[Post started August, 2022]
So we recently bought our first EV, and as with so many other things that you try out for the first time – once you try it out you will never be able to go back to a time when you didn’t have it. We purchased a Chevy Bolt, definitely cheap on the end of the spectrum ($46k out the door) vs the stalwart (Tesla starting at $70k), Rivian as the upstart ($100k out the door) and then there’s the other major manufacturers like Ford that are making the big commitments but not yet delivering the results (though I am curious about the electric F-150, biggest selling vehicle in the world, and how it will change the perception of EV’s, particularly in middle America where what many people don’t realize is where most new cars are sold).
[Post restarted March, 2023]
So now that we’ve had the car a few months I want to share my observations, positives and negatives, not just about the car itself, but also with the real-world challenges around charging infrastructure and overall service and support for EV’s. On the plus side, the car is fun to drive, powerful and feels comfortable on the road. It happily gets up to 70+ miles per hour and zips through the streets like a silent ninja. I’m 6″2′ and the seating is very comfortable for me, both in the drivers and passenger seats – I can’t speak for the back seats, though we have had 3 people back there which certainly looks like a squeeze. Trunk space is sufficient if not exceptional, that said we do have the bottomed out area underneath the trunk that I know we’re not fully taking care of. We added a tow hitch, expensive as while it officially supports it, nobody seems to sell them to enable us to pull our jetski out, though we haven’t tested this and I must admit i’m a little apprehensive with a front wheel drive pulling anything out from a relatively sharp ramp. Think i’ll be doing some testing with our RAM attached with ropes in case anything goes sideways.
Onto the negatives, the in-car audio/entertainment system is truly horrible – menus and navigation is unintuitive in every possible way, it feels even worse than Windows 3.11 did back in the days. Thankfully (and essentially) it supports Android Auto and Carplay, meaning that as soon as we hop in the car these are activated and we rarely have to interact with that system. This is going to be a real struggle for the traditional ICE manufacturers as they do not and cannot (I believe) make the changes that are required in this area to be even a laggard, let alone a leader.
Onto the charging infrastructure and general support for EV’s, and this is where it is sorely lacking. EV charging is fragmented, often broken, non-standardized and requires installation of no less than half a dozen apps in order to be able to do any kind of medium or long distance travel – something that we do every week with a 360 mile round trip that we make to the lake and returning to the SF Bay area / peninsula. Interfaces, displays, charging speeds, cost models and overall experience of providing meaningful information on the charging experience goes from mostly decent to truly appalling, and compared to the Tesla experience is so far behind that it’s truly disgraceful. The Biden era commitment for 1,000’s of chargers is good in theory, however a metric tonne of those chargers are going to be L2, and after being stuck after getting caught in snow (that’s a whole other story) and needing to turn back with only an L2 to get us a topup before we got to a DC fast charger, it literally involved us sleeping in the car for hours, just to get 20 short miles down the road. Being the optimist that I am, I do see green sprouts shooting up in this space – EVGo has publicly made a large commitment to refresh it’s chargers in numerous places and is actually building in telemetry, improved error management and dispatch teams to be sent out to actually fix broken units.
So what can be done? Well putting my ill-advised solutions hat on I see that the following relatively small changes would make a huge difference.
- Signage – It doesn’t have to be gas station high and prominent, but at least something out there that as you get closer in the car park that indicates that it’s branded charging station.
- Recommendations and discounts – The opportunity to provided paid-for recommendations to the local coffee shop, restaurant, snack bar, as well as public facilities like toilets is ridiculously obvious, would be welcomed by drivers AND bring in a very nice revenue stream – plus it will start that flywheel going of encouraging public locations to install units when they can attract revenue to their tenants stores.
- Lighting – Seems obvious, right. Nope, the lighting at most places at 9pm, even in ‘nice’ neighborhoods is truly appalling. This is the EV revolution, surely we can install light and bright LED’s to make these places feel futuristic.
- Availability lighting – Why do stations that are online have a nice green light visible to show the station is working and a red one to show that it’s offline. Nobody wants to see a charger offline, but surely that’s better than going through the process of parking, plugging in, only then to find out that the station is offline.
- Simplified error reporting, either onscreen or in the app. Why oh why can’t you just press a button to indicate that a station is offline, and either kickoff a fully automated testing sequence, or at the least sending a ticket for an agent to do a fully check and message via a push notification to try again?
- Queuing management – Chargers are going to increasingly get busy and managing those who are waiting is going to become increasingly contentious – there needs to be a way to put people in a queue (even if it’s using a mobile phone/QR code situation as well as the app) so that they don’t have the anxiety of trying to create a manual queue when you arrive with others.
- Standardized or centralized app – Plugshare is definitely doing what they can here, and I know that everyone wants to lock-in their customers, but you can do that with incentives like gas stations rather than forcing it on people. I would love to see the providers all sign up (or some, or many) to plugging in (see what I did there) funds to Plugshare to create an app that is not locked into the 1970’s and provide unified billing options. Make it a defacto standard and then use PlugShare app push notifications to offer discounts/benefits/teasers to move to their exclusive app gives people a simplified service for those willing to pay a little more, and options for specialized apps for those who are either loyalty or cost-conscious. I would absolutely pay a little more for the convenience of a single app and it would create a flywheel that pulls in any new charging networks to be onboard to pull in the most revenue.
Will all of these things happen, the optimist in me says 100% yes – it’s just a matter of some time and patience and hopefully the infrastructure providers, car manufacturers, property owners +++ observing and responding to the overwhelming amount of words dedicated to getting this right.
I look forward to both writing an updated post, and creating a link on this post to that new content showing how much things have improved in 1,2,3,5 and 10 years time.