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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 19 2020, @06:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the electrifying dept.

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)?


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday August 19 2020, @11:35PM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Wednesday August 19 2020, @11:35PM (#1039106) Journal

    Sounds like a road trip is very doable, in a Tesla. And that is about what I expected, half an hour to get 200 miles of range. 20% to 33% longer travel time is not thrilling, but livable. It's the other electric cars that are unacceptable.

    I own an old Nissan Leaf (2011) I got used, for cheap. The batteries are due for replacement, having degraded to the point that the car has only about 40 miles of range when fully charged. I love the low maintenance and ultra quiet ride. No emissions testing needed. No idling, and no fumes to breathe while idling with door open or window down. But the severely limited range makes it useless for anything other than very local trips.

    I don't even try to use charging stations any more. I've learned they are not reliable. They might be turned off after hours, disabled, out of order, the wrong type, occupied, or, most likely, nowhere near my destination. Take a trip that you can't finish without a recharge, and you've put yourself at the mercy of the vagaries of these public charging networks. They don't take credit cards like gas pumps do, no. You have to set up accounts with each of whichever of the half dozen networks are in your area, and then you need their special card, or their app on your smartphone. Even when they are "free", they still insist you have an account. A charging station halfway to your destination is mostly useless, because it takes way too long to recharge. Even when it is at your destination, you might not want to stay that long. Oh, and Tesla gives other electric cars a giant middle finger, by not providing any means to connect them to Tesla's chargers. So I do all my charging at home. If it's too far for the electric to do the round trip on one charge, I take a gas burner.

    To make that Phoenix to L.A. run in my old Leaf would take days, of course. Or not be possible at all, if there's a gap of more than 40 miles between charging points.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by KilroySmith on Thursday August 20 2020, @12:27AM

    by KilroySmith (2113) on Thursday August 20 2020, @12:27AM (#1039137)

    The Leaf was a great city car, hobbled by Nissan choosing not to actively cool the battery (the Tesla will turn on the A/C to cool the battery if it gets too hot outside, even sitting in my garage) which caused a lot of battery degradation, especially in hot areas. They were also really early in the EV game, and it turns out that the Chademo charging standard they chose is going to end up on the trash heap of history. Unfortunately, I expect the Tesla connector to end up there eventually, also - eventually there'll be enough other cars with CCS connectors, and enough CCS charging stations, that Tesla will have to change (they already use CCS in Europe, because the EU decided on a single standard, and it wasn't Tesla). Bummer because the Tesla connector is smaller, sleeker, easier to manage, and identical in every market, unlike CCS.

    I really wish that a few of the new EVs would take Tesla up on their offer and join the Supercharger network. Tesla has asked that, to do that, they sign a free patent license, and contribute to the cost of building the Supercharger network. But the old car companies are wedded to the idea of "We don't build gas stations, why should we build Charging stations".