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I was charging my car on a 120V, 15A circuit (12A draw to the car) for over a year. I'd use about 8kWh per day with a 20 mile round trip commute + extras; that

I was charging my car on a 120V, 15A circuit (12A draw to the car) for over a year. I'd use about 8kWh per day with a 20 mile round trip commute + extras; that translated to needing about 5.5 hours of charging. It really was fine, but it was near the limit of what's practical without using a fast charger. Extra trips around town would put me at a deficit, and it'd take a few nights of charging to bring things back up to my set point of 80%. Additionally, I had to think a few days out for when I'd know I'd be doing a bunch of driving to make sure I gave myself enough buffer. Now, having a charging circuit that can put out over 9kW means I can think about it a lot less. But I thoroughly agree with you: a normal mains outlet is often fine, and holiday road trips can be messy.

b112 2y ago
You know, there's a car train between the northern US and further south. Your car goes on one train car, you get to relax in the train. And I know the UK/france tunnel is like this too. Seems like an optimal solution in some respects, if optimized. For example, millions of Canadians travel to Florida each year for the winter, a lot by car. If such a train ran once a day, it would help many with range anxiety for such cases. But imagine if major cities had such trains between them daily? These can still carry commuters without cars, too! And of course, we don't need everyone to be covered by this solution today, because the goal is to keep the transition to electric happening. This would help.
- RandomCitizen12 2y ago
  Looking at prices, the chunnel car shuttle seems to be $200 for a 50 mile trip. If a regular American car was driving this distance it would cost about $10 in gas. I don't see this catching on for links between cities.
  - pxndxx 2y ago
    the chunnel goes _under the sea_ for 30 miles.
    - RandomCitizen12 2y ago
      Yes. But most of the cost of the ticket will be operating expenses for the train and associated service. The cost of building under a body of water, which is large, does not make most of the ticket price difference.
      - Symbiote 2y ago
        The cost of the Channel Tunnel (by car) is determined by what the market will sustain: the only alternative to move a vehicle is a ferry. The train is a bit faster. A more realistic comparison is something like Villach in Austria to Edirne in Turkey, which is 1400km by road, and €259 one-way for a car plus €149 for one person (https://www.seat61.com/motorail-trains.htm https://www.seat61.com/motorail-trains.htm).
        RandomCitizen12 2y ago
        For comparison, math for the Villach to Edirne trip comes up with USD 158 in gas for the average US car mileage and gas price for 1400km, versus USD 443 for the car + person tickets.
        abenga 2y ago
        I'd gladly pay 300 dollars not to drive 1400km. Once or twice a year, I drive 320km, and I think about twice that (to and fro) is the limit of what I am reasonably willing to drive over a couple of days.
        yurishimo 2y ago
        Those are rookie numbers. I used to drive 100km for dinner sometimes or to visit friends on a Saturday afternoon. This is in a major US metro.
        dzhiurgis 2y ago
        Driving 100km on a straight highway with driver assist is nothing. Driving 100km on a nauseating mountain serpentine can easily take 2-3x longer. But yeah, 300 dollars in Turkey is a lot of money that most people will be willing to save.
- shkkmo 2y ago
  There is one single car train route on the east coast that goes between Virginia and Florida with no stops. I am skeptical about the ease of scaling this, especially given the state of non-car distance travel on Amtrak.
  - rascul 2y ago
    I looked into this a few years ago. It cost more and took longer than if I just drove it. Not sure how that calculation would work out today, though.
    - ssl-3 2y ago
      I've looked at it a bit tonight, since I do drive from DC-ish to Orlando-ish for a thing every year. It looks like ticket prices vary considerably based on date, and tend to get cheaper as dates grow closer if bookings are sparse, much as airfares or hotels behave. Depending on date, it looks like I can take one direction of that trip on a train for as low as $360. That's $75 for (what looks like decently comfortable) "coach" seating for 1, and $285 for a "standard size" vehicle. To drive between those same two points is 811 road miles. At $0.67 per mile (the IRS reimbursement rate, which is supposed to include consumables like fuel and also less-visible things like insurance and depreciation), that's $544. So the Auto-Train can be cheaper. It can also be more expensive: Again, depending on date, I've seen coach seats as high as $280 -- a couple hundred bucks higher than the cheapest fare of $75 -- which makes it more rather more expensive than driving. Trip time, if driving solo, looks close-enough to the same. It's 12-ish hours to drive straight-through, plus stops for fuel, libations and probably at least one nap of indeterminate length to combat fatigue. That seems close-enough to the auto train's ~17-hour trip to not be worth thinking too much about. And theoretically, after getting off of the train, I won't be worn out from having spent an entire human day driving. That seems like it would be nice -- I can have a cocktail or two and play some Factorio instead of just...driving all damned day. Fascinating stuff, I think. I'll check out prices before I head out to make that trip again in the spring. Who knows: Maybe I'll wind up taking the train.
      - Symbiote 2y ago
- gessha 2y ago
  People will come up with the craziest solutions to problems solvable with 200 year old technology (trains). Why you need these heavy metal boxes instead of taking a train is beyond me. Cars are optimal for trips below 100-ish miles. Anything above is high speed train and airplanes.
  - LargeWu 2y ago
    You're making a very big assumption that once you get dropped off by the train at your destination that you aren't going to need a vehicle once you're there.
    - xipix 2y ago
      Rent one?
      - recursive 2y ago
        Have you rented a car recently? I'd rather drive my own car for 3 hours. Then I'll also have an easier time securely bringing a whole bunch of stuff, which I sometimes do also.
    - neltnerb 2y ago
      It's definitely worth reminding anyone that this is why you need train stations to have good bus service to the surrounding area. You can't even take a commuter rail (in a city with decent rail transit) unless your destination has good bus service or a friend to pick you up. These things come hand in hand, if you want to make it work things either need to be walking distance from the station or with reasonably frequent buses. If a bus comes once an hour (actually the case in my city off rush-hour) it may as well not exist.
      - Lio 2y ago
        Or you take a folding bike with you. Brompton even make an electric version for those that need it.
      - deleted 2y ago
bryanlarsen 2y ago
> it'd take a few nights of charging to bring things back up to my set point of 80% But is that an issue? As long as you always have enough juice to get to a fast charger, and you can always get back to 80% by Friday morning, isn't that enough? Sure, it's nice to have a 9kW charger, and I'm glad I do. But if I would have been forced to pay $5K to upgrade my mains connection I would likely have just kept the $5K and charged on 120V.
- jdeibele 2y ago
  I've been doing 120V for just over a year with the Chevrolet portable charging cable. It's mostly been fine, the main issue is that it stops working every so often and has to be unplugged and plugged back in. My Bolt lets me say that the circuit is dedicated to it at home and pulls 12 amps instead of the 8 amps it would pull anywhere else. It's trying to make sure it doesn't overload the circuit. We are moving to a newer home and I already have the 240V charger installed there. Looking forward to 25-30 miles of range per hour (running at 32A normally but have a dedicated 60A circuit) instead of the 3 I'm getting now. At this house, the 200A panel is full so I would have had to add another panel.
  - malfist 2y ago
    Emporia makes a load balancing charger. You hook an anmeter around the mains and it can pull anything less than the max the box can handle. My 200 service was also "full" but when monitoring the energy, we rarely pull above 40 amps. We'd only hit 200 if the emergency heat was running at max for both HVACs, the oven was on, the water heater was going and the dryer was running. Pretty hard to do by accident, nigh impossible if you think about it
- NegativeK 2y ago
  I probably would've stuck with 120V charging if I didn't also want the 240V outlet for machine tools/etc in my garage. And like you, I wouldn't've paid to upgrade the panel if that was necessary. Fortunately there was capacity.
LinAGKar 2y ago
> that translated to needing about 5.5 hours of charging How much time do you have available for charging? I'd have thought you'd spend a lot more than 6 hours a day at home. And chargers at work would allow charging the car near constantly when it's not being driven (other than days when you travel elsewhere), so I think that's an important part of transitioning to EVs.
eurleif 2y ago
Your daily travel was around half of the average American's[0], and as you said, that was near the limit of what's practical. It follows that for the average American, a normal outlet is not fine. [0] https://www.axios.com/2024/03/24/average-commute-distance-us-map https://www.axios.com/2024/03/24/average-commute-distance-us...
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  But using two outlets, on opposite phases, would give you double the voltage. Might be too much to expect people to identify two suitable outlets and have a “Y”extension lead that would bring them together.
  - giantg2 2y ago
    Somewhere a copy of the NEC is bursting into flames. You'd be better of installing a new circuit with proper equiptment. Most homes would be able to at least accommodate a 20amp 220v socket, which takes about 40% of the charging time of a regular socket (15amp 110).
    - amluto 2y ago
      OTOH I see no fundamental reason that one couldn’t build an EVSE that connected to two different outlets and drew from both of them. Two branch circuits supplying the same device is not especially rare.
      - giantg2 2y ago
        I've never seen that. With the right protection circuits it could work safely. However, most garages seem to only have one branch anyways, so might as well add a 20amp+ 220v branch.
      - toast0 2y ago
        In a (large, recently constructed) garage, it seems likely that you've got multiple circuits with outlets. If you've got multiple outside outlets, they're probably all on the same circuit. If the hots are the same phase, I don't know if there's a way to determine if they're behind the same breaker or not. If the hots are on different phases, you need to return to each neutral or the gcfi that's likely to be present on an outdoor outlet will trip.
Dylan16807 2y ago
> near the limit of what's practical without using a fast charger "fast charger" usually means one of those fancy DC systems, not just a bigger outlet.
- MengerSponge 2y ago
  Confusingly, Level 2 charging can refer both to 220V AC or fast DC charging. Context is key, but home level 2 (AC) can get up to about 20kW, while DC Level 2 easily delivers up to 400kW. "Fast charger" in the context of home charging means 20-50A at 220V, which is enough to fully charge the battery in a few hours. Basically, you can roll in on fumes at midnight, plug in and go to sleep, and wake up and leave the next morning with a full tank.
  - sokoloff 2y ago
    I’ve always heard DC Fast Charging called “DC Fast Charging” or “Level 3”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it called Level 2.
    - MengerSponge 2y ago
      Because if you use the wrong terminology it's more clear, but SAE J1772 specifies two levels of DC fast charging.
  - recursive 2y ago
    No one calls DC fast-charging "level 2". It's a mistake. Let's not confuse the issue by starting now.
    - MengerSponge 2y ago
      I dunno what you want to happen here: SAE J1772 refers to level 1 and level 2 DC fast charging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772
      - 2y ago
verisimi 2y ago
> it was near the limit of what's practical without using a fast charger > I had to think a few days out for when I'd know I'd be doing a bunch of driving to make sure I gave myself enough buffer Its hard to accept a future that involves this sort of compromise and introducing new stresses for an inferior solution.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  You have to think about gas too, you're just used to it. And the future has enough fast chargers that it's hard to be caught out no matter where you go. The future also involves more high power plugs, which would have removed the issue you quoted. If you would mind that issue more than they did, then you just need to get a plug installed when you buy an EV.
  - verisimi 2y ago
    Its a different order of magnitude. I don't need to think about fuel every day, and I don't have to consider my week if I have a busy day.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      All of that gets removed if you have a bigger outlet. There are some people that mind that very little and won't bother to get the upgrade, but judging EVs in general based on the 120-volt situation is like judging pasta in general based on cups of instant ramen.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
      People who walk out every morning to an EV fully charged up on a home L2 charger (the "high power plugs" mentioned above) very seldom have to think about charge, and definitely not "every day". How would you feel if your car automatically had a full tank of gas every morning? Even when near empty the night before. It's described as the complete opposite of "worry every day".
      - 2y ago
playa1 2y ago
I had been doing a similar 1kw trickle charging setup for 3 years. While it was sufficient for daily driving we would go on longer drives regularly, mostly on weekends so 2-4 times a month. It was annoying mental overhead to have to plan out the charging so often. Three months ago we ran 240v to the garage and now have 12kw charging at home. It has been a game changer! We don’t have to think or plan around the charging. Every morning the car is at 75% (the limit we have set). And if we are going on a long drive I can move it to 90% or 100%. I really regret not getting the level 2 charger years ago when we got our first EV.
Fatnino 2y ago
An acquaintance of mine lost his lease on house he was renting and temporarily moved his family out of state while looking for a new place here. As you can imagine, this turned into many months of them being gone. He left his Chevy Bolt parked across the street from his former residence (or rather, across from the construction site that replaced it). Eventually, the car got impounded and I got roped in to go bail it out and bring it to another friend of ours who had space to store it legally. When I got the car, the battery was almost completely discharged. When dropped off the car I don't actually know how it was still moving. We plugged it in to a regual home wall outlet be cause that's all there was. The car computer said it would take SIXTY HOURS to charge to full. That's two and a half DAYS.
- r00fus 2y ago
  Completely unsurprised. Just consider the energy density of gasoline or a modern EV battery. The fact remains that a full EV battery can really take you a long ways.
  - Fatnino 2y ago
    It really can't. A fully charge bolt (when it's still new) will take you about 250 miles. You won't find a gas car that can't go 300 miles on a tank. I currently have an old prius (which is admittedly far above average compared to regular cars) and it can go 450 miles on a tank. And that tank gets filled up faster than the time it takes to walk inside and buy a bag of chips.
- Kirby64 2y ago
  Very normal. You have to consider how long you need to 'replenish' the the range you used from your daily driving. Assuming you plug in when you get home, you likely have ~10 hours of charging time. Standard wall outlet is 12A continous, so 1440W. Most 120V is relatively 'inefficient' due to needing to run all the cooling infrastructure which tends to be a fixed overhead. A good number is roughly 4 miles of range per hour of charge on a 120V standard outlet for most normal vehicles (Bolt, Model 3, Ioniq 5, etc) So, as long as you're driving less than 40 miles per day, 120V outlet will always keep you topped up. If you charge longer (i.e., plug in at 8PM, leave at 7AM) then the numbers look even better. Some considerations for cold climate and whatnot, but 40 miles in a day is a good commute.
m463 2y ago
I did the same thing. My daily use averaged 24 miles and 110v worked just fine. Since then, batteries have gotten bigger, I have a 220v charger than can easily fill the large battery overnight with cheaper power, many parking garages have chargers, and high speed fast chargers have become commonplace. I kind of wonder if the people purchasing cars for these theoretical events have a first aid kit in their car, emergency food in the house, or savings for a few months out of work. I think getting a older big gas SUV with plenty of storage space is a good backup. You can haul things too big or dirty for your EV, use gasoline when electricity for some reason doesn't work, and haul around a big family visiting from out-of-town. You can also lend it to the people who don't understand EVs.

b112 2y ago

You know, there's a car train between the northern US and further south. Your car goes on one train car, you get to relax in the train. And I know the UK/france tunnel is like this too. Seems like an optimal solution in some respects, if optimized. For example, millions of Canadians travel to Florida each year for the winter, a lot by car. If such a train ran once a day, it would help many with range anxiety for such cases. But imagine if major cities had such trains between them daily? These can still carry commuters without cars, too! And of course, we don't need everyone to be covered by this solution today, because the goal is to keep the transition to electric happening. This would help.

RandomCitizen12 2y ago
Looking at prices, the chunnel car shuttle seems to be $200 for a 50 mile trip. If a regular American car was driving this distance it would cost about $10 in gas. I don't see this catching on for links between cities.
- pxndxx 2y ago
  the chunnel goes _under the sea_ for 30 miles.
  - RandomCitizen12 2y ago
    Yes. But most of the cost of the ticket will be operating expenses for the train and associated service. The cost of building under a body of water, which is large, does not make most of the ticket price difference.
    - Symbiote 2y ago
      The cost of the Channel Tunnel (by car) is determined by what the market will sustain: the only alternative to move a vehicle is a ferry. The train is a bit faster. A more realistic comparison is something like Villach in Austria to Edirne in Turkey, which is 1400km by road, and €259 one-way for a car plus €149 for one person (https://www.seat61.com/motorail-trains.htm https://www.seat61.com/motorail-trains.htm).
      - RandomCitizen12 2y ago
        For comparison, math for the Villach to Edirne trip comes up with USD 158 in gas for the average US car mileage and gas price for 1400km, versus USD 443 for the car + person tickets.
        abenga 2y ago
        I'd gladly pay 300 dollars not to drive 1400km. Once or twice a year, I drive 320km, and I think about twice that (to and fro) is the limit of what I am reasonably willing to drive over a couple of days.
        yurishimo 2y ago
        Those are rookie numbers. I used to drive 100km for dinner sometimes or to visit friends on a Saturday afternoon. This is in a major US metro.
        dzhiurgis 2y ago
        Driving 100km on a straight highway with driver assist is nothing. Driving 100km on a nauseating mountain serpentine can easily take 2-3x longer. But yeah, 300 dollars in Turkey is a lot of money that most people will be willing to save.
shkkmo 2y ago
There is one single car train route on the east coast that goes between Virginia and Florida with no stops. I am skeptical about the ease of scaling this, especially given the state of non-car distance travel on Amtrak.
- rascul 2y ago
  I looked into this a few years ago. It cost more and took longer than if I just drove it. Not sure how that calculation would work out today, though.
  - ssl-3 2y ago
    I've looked at it a bit tonight, since I do drive from DC-ish to Orlando-ish for a thing every year. It looks like ticket prices vary considerably based on date, and tend to get cheaper as dates grow closer if bookings are sparse, much as airfares or hotels behave. Depending on date, it looks like I can take one direction of that trip on a train for as low as $360. That's $75 for (what looks like decently comfortable) "coach" seating for 1, and $285 for a "standard size" vehicle. To drive between those same two points is 811 road miles. At $0.67 per mile (the IRS reimbursement rate, which is supposed to include consumables like fuel and also less-visible things like insurance and depreciation), that's $544. So the Auto-Train can be cheaper. It can also be more expensive: Again, depending on date, I've seen coach seats as high as $280 -- a couple hundred bucks higher than the cheapest fare of $75 -- which makes it more rather more expensive than driving. Trip time, if driving solo, looks close-enough to the same. It's 12-ish hours to drive straight-through, plus stops for fuel, libations and probably at least one nap of indeterminate length to combat fatigue. That seems close-enough to the auto train's ~17-hour trip to not be worth thinking too much about. And theoretically, after getting off of the train, I won't be worn out from having spent an entire human day driving. That seems like it would be nice -- I can have a cocktail or two and play some Factorio instead of just...driving all damned day. Fascinating stuff, I think. I'll check out prices before I head out to make that trip again in the spring. Who knows: Maybe I'll wind up taking the train.
    - Symbiote 2y ago
gessha 2y ago
People will come up with the craziest solutions to problems solvable with 200 year old technology (trains). Why you need these heavy metal boxes instead of taking a train is beyond me. Cars are optimal for trips below 100-ish miles. Anything above is high speed train and airplanes.
- LargeWu 2y ago
  You're making a very big assumption that once you get dropped off by the train at your destination that you aren't going to need a vehicle once you're there.
  - xipix 2y ago
    Rent one?
    - recursive 2y ago
      Have you rented a car recently? I'd rather drive my own car for 3 hours. Then I'll also have an easier time securely bringing a whole bunch of stuff, which I sometimes do also.
  - neltnerb 2y ago
    It's definitely worth reminding anyone that this is why you need train stations to have good bus service to the surrounding area. You can't even take a commuter rail (in a city with decent rail transit) unless your destination has good bus service or a friend to pick you up. These things come hand in hand, if you want to make it work things either need to be walking distance from the station or with reasonably frequent buses. If a bus comes once an hour (actually the case in my city off rush-hour) it may as well not exist.
    - Lio 2y ago
      Or you take a folding bike with you. Brompton even make an electric version for those that need it.
    - deleted 2y ago

bryanlarsen 2y ago

> it'd take a few nights of charging to bring things back up to my set point of 80% But is that an issue? As long as you always have enough juice to get to a fast charger, and you can always get back to 80% by Friday morning, isn't that enough? Sure, it's nice to have a 9kW charger, and I'm glad I do. But if I would have been forced to pay $5K to upgrade my mains connection I would likely have just kept the $5K and charged on 120V.

jdeibele 2y ago
I've been doing 120V for just over a year with the Chevrolet portable charging cable. It's mostly been fine, the main issue is that it stops working every so often and has to be unplugged and plugged back in. My Bolt lets me say that the circuit is dedicated to it at home and pulls 12 amps instead of the 8 amps it would pull anywhere else. It's trying to make sure it doesn't overload the circuit. We are moving to a newer home and I already have the 240V charger installed there. Looking forward to 25-30 miles of range per hour (running at 32A normally but have a dedicated 60A circuit) instead of the 3 I'm getting now. At this house, the 200A panel is full so I would have had to add another panel.
- malfist 2y ago
  Emporia makes a load balancing charger. You hook an anmeter around the mains and it can pull anything less than the max the box can handle. My 200 service was also "full" but when monitoring the energy, we rarely pull above 40 amps. We'd only hit 200 if the emergency heat was running at max for both HVACs, the oven was on, the water heater was going and the dryer was running. Pretty hard to do by accident, nigh impossible if you think about it
NegativeK 2y ago
I probably would've stuck with 120V charging if I didn't also want the 240V outlet for machine tools/etc in my garage. And like you, I wouldn't've paid to upgrade the panel if that was necessary. Fortunately there was capacity.

LinAGKar 2y ago

> that translated to needing about 5.5 hours of charging How much time do you have available for charging? I'd have thought you'd spend a lot more than 6 hours a day at home. And chargers at work would allow charging the car near constantly when it's not being driven (other than days when you travel elsewhere), so I think that's an important part of transitioning to EVs.

eurleif 2y ago

Your daily travel was around half of the average American's[0], and as you said, that was near the limit of what's practical. It follows that for the average American, a normal outlet is not fine. [0] https://www.axios.com/2024/03/24/average-commute-distance-us-map https://www.axios.com/2024/03/24/average-commute-distance-us...

SoftTalker 2y ago
But using two outlets, on opposite phases, would give you double the voltage. Might be too much to expect people to identify two suitable outlets and have a “Y”extension lead that would bring them together.
- giantg2 2y ago
  Somewhere a copy of the NEC is bursting into flames. You'd be better of installing a new circuit with proper equiptment. Most homes would be able to at least accommodate a 20amp 220v socket, which takes about 40% of the charging time of a regular socket (15amp 110).
  - amluto 2y ago
    OTOH I see no fundamental reason that one couldn’t build an EVSE that connected to two different outlets and drew from both of them. Two branch circuits supplying the same device is not especially rare.
    - giantg2 2y ago
      I've never seen that. With the right protection circuits it could work safely. However, most garages seem to only have one branch anyways, so might as well add a 20amp+ 220v branch.
    - toast0 2y ago
      In a (large, recently constructed) garage, it seems likely that you've got multiple circuits with outlets. If you've got multiple outside outlets, they're probably all on the same circuit. If the hots are the same phase, I don't know if there's a way to determine if they're behind the same breaker or not. If the hots are on different phases, you need to return to each neutral or the gcfi that's likely to be present on an outdoor outlet will trip.

Dylan16807 2y ago

> near the limit of what's practical without using a fast charger "fast charger" usually means one of those fancy DC systems, not just a bigger outlet.

MengerSponge 2y ago
Confusingly, Level 2 charging can refer both to 220V AC or fast DC charging. Context is key, but home level 2 (AC) can get up to about 20kW, while DC Level 2 easily delivers up to 400kW. "Fast charger" in the context of home charging means 20-50A at 220V, which is enough to fully charge the battery in a few hours. Basically, you can roll in on fumes at midnight, plug in and go to sleep, and wake up and leave the next morning with a full tank.
- sokoloff 2y ago
  I’ve always heard DC Fast Charging called “DC Fast Charging” or “Level 3”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it called Level 2.
  - MengerSponge 2y ago
    Because if you use the wrong terminology it's more clear, but SAE J1772 specifies two levels of DC fast charging.
- recursive 2y ago
  No one calls DC fast-charging "level 2". It's a mistake. Let's not confuse the issue by starting now.
  - MengerSponge 2y ago
    I dunno what you want to happen here: SAE J1772 refers to level 1 and level 2 DC fast charging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772
    - 2y ago

verisimi 2y ago

> it was near the limit of what's practical without using a fast charger > I had to think a few days out for when I'd know I'd be doing a bunch of driving to make sure I gave myself enough buffer Its hard to accept a future that involves this sort of compromise and introducing new stresses for an inferior solution.

Dylan16807 2y ago
You have to think about gas too, you're just used to it. And the future has enough fast chargers that it's hard to be caught out no matter where you go. The future also involves more high power plugs, which would have removed the issue you quoted. If you would mind that issue more than they did, then you just need to get a plug installed when you buy an EV.
- verisimi 2y ago
  Its a different order of magnitude. I don't need to think about fuel every day, and I don't have to consider my week if I have a busy day.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    All of that gets removed if you have a bigger outlet. There are some people that mind that very little and won't bother to get the upgrade, but judging EVs in general based on the 120-volt situation is like judging pasta in general based on cups of instant ramen.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
    People who walk out every morning to an EV fully charged up on a home L2 charger (the "high power plugs" mentioned above) very seldom have to think about charge, and definitely not "every day". How would you feel if your car automatically had a full tank of gas every morning? Even when near empty the night before. It's described as the complete opposite of "worry every day".
    - 2y ago

playa1 2y ago

I had been doing a similar 1kw trickle charging setup for 3 years. While it was sufficient for daily driving we would go on longer drives regularly, mostly on weekends so 2-4 times a month. It was annoying mental overhead to have to plan out the charging so often. Three months ago we ran 240v to the garage and now have 12kw charging at home. It has been a game changer! We don’t have to think or plan around the charging. Every morning the car is at 75% (the limit we have set). And if we are going on a long drive I can move it to 90% or 100%. I really regret not getting the level 2 charger years ago when we got our first EV.

Fatnino 2y ago

An acquaintance of mine lost his lease on house he was renting and temporarily moved his family out of state while looking for a new place here. As you can imagine, this turned into many months of them being gone. He left his Chevy Bolt parked across the street from his former residence (or rather, across from the construction site that replaced it). Eventually, the car got impounded and I got roped in to go bail it out and bring it to another friend of ours who had space to store it legally. When I got the car, the battery was almost completely discharged. When dropped off the car I don't actually know how it was still moving. We plugged it in to a regual home wall outlet be cause that's all there was. The car computer said it would take SIXTY HOURS to charge to full. That's two and a half DAYS.

r00fus 2y ago
Completely unsurprised. Just consider the energy density of gasoline or a modern EV battery. The fact remains that a full EV battery can really take you a long ways.
- Fatnino 2y ago
  It really can't. A fully charge bolt (when it's still new) will take you about 250 miles. You won't find a gas car that can't go 300 miles on a tank. I currently have an old prius (which is admittedly far above average compared to regular cars) and it can go 450 miles on a tank. And that tank gets filled up faster than the time it takes to walk inside and buy a bag of chips.
Kirby64 2y ago
Very normal. You have to consider how long you need to 'replenish' the the range you used from your daily driving. Assuming you plug in when you get home, you likely have ~10 hours of charging time. Standard wall outlet is 12A continous, so 1440W. Most 120V is relatively 'inefficient' due to needing to run all the cooling infrastructure which tends to be a fixed overhead. A good number is roughly 4 miles of range per hour of charge on a 120V standard outlet for most normal vehicles (Bolt, Model 3, Ioniq 5, etc) So, as long as you're driving less than 40 miles per day, 120V outlet will always keep you topped up. If you charge longer (i.e., plug in at 8PM, leave at 7AM) then the numbers look even better. Some considerations for cold climate and whatnot, but 40 miles in a day is a good commute.

m463 2y ago

I did the same thing. My daily use averaged 24 miles and 110v worked just fine. Since then, batteries have gotten bigger, I have a 220v charger than can easily fill the large battery overnight with cheaper power, many parking garages have chargers, and high speed fast chargers have become commonplace. I kind of wonder if the people purchasing cars for these theoretical events have a first aid kit in their car, emergency food in the house, or savings for a few months out of work. I think getting a older big gas SUV with plenty of storage space is a good backup. You can haul things too big or dirty for your EV, use gasoline when electricity for some reason doesn't work, and haul around a big family visiting from out-of-town. You can also lend it to the people who don't understand EVs.