here in the US...
Will such partnerships vanquish range anxiety for electric vehicles (EVs)?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 20 2020, @07:51AM (3 children)
A person can drive for 5 hours, get lunch, drive for 5, get dinner, etc, etc.
And gas breaks are "a break" too, one can make them 15 minute breaks.
Yet you WILL NOT drive 1400miles a day in any electric car today. It takes waaaaaaay too long to charge the batteries. WAY too long.
First, you cannot wait until battery = 0 to stop. Just like with ICE, you see you have a 1/4, 1/8th of a 'tank/charge', you need to stop and find a station. You need to give yourself 50 miles of headroom, or so.
That means you're taxing 20% of the battery charge as 'useful'.
Next, level 3 chargers might *might* hit 80% in 30 minutes. Yet, does that add another 500 miles of range? No, because you're charging 20%, 10% to 80%.
I drive from Ontario to California in 4 days. Yes, 4 days.
When I plugged this same trip into an EV charging station / route planner, it took 9 days. It wasn't where the charger is, but things like:
- it takes 30 minutes to charge, 7 times a day, versus 3 refuels, at 3 minutes each
EG, 210 minutes versus 9 minutes.
There is literally no comparison if you're driving ICE versus electric, for real range right now. It's fine inside a city. Not fine if you have to actually travel, and lots of people do!
And of course, that doesn't even include things like 'heat' and other such things, where as these are a byproduct of an ICE running.
H2 is the real long-term way to go here.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday August 20 2020, @12:32PM (1 child)
Why does it take you so long? Your starting point is halfway there. If you're starting in Toronto, it should take you 3 days. If you're starting in Kenora, it should take more like 2.5 days.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday August 20 2020, @08:21PM
I've unloaded in San Diego, come back to Yuma to load groceries for Toronto. It always took 72 hours or longer to drive to Toronto. Four days to drive it is at least somewhat respectable. It indicates that he may have stopped for a night's sleep along the way, which I didn't always do.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday August 20 2020, @08:15PM
Respectable.
About the only way that EV is going to compete with gas OR diesel engines, is if they do battery swaps. Pull up to a changing station, your low/dead batteries come out one side, and the fresh batteries are pushed in the other side. That's probably still 1/4 hour operation, not a three to five minute "fill up".
Of course, swapping batteries is likely to result in picking up a dud battery somewhere, that just won't take a good charge due to age.