First Road Trip in our New EV
In May 2022 my wife and I bought our first EV. In June we took our first road trip, 400+ miles each way from Western Massachusetts to Washington DC. Here are a few reflections on the EV purchase and the road trip.
The EV we purchased is a 2022 Nissan LEAF. We bought it the first day we started looking at EV’s, so we didn’t do a lot of any research or test-driving. This is what we knew when we bought the Leaf:
1) It would be at least a month before we got the vehicle, and we would have to take whatever color (red) and features (heated seats and steering wheel) the car that was coming had rather than choosing these things as part of our order. EV’s were in incredibly short supply. Most dealers in western Massachusetts didn’t even have one we could test drive.
2) The LEAF qualified for a $7500 Federal tax credit and a $2500 State rebate. At the time, the Federal tax credit for EVs was based on cumulative EV sales per manufacturer—Ford, Chevrolet, Tesla etc.; once a manufacturer sold 200,000 total qualifying vehicles the credit was phased out. At the time that we were looking, Chevrolet and Tesla had already hit that threshold, and Ford was nearing it. But even though the Nissan LEAF had been available for over 10 years, Nissan still had not reached the threshold.
Early Reactions
We love the vehicle. It’s comfortable and drives beautifully. Obviously we haven’t driven yet in a New England winter or in a broad range of conditions. But so far so good.
An EV Charging Primer
Disclaimer: I have an amateur’s understanding of electricity. I’ve done some house wiring. I’ve lived off-grid where my power came from solar panels, batteries and a back-up generator, and I was the power company; but I am not an electrician or an electrical engineer.
Three of the descriptors for electricity are watts, current (measured in amperage), and voltage. The amateur’s explanation for these is that watts is a measure of the work a given amount of electricity is doing (i.e. Our LEAF came with either a 40 kilowatt or 62 kilowatt battery. The 62 kilowatt version can do more work = go farther on a charge). Electrical current is something like the “rate of flow”, and voltage is the “pressure” at which the electricity is flowing.
Electricity also comes in two types, AC (alternating current) and DC (direct current.) AC electricity does exactly what it says, alternates or changes direction as it flows. (It seems counter-intuitive that this could work but electricity doesn’t really “flow” in a water through a pipe sort of way.) DC electricity flows in only one direction. Each type of electricity has things it is better at and things it is less well suited for, and we use both types in our daily lives without giving it much thought.
There are 3 types of chargers that can be used with an EV, labeled Level One, Level Two and Level Three. Level One chargers use household AC, +/-115 volt current and are quite slow, basically a trickle charge. Charging our LEAF from zero (which it has never been at) to full with a Level One charger might take 20 hours. Level Two chargers are also AC, but are 240 volt—think electric dryer, arc welder or other heavy duty circuit. My wife’s workplace has a Level Two charger, and we finished the installation of a Level Two charger at our house two days before we left on our trip. Zero to full for us on a Level Two charger is in the range of 6-8 hours.
Level Three chargers are industrial strength, DC chargers. Before our road trip we had never charged with a Level Three charger, but we were told that zero to full would be an hour or less. (More on that later.)
Bring on the Trip!
Before heading to DC, the farthest we had taken the LEAF was to Boston, roughly 120 miles, approximately half of our LEAF’s 250 mile range. (Our 2022 LEAF SV Plus has EPA rated range of 226 miles, but so far in our driving conditions we are getting a little more.)
We had already used both Level One and Level Two charging to recharge the LEAF. The roadtrip would be our first experience with Level Three charging.
Apps and More Apps
Before heading out I loaded my phone with apps related to EV charging. I already had PlugShare, an all-purpose charging station locator, and ChargePoint, the app for the charging stations we had previously used. To these I added ABRP (A Better Route Planner) which offered a point to point (charging station to charging station) route from our home to our destination. (One of their proposals: “Charge to 80% drive to station x, you will be at 3%, recharge to 40%…” That seemed incredibly risky given that we couldn’t just buy a gas can and add a couple gallons of gas if there was a glitch.) We elected to plan our charging ourselves, and began thinking about finding a charger whenever we hit +/- 50% capacity (every 2-2.5hours).
By the time the trip was over I had added 3 more apps to my phone, one for each of the new companies whose charging stations we encountered.
It Be the Wild, Wild West Out There in Fast Charging World
If you drive a Tesla and want a fast charger you go to a Tesla super charger, end of story. If you drive any other EV, you will be using one of two fast charging architectures, CCS or CHAdeMO. CCS is the more common. CHAdeMO is what our LEAF uses, an older, less common standard that will be phased out in the coming years. This is not something we knew when we bought our car. Would it have dissuaded us from buying? Probably not, given the other dynamics in play, but it is something we wish we had known. That said, most of our charging is Level Two charging at home. It is only on a long trip like this that we need Level Three charging, but still…. One of my thoughts was that when I go to a gas station, I have a choice of different blends of gas but they’ll all work in my car. Not so with EV chargers.
Anyway, when Level Three charging works, it works great. The PlugShare app tells us if a given charging station has a CHAdeMO charger and whether or not it is in use, as well as what company runs the charging station. There is also a social feature on the app where users can report if the station is working when they try to use it. In our experience 20%-30% of the stations we wanted to use were not working.
There are multiple reasons for this. An article in the 30.07 edition of WIRED—Right. Year 30, issue 7 I think, but I’m not completely sure what 30.07 means either—describes the three common things that can go awry. 1) The charging station needs power. If there’s any problem with the power supply, the station can’t operate. 2) The station needs a reliable wireless internet connection to process payments and/or communicate with an app. If there is any problem with internet connectivity, the station won’t operate. 3) The charger needs to be able to navigate the “handshake” in the connection between the car and the charger. If anything goes wrong with that handshake, charging won’t happen.
At the first charging station we stopped at, I needed to install a new app and immediately ran into problems. A call to technical support got us charging, and I was eventually able to initiate charges on this company’s chargers by logging into my account on the web. But the username and password I used for my website account would not work on the app. I eventually got the app to work by installing it on my wife’s phone and sending my account a password reset from there (?!).
This company also mails you an RFID card to use with their chargers which I suppose is helpful in a universe where you aren’t already on the road and encountering their chargers for the first time. I won’t mention the company by name (ok, it was EVgo). Once I got their app working, it was fine, but it was definitely the most finicky and problematic of the apps. (I taught web development and coding back in the dark ages before there were apps and am pretty tech savvy. IMO the EVgo app has some bugs.)
It’s worth noting that there are some pretty diverse places with Level Three chargers. We charged at expressway toll plazas and National Park Visiter Centers, Walmarts and frumpy strip malls, hotel parking lots and sterile office parking plazas. Our romantic notion of of roadtripping in the new EV got a reality adjustment, at least until the charging infra-structure is more robust. At several chargers, Level Three charging cost more than gas would have cost on a price per mile basis, even with gas at $5/gallon.
One thing we hoped we could rely on if there were problems in the fast charging world was Nissan dealers. Our local dealer has a fast charger and their representation was that most Nissan dealers did as well.
Here’s what we learned about Level Three chargers at Nissan dealers: 1. Only some dealers have installed them. 2. Almost none of them worked. The error we encountered most often was with the payment processing. The employees at the dealerships were sympathetic but told us there was nothing they could do; their Level Three charger didn’t work and they had no idea when it would.
One employee confided that there is little to no incentive for the dealership to get or keep a Level Three charger working. I won’t name names (ok, it was XXXXXXX at the Nissan dealership in XXXXXXXX.)
One last note on our first experience with fast charging. An EV battery charges best when it’s cool. There are a number of systems for keeping EV batteries cool; our LEAF uses air cooling. After hours on the road at highway speeds, we would be getting barely half the fast charging rate we got early in the day. The first time it happened, I blamed the charger (#%@$$ charger!). When it happened multiple times, I researched what was happening and discovered the thermal explanation. It is something we will have to take into account when planning future road trips.
Some completely unscientific research on the Interweb suggests that Tesla, Chevy Bolt, Ford Focus, BMW i-3, and Jaguar I-Pace all use liquid battery cooling. Probably other EVs do as well. I would expect the thermal charging penalty to be extremely reduced or eliminated in those cars. It’s something to look into if you regularly need to do hours of highway driving in an EV.
Finally, I would repeat what I wrote earlier: when fast charging works it’s incredible. Our LEAF regularly went from 30% to 80% in the time it took us to stretch our legs, visit the bathroom and pick up a snack or grab a meal. And the vast majority of the driving we do at home is in the 30-80 mile per pop range, well suited for Level Two charging. Also we have solar panels at home that produce our electricity, so charging the car there is pretty cost free.
There is a very human element to EV roadtripping that should be mentioned as well. At the end of a 12 hour day of driving, on the final day of our trip, we were about 40 miles from home with the LEAF range estimator estimating that we had about 48 miles of battery left. I insisted we take a detour and charge for 20 minutes before heading home. My wife who is a huge EV evangelist—“we’ve saved x number of dollars and not emitted 60 gallons of emissions, 70 gallons of emissions”—just about melted down. But we did stop and charge briefly before heading home.
The Final Word
So far our experience with EV driving has been amazing. But we still have plenty to learn about driving our LEAF in different conditions and situations.