EV future

[ZBB]

This is a good place to have the discussion -- considering that there are 5 of us who have an EV (with a couple of us on our 2nd or 3rd one…)

- Most charging will be at home. In my case, ~90% of my EV mileage has been charged at home. Nearly all the remaining was during road trips, and nearly all of that on L3 chargers. I charge occasionally at freebie chargers around town, but that easily could have been at home. I've only had to pay for charging once after forgetting to charge one night and not having enough juice to make it home (so I hit a paid L3 charger on my way home).

- For most people, 150 mile range will be sufficient for commuter and weekend needs. Just charge back up overnight. But it looks like all the recent announcements are for minimum range of ~250 miles. That's great.

City dwellers will be the hardest group to provide coverage -- but some thoughts:
- Many of them already don't own cars and just rent if they need one. Car sharing and ride sharing works well for them. I work with some people that no longer have a car and just take Uber/Lyft when they need a ride (and they walk to work).

- Some cities are already putting charging in on the street -- just like parking meters. These are all over Paris for example. There's even an EV-only car sharing service in Paris that parks that cars on the street at dedicated chargers.

- Its not a surprise that the European automakers are focused on 800V L3 DC, putting out 400kW. Once the batteries can take the full power of these chargers, it means doing an 80% charge in <10 min. That's 3-4x faster than Tesla's current Superchargers.

- Tesla has been putting in "Urban Superchargers" over the last 18 months. These are a bit slower (72kW max), but are not shared -- so you get the max avail from the start (the traditional 120kW Superchargers have 2 outlets share each charging stack -- so the first car to arrive gets max power, and the 2nd car gets the remainder, min 10kW and ramps up as the other ramps down).

- As for the grid requirements of L3 charging, many L3 sites have battery packs to pull juice off the grid evenly, but discharge the batteries faster when needed. Tesla has many superchargers with this, and there are reports of other L3 sites that already do this. VAG was in the news recently with a "mobile" L3 charger that includes a battery pack and the charger -- it could be put on site and used immediately with no grid connection (at least until the battery drains…)