Month: September 2023

(Update:  you can now see the survey results.)

I am hoping to collect some fairly comprehensive information about where the charging ports are on EVs and PHEVs that are used in the US.

At this article you can see information about charging port locations on European vehicles.  My hope is to do the same for America vehicles.

Are you in the US?  Do you have an EV or a PHEV?  If so, I would be very grateful if you could share the location of your charging port.  To respond, click here.

The questionnaire also asks if you have an EV charger at home, and whether you have any adapters for charging at other kinds of charging stations.

Thank you for helping.

I am delighted to see an announcement by Hilton that it plans to install twenty thousand level 2 EV chargers across two thousand of its properties.  What Hilton plans to install are Tesla Universal Wall Connectors.  Continue reading “Hilton to install twenty thousand level 2 chargers”

Let’s say that you run down your EV battery to zero.  Or let’s say you run it down so far that you would be unable to reach your intended charging station.  What can you do?  Some people do “tow charging”, which makes use of the regenerative-braking feature of the vehicle.  Continue reading “Tow charging”

(Update:  a month after construction, the charging station has been turned on.)

From time to time, one encounters a thing where the lingering question is “what is the problem for this thing is the solution?”  Recently I encountered such a thing, namely an odd little four-kiosk EV charging station, not yet in service, tucked away in a corner of a parking lot of a Target store in Silverthorne, Colorado.  As it turns out, this charging station is part of fourteen others (see map at right) that rather inexplicably make up a trail from Broomfield, Colorado to Seattle, Washington.  The charging stations are, in some baffling way, connected with the car maker Volvo and with the coffee retailer Starbucks.  Continue reading “A curious string of EV charging stations”

Now in 2023 it is becoming clearer and clearer that it is sort of unfortunate that a terminology has come into common use namely a single two-word phrase (“charging station”) that conflates two entirely different and wholly unrelated functional needs.

• There is the need to be able to plug in an EV at night before going to sleep, with the idea that in the morning, after the passage of some hours, the EV will be charged up.
• And there is the need to take a break during a cross-country EV trip to stop for 15 or 20 minutes, to charge up, and then four or five hours later there is the need to take another break during that cross-country EV trip to stop for 15 or 20 minutes to charge up again.

Continue reading “Fuzzy meanings of “charging station””

The EV startup Fisker has, reportedly, delivered only twenty-two actual vehicles to customers to date.  It has announced a pickup truck and and it has announced a car that will supposedly cost less than $30K.  And Fisker has announced that Real Soon Now, all of its newly manufactured electric vehicles will have a Tesla-style charging port located at the left rear corner of the vehicle.

This adds an entry to the canonical list.