Tesla-S-owner

In a previous blog article I listed nine states that have “right-to-charge” laws.  Those states were California, Florida, Oregon, New Jersey, Virginia, Illinois, Hawaii, Connecticut and Colorado.  I have now learned that more states have right-to-charge laws.  Continue reading “Which states have “right-to-charge” laws?”

On January 16, 2024, Mazda 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 another entry to the canonical list.

(Update:  Comments have been filed in response to a Request For Information – see blog article.)

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, enacted on November 15, 2021, established a $5 billion firehose of federal money to help pay for high-speed electric vehicle chargers across the United States.  This Act charged the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) with figuring out how to decide what kinds of electric vehicle (“EV”) chargers would be eligible to receive money from this $5B firehose of money.  To do this, the FHWA took a mere two weeks to publish a Request for Information (RFI) in the Federal Register on November 29, 2021.   Public comments were due within two months of the Federal Register (“FR”) notice, that is, by January 28, 2022.  Continue reading “Will the $5 billion federal firehose of EV charger money become available for Tesla plugs?”

If one defines a relevant metric like deaths per passenger mile, and if one applies the metric while avoiding giving undue weight to things like “magnitude of headline splashing”, then much insight can be gained about relative safety or riskiness of various transportation choices.   And there are many reminders that lots of people are not very good at assessing risks when left to their own devices about it.  Continue reading “How risky are automobile driver assist systems (for example Tesla Full Self Driving)?”

On December 19, 2023, Volkswagen (maker of Audi, Porsche, Bentley, Lamborghini, Bugatti) 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 another entry to the canonical list.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was enacted on November 15, 2021, promising that $5 billion would be spent installing electric vehicle chargers across the United States.  Now, after more than two years, the first four EV chargers have been placed into service.  Where are these EV chargers?  What kind of charging plugs do these first four EV chargers have? What does it cost to use the chargers? Continue reading “First-ever NEVI-funded EV charger placed into service”

On November 6, 2023, Lucid 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 another entry to the canonical list.

On November 1, 2023, Subaru 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 another entry to the canonical list.

I was fascinated to learn that California has a law that says that a home owner’s association is not allowed to say “no” to an EV charging station if a home owner wants to install one.  Not only that, the HOA is not allowed to impose requirements that that “significantly increase the cost of the station or significantly decrease its efficiency or specified performance.”  It is California Civil Code § 6713.  I am astonished to see that this became law in 2013, long before electric vehicles became commonplace.

Similar laws are in effect in Florida, Oregon, New Jersey, Virginia, Illinois, Hawaii, Connecticut and Colorado.

One source for information about public EV chargers in North America is the Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center.   You can apply various filters in a search for EVSEs (blog article).  As of October 26, 2023 here are the numbers that you get.

		locations	plugs
A	NACS fast DC	2193	23977
B	CCS1 fast DC	7420	14879
C	CHAdeMO fast DC	6478	9743
D	NACS level 2	4971	11937
E	J-plug level 2	58140	126712

A first thing to keep in mind is that “level 2” in this context (rows D and E) represents very slow charging.  These chargers might be at hotels, where you can charge while you sleep.   Row D is mostly what Tesla calls “destination chargers”.  Yes, row E has some really big numbers.  But these chargers are not interesting for people who are contemplating cross-country drives, because they are so slow.

Row A is what we call “Tesla superchargers”.  These are the chargers that are almost never broken.  If one of them stops working, generally it gets repaired almost instantly.  These are the chargers that are located along all of the interstate highways in the US, so that you can safely embark on a cross-country drive without range anxiety.

Row B can be thought of, roughly, as “non-Tesla fast chargers”.  It is commonplace to go to one of these charging locations and to find that one plug is broken, or maybe more than one.  It is commonplace to identify some place that you might drive a non-Tesla car and none of these row-B chargers can be found in that area.  This sorry state of affairs for row B is the chief reason that so many car makers have joined the NACS charging plug club (canonical list).

Row C has a foot in the grave.  There was a time when CHAdeMO plugs looked like maybe they had a future in North America, but that time is past.   No new cars sold in the US use CHAdeMO plugs.

Yet another thing to keep in mind is that this information from the Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center is surely never quite up to date.  No matter how hard the DOE tries to keep this information up to date, there are probably big information gaps and non-negligible reporting delays from the operators of charging stations.  The reader is invited to take these AFDC numbers as general indicators of trends, and not as exact numbers.

What goes unmentioned in the numbers in this table is that, now, and in the future, most EV charging for most EV owners is going to happen at home.  Yes, of course there are many would-be EV owners who would never be able to charge at home — some people can only park their car on the street, for example.   And some live in apartments or other multi-tenant situations where there is no meaningful opportunity to install one’s own EV charger.  The problem of would-be EV owners who cannot possibly charge at home is a big problem and will not be meaningfully remedied any time soon.  But the plain fact is, right now in 2023, most EV charging that happens, happens at home.