I Sing (and Whine) the Car Electric
NH to LA on just voltage and verve.
Fair warning; this is an EV ramble. No politics, well only a little. The first post I did here in the Great Substack Experiment was on my new EV obsession, so now I return for another. You political junkies might want to pass. As the late great Garry Shandling said on the last episode of his brilliant The Larry Sanders Show”, you can now flip.”
So this summer I drove a car from central New Hampshire to Los Angeles. The trick? It was an Electric Car (EV; fancy term number one). The bigger trick? It was a non-Tesla EV, a Volkswagen ID4. Why does that count? Charging stations. I’ll explain.
Of course, the whole drive an EV across the county caper stuck my friends in New Hampshire as complete insanity. I might has well have told them I was planning to head west in a Conestoga wagon. Same drill every time: first, a polite frozen smile, then a beat of thinking along the lines of “how do I tell this idiot he is insane” which would morph into a sweetly concerned question; “OK, but, um, what about recharging?” Most normal people my age — outside EV hotbeds like California or Colorado — think electric cars are silly hippie-mobiles that run out of battery juice quickly, like an old, unreliable flashlight fished out of the family toolbox. You turn it on, it works for a bit but then fades out, leaving you dark and stranded on the roadside: easy if environmentally aware prey to roving bands of wild gypsies and dangerous ANTIFA highwaymen. Range anxiety is what the industry calls it, and their market surveys find it is the biggest hurdle to the mass acceptance of EVs by the American consumer.
After listening to the kind concerns of my friends, I would try to explain about fast charging stations, battery chemistry, blah, blah as their eyes glazed over. To them, the rules were clear: trustworthy cars run on gas dammit, not e-magic! This isn’t… Europe!!!
For all my bluster, I did have a bit of range anxiety lurking around in my head. I wanted this to be a fun trip, not Hell on low resistance EV wheels. So what’s the whole range anxiety problem about? To explain I have to dive into the geeky electro-geopolitics of electric car fast charging in North America. My apologies.
Let’s start with how you charge an EV. Sure you can plug it into a wall outlet like a toaster, but even after a few hours you’ll barely get around the block a few times. The next step up the amperage ladder is a “Level 2” charger. Most EVs will happily (and fully) charge from a Level 2 unit overnight in a garage or driveway.
These Level 2 units take a bit more power — you will need an electrician to install the electric oven-like 240V circuit the charger requires — but these Level 2 devices do the overnight full charge job quite well. (This charming character makes a great value-priced and near indestructible L2 charger in Canada.)
On an EV road trip, however, you are far away from the trusty Level 2 charger in your garage or workplace, so you must mostly rely on charging stations featuring high-powered “DC fast chargers” (DCFC, fancy EV term number 2!) at charging installations run by companies that sell these fast charging services to passing EV drivers. These DC fast chargers, big and highly amped up, will give your car a 170 mile or more charge in around 25-35 minutes. Perfect for long highway trips.
Still, in order to make all this even more complicated, these fast charging networks are divided into two warring technical camps: one Elon-owned network only for Teslas (called NACS, sorry) and another, more hodgepodge collection of fast charging networks serving everybody else (Kia/Hyundai, BMW, Mercedes, Ford, Rivian, Lucid, GM, VW, etc) with a charging standard they all share called CCS. Think Betamax vs VHS redux. You kids think Playstation vs Nintendo. Still dated, I know.
The Tesla fast-charging network is — irritatingly — near flawless; it’s everywhere and almost always works. The hitch is the ghost of a sneering Elon floating over the whole Tesla thing which is a heavy psychic tax I am loath to pay.
Outside the Tesla club, the leading everybody-else network is called “Electrify America.” The runner up CCS network is called “EVgo”. Unlike the gleaming Tesla stations that are, well everywhere, these outfits are the Bad News Bears of the charging station universe; smaller and usually tucked into Walmart parking lots or behind motels near the interstate. Energy companies like Shell and BP as well as convenience store empires like Sheetz and Circle K are also all jumping into the fast charging game. (There are billions of Federal and state subsidy dollars oiling the e-infrastructure pump, so to say, which is greatly encouraging these fast charging network build-outs.) With each network you can pay by credit card for your juice or join the network as a paid member for a few bucks a month and pay less per charge through an app on your smartphone. App users also avoid dealing with the finicky credit card readers that are the biggest failure point on these big machines.
The problem? Both Electrify America and EVgo are notorious for lousy, broken, and frustrating charger stations.
Cut to an exhausted and overworked Electrify America engineer waving a near empty whiskey bottle around while screaming at their laptop screen:
“Why don’t these loud-mouth internet idiots like this Murphy gas-bag understand that our DC fast chargers have to successfully interface with the in-vehicle software of a dozen brands, from from Kia to BMW to Ford and GM and even Rivian and Lucid all the rest?! All those glory hounds over at Tesla have to do is make their fast charging stations work WITH ONE TYPE OF CAR!!!”
Fair point. Now get back to work and solve it.
Arriving at a kaput (VW owns Electrify America) fast charging station is no fun. You pull up only to find one or more of the charging units out of service. Maybe one or two of the others are working, but only pumping out “de-rated” power at a slow trickle. Or they are working for other cars, just rejecting yours! Rage ensues, a long wait is certain, and for many the dreaded specter of range anxiety surges yet again.
With all this in mind, I left NH and headed west, wondering if the non-Tesla charging network jungle would be as awful as our great nation of online chat room horror story merchants and epic complainers had promised me.
My first stop to fast recharge would be the first big test. Would I become yet another Electrify America horror story; stuck in a broken charger with only 3% power and a long nightmare ahead of me with nothing to do but rage-tweet until my iPhone died? Eventually, alone in my cold and dark EV, I’d ironically die… only to become a flat applause line in a future Ted Cruz stump speech.
Soon, the e-Reaper came knocking. Crossing from Vermont into upstate New York, I checked the power gauge. Down to 16%. Time to think about charging. Gotta find an Electrify America or EVgo station I guess, and face the music.
There was, however, another alternative... I work in politics you see, so I know how to work the trick angles. I punted on the whole Electrify America dice-roll and pulled up instead to a Tesla Supercharging station at an Indian Casino.
But wait! How? Tesla Superchargers will not charge VWs! What evil Voodoo did you pull here Murphy?
My secret move was knowing that ever crafty Tesla has quietly installed a small handful of special “magic dock” stations where the charger handle on the Tesla-only charging dispenser automatically attaches itself to a special CCS style nozzle adapter inside their machine when you pull it out — the Tesla app finks you out to the charger, so it knows you are a cheeky troublemaker not driving a Tesla — and you can indeed easily charge your CCS car on their Tesla machine, you just have to fork over a credit card number to the Tesla app. (Tesla’s accounting department is no gang of slouches either; they know that the Biden administration’s billions-high pile of Federal subsidy dough is closely tied to providing charging stations that will power both NACS and CCS cars. Charging will soon become a very good business for Tesla, sort of like Amazon and their gold mine cloud computing setup called AWS.)
The Tesla magic dock worked, well, magically. Score one for Elon and his merry band of mad charger engineers at the Tesla Supercharger factory in Buffalo. The problem? Tesla Magic Dock stations are as rare as a Musk apology. They are essentially non-existent; I just lucked out because two of the handful that do exist are in upstate New York, need Tesla supercharger central in Buffalo.
(Let me stop here to say that, thankfully, big charger change is coming. Most of the other EV car makers have thrown in the towel on CCS and are going to start making their cars with the Tesla NACS charging standard in 2025. To their credit, Ford led the parade on that. Now GM, Honda, Kia/Hyundai, Mercedes, BMW, Toyota, Lucid, Rivian and are all marching along as well. So it will get simpler, eventually. And Tesla has just announced their new wave of “v4” superchargers will include their crafty Magic Dock.))
After falling flat-footed for the Tesla Magic Dock tease and becoming a 80% charged-up member of the CCS Traitor’s club, I put another 200 miles behind me and started plotting my next charge. No more Tesla Magic Docks existed between me and San Francisco, so it was time to crawl back to CCS. My next stop was an Evolve New York station connected with Shell’s Recharge network. “Evolve” New York… get it? What is with these awful names. That said, their fast charger worked fine. (Technically even a bit better than the Tesla Magic Dock which took two tries to fire up. Take that Elon!) Evolve NY is a creation of the New York State Power Authority and while as a good conservative I’m highly suspicious of do-gooder projects awash in give-away government funding, I gotta say that the Shell fast charger was great and got me right off on my way. I will be applying for EVHPOCRT vanity plates next year.
Wait, what about the travelogue stuff? Nifty craft stores? Peach festivals? A good mule parade? Alas I was moving fast, full of deadlines and commitments as the song goes. I was knocking down 600+ miles a day. (A bragging friend set that as a minimum standard on long drives she had done in, get this, a Mini/clown car. The 600+ daily mileage count was also the vital advice given me by the all-important A Better Route Planner EV app which recommends stops and even the most efficient charging times and levels.
Still, even in my rush, it was great fun to drive through pretty green Vermont in the summer (thank you nuclear power; Vermont leads the nation in the percent of its power coming from nukes). Once you hit western New York and northern Ohio the scenic charm fades a bit, but I’m from southeastern Michigan so it felt like home.
In Erie PA I faced my first Electrify America (EA) nightmare. To be fair, the first two EA stops were fine. Worked great. I felt my apprehension fading, and since when leasing a EV from VW (and others like BMW) the brands throw in free DC fast charging at EA stations for 3 years. So, at EA station all I had to do was plug in, wave my Electrify America smartphone app around like the Great Ballantine and presto, 135kw of free electricity would start to flow. This Erie stop however, was tricky. The unit started charging, but then got stuck. It was apparently having such a wonderful time charging my car that it wouldn’t let go; the charger handle was locked into my car.
This required various tricks both on my side and a call to a long suffering tech on EA’s 1-800 please-stop-yelling-at-us line to eventually — after about 20 minutes — get the damn thing to release its death grip on my car. This kerfuffle would have been less difficult had it all not happened at midnight in a Walmart parking lot during a lightning heavy thunderstorm.
Electricity, my fair weather friend, had turned on me. Luckily, like my Conestoga mushing forebearers, I had brought along rain gear.
The next even more irksome electro-disaster was in Cleveland, Ohio. I know, I know. But that’s a smear because I really like Cleveland a lot. (Back at the gruesome 2016 GOP Horror Show convention, we made the wonderful Harbor Bar our broadcast HQ for Radio Free GOP’s convention coverage.) Cursed by Erie, I hit Cleveland right after another big storm and got stuck in the middle of a power failure that knocked out most of the downtown traffic lights, so we all had to creep through busy intersections on a polite if wary honor system. Thank God it was the midwest and thanks to Cleveland’s famously nice Drew Carey vibe, moving through intersections without traffic lights was slow but easy.
Eventually, I found an EVgo fast charging station. The local power was back on, but just like every time I try to charge at EV(no)go in California, the charger screen said my account was rejected and there I was, back waiting on EVgo’s 1-800 line. Finally the folks at EVgo HQ remotely restarted their charger (and was told my account was fine, despite an unbroken string of earlier such failures back in California with another EV) and I got a charge going… for about eight minutes until the power failed for the entire city block. Then the juice came back up and of course the now restarting EVgo charger reset and promptly rejected me again. Back on the 1-800 line, another 20 minutes of forced politeness and finally they got the charger working again. I left the second I had enough juice to get on the highway and floor it away from EVgo and on to the next EA station, which worked just fine. (Update. After canceling my error prone old EVgo membership and rejoining two weeks later, I’ve had much better EVgo charging experiences here in California. Of course it took three long and frustrating calls and multiple emails to EVgo customer support to get their master computer not to mistakenly conflate my old membership info with the new one so the EVGO app finally worked, but now I must say it’s working quite well.)
Crossing the Missisippi into Iowa on I-80 made me smile. I’ve worked a lot of Iowa races over the years, from Gubernatorials to Presidentials and there is just something special about Iowa; every campaign Hack who’s worked there will tell you that. Nice people, great politics, great food and that special Iowa thing. No, not the subfreezing winters, the Iowa thing is about pride. When you cross the state line from Illinois to Iowa you notice it immediately. The barns are suddenly clean and newly painted. The farm implement manufacturing plants that line the interstate are pristine, with large pedestal signs proudly holding up spotless examples of the machines they make for all the world to see. Iowans, in my experience, are very squared away and it shows.
And now, since you’ve been waiting — forever it must seem — for the EV crap to be over with and finally get a little politics gib-gab, here is a really tasty chunk of Iowa centric political junkie chow. In 2012, talented documentary filmmaker A.J. Schnack made a wonderful fly-on-the-wall documentary about the GOP Iowa caucus. A must watch. It’s on Amazon prime. Here is the trailer:
OK, sorry, but back to the EV trip.
As the miles rolled by, and yes Nebraska I’m thinking of you, everything worked. The EA charging stations, all of it.
People curious about this whole EV thing often ask me the same thing about charging. “Doesn’t it drive you crazy to have to stop and charge?” Pre-trip I was wondering about that myself. Zipping around town you never have to charge much. I mean, who drives 260+ miles on a typical day? I just Level 2 charge at my office (yes, I installed a Autel Level 2 charger there; my electrician loves me. Google “zealot”). Or I charge overnight at another 48 amp Wallbox Level 2 charger hidden in the hedge at our home (if that brainiac ideas ever goes very wrong, I promise to post pictures of me with a group of irked LAFD firefighters standing by my burned out hedge). But being so well-covered by Level 2 chargers I only have charge once every five days or so. But A road trip? Which means stopping on the highway again, and again? Will that be a thing?
What happened? I found myself looking forward to charging stops. After three hours or so on an Interstate highway, I was delighted to stop the car, stretch my legs, wander around the Love’s, and finally enjoy the one last untaxed pleasure left to most Americans, as cheap or free electricity filled up my battery.
Sharing chargers at these DCFC stations creates a community too, especially on highway trips. There is a nice wholesome vibe at Charger Town as you stand around waiting for your battery to hit 70-80 percent. This vibe is especially strong at fast charging stations located at truck stops or mega-gas stations along Interstate highways. (At the fast charging installations located in Walmart parking lots, well, not not much. You’re twenty minutes there becomes a somber reflection of income disparity, especially at night).
At the highway stations, there is at least one other EV already fast charging when you roll up, maybe two. After a lingering silence, polite EV chatter gently breaks out. The whole thing has a sweet Antiques Roadshow feel. “So, what kind of power are you getting?” That’s the standard icebreaker, code for how much is the fast charger hooked up to your car actually pumping out; that question is the universal opening salvo of acceptable EV small talk because the answer is both important and can be complicated. (Different EVs take in fast charging power at different kilowatt and voltage levels. The roadside DC fast chargers are also rated at different promised output levels: from tidy and meek 50kw units (slow, not great, but well-intentioned and common in the parking lots of forward-thinking local town’s public libraries) to utilitarian 150kw units (fine for most charging uses and a mainstay at EA and others) and ultimately, high powered (think lightning bolt capable ray gun power) 350kw units that charge fastest, especially to fancier cars or pickups like the Ford Lightning or Rivian with high charging rates and big batteries. The combination of all these factors dictates how long you’ll be standing around charging your car while running out of small talk.
Since the chargers sometimes perform below their rated power (“hmmm Neighbor, this 150kw unit only seems to be giving me 68kw…”) more charger small talk is likely. Electrify America fast chargers sometimes run “de-rated” or significantly slower than the braggadocio heavy labels that are plastered all over them — “ultra-charger” etc — claim, which is a maddeningly common EA complaint. (Update: I’ve found this to be worse lately when taking the I-5 from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley.) Usually a nefarious conspiracy between the EA brass and their sinister allies at the local power company is blamed.
Since charger nozzles are held in place when you lock your car, the normal routine is to cover the usual charger talk topics for a bit and then amble off to the nearby Loves or Quickie-mart to kill off 20 minutes or so. It’s nice and relaxing and I found the short breaks and leg stretching made knocking off the 600+ miles a day pretty easy.
There is one nasty iceberg lurking in the smooth seas of fast charger station happy chat: the 70 to 80% rule. Because we are riding in an electron rodeo here, physics inevitably becomes important. Unlike pumping gallons of gasoline into a big empty tank, batteries take charger power at different speeds depending on how full they are. Charging an empty EV battery from say, 6% to 50%, goes really quickly; the juice just pours out of the charger (which usually runs at or near it’s full claimed power level at the start of a low battery charge) so in around ten minutes, you have maybe 120+ new miles of range. But as the battery fills up, the charging rate it will accept starts to slow down and the fast charger’s output slows down with it. Even mighty 350kw Shazam! level chargers can drop to a slow 69kw crawl. Once the battery is 80% or so full, the charging rate becomes a tiny trickle.
Cunning EV drivers know this and plot accordingly; they understand that arriving at the station with a, say, 8% battery and quickly charging up to maybe 55% will get them quickly back on the highway and rolling, so the smart move is do exactly that and race 170 or miles (cars all differ) down the highway to the next fast charger. More short charger stops will get you there far quicker than waiting for a few long, full charges. Alas, many people assume their new EV works just like their trusty old gas guzzler, so when charging, naturally you should totally fill up the car. Which takes… forever. Doing a full battery charge at a fast charger with most EV will keep you there for at least an hour plus… HOGGING THE CHARGER for way too long while others looking for a fast charge just wait and wait.
I saw this first hand in, naturally, a Walmart parking lot in boiling 104* Las Vegas Nevada. It was a four unit Electrify America fast charger station with two of the four units — surprise! — out of order. Four cars sat waiting to charge. I arrived there after giving up at another Electrify America charger location in Vegas that had six cars waiting. At this second try charger, I found two nice ladies having a nice through-the-window chat about various awful relatives while they both charged… to 95%+ percent. A nightmare: with a wait of over an hour in scorchingVegas heat. One of the exasperated waiting drivers got out and politely tried to remind the to-the-moon-and-back chargers about the stop at 80% or less rule (also much better for long term battery life) and instantly an episode of Cops broke out. My attempt at a quick lecture on electron physics didn’t help either. An hour later, I had finally fast charged for 18 minutes and sped for the interstate.
One last charger station story. The day before the parking lot rage war in Las Vegas, I hit the most bizarro yet charming fast charging station I have ever seen. I was driving in eastern Utah, south of Denver and heading toward Las Vegas. A long, beautiful drive. Sparse in people, exits, and of course, high powered DC fast charging stations. Clearly there had been a Very Important Meeting at Electrify World HQ about this years before. A decision had been made to do Whatever It Takes to put a charging station on the important Denver to Las Vegas route along I-15. So at the dusty small, I mean really small, hardscrabble town of Green River, Utah the EV Future’s Almighty Powers That Be showed up with a million volts and over a million bucks worth of shiny new DC Fast Charging gear and plopped a DCFC station in the gravel lot beside the kitschy Green River Coffee Co. When the caravan of trucks from Rocky Mountain Power and Electrify America showed up to install big power and the EV charging station equivalent of a remote Moon Base, the locals must have thought it was an alien invasion and started scanning the sky for black helicopters. But, problem solved. You can now take the money you saved buying an EV with the $7500 federal EV credit, and the $5,000 Colorado state EV credit and drive south on I-15 to blow it all in Vegas without having any range anxiety at all!
Standing there made me think of a scene from the sci-fi genre of Old West vibe meets dystopian ultra-tech future, ala Firefly. God, I love America.
Green River: the EA charger worked perfectly. Alas the coffee shop was closed. It looked pretty cool.
So what did I learn from crossing our great national diagonally in a Chattanooga TN-built EV with a shaky CCS fast charging network?
I loved it. EV roads trips are fun. Not easy, but pretty easily doable. Yes there can be challenges and a bit of route planning is necessary. More and better fast chargers are badly needed; certainly on the key interstate arteries but especially in the denser urban areas where there simply aren’t enough units up and operating to service the growing surge in EV sales. In time, the switch to universal NACS connectors will help. The federal subsidy, like it or hate it, will speed things along. Hotel slow/overnight chargers are a great idea too (kudos to the Hampton Inn in St George Utah) but there are not nearly enough of them. But me? I want to do it again, on I-10 across the desert and the South. As per Electrify America, after over 20+charging stops, I gotta be fair: 90% of the time their equipment worked just fine. If not for Erie and Las Vegas it would have been perfect. (A shout out to Shell recharge as well: zero problems.)
I got across the country pretty easily without spending one dime on gas or emitting one stinking’ once of carbon. I loved the VW ID4 I drove; it’s not the top performing EV in the marketplace, but it was fun to drive, quick, served me very well. (It has a few software glitches in the infotainment system and its built in navigation system isn’t great, but there are apps for both via Apple CarPlay and rumor has it the 2025 ID4 has a significant software upgrade.) If you are EV shopping, definitely check one out. (And yes, I recently rented a Tesla model Y on a weekend trip and while it’s EV CW heresy to say this, I very much preferred the VW ID4. I found the Tesla interface irritating and I hated the egg on wheels design.) Though my very favorite EV is the BMW iX, which I also lease and is my daily driver.) Due to the free fast charging that came with my VW, I think my total e-fuel cost was about $35. Upon reflection, I may just owe that long-suffering EA systems engineer a fresh bottle of whiskey after all. For the Green River, Utah bizarro yet charming EV charging station alone. See you on the road, Saudi petroleum power and carbon free.