An oft-cited reason people don’t buy electric cars is “range anxiety” — if batteries struggle to take you as far as gas and charging stations are limited in number, the thinking goes, who would want one?
But there is another obstacle: charging time trauma.
Compared with a five-minute pit stop at your local gas station, charging an electric vehicle is a glacially slow experience.
Modern electric cars still often need an entire night to recharge at home, and even at a commercial fast charging station, a fill-up can take an hour or more
“Driving long distances and stopping for one to two hours is not something I would want to do,” said Mark McNabb, the chief executive of Electrify America, a Volkswagen subsidiary that is installing charging stations across the United States as part of the German automaker’s settlement for cheating on diesel emissions tests.
The good news? Charging times will eventually shrink to little more than 10 minutes. The bad news: That won’t be for several years.
Still, there is help is on the way. Manufacturers are installing more charging points across the country, and technological improvements are already allowing for charging times to improve.
Two levels of charging are typically available in residential settings. Level 1 is a standard AC outlet that provides between 1 and 1.5 kilowatts of electricity. It takes a Level 1 charger about 30 hours to fully charge the electric version of the Ford Focus, which has a range of 115 miles. Level 2 uses a professionally installed charger connected to a 240-volt AC outlet — the kind used by some large appliances — and delivers between 7 and 9 kilowatts, lowering the charge time to about 5.5 hours.
Some commercial charging locations offer more advanced technology, employing so-called fast chargers. These offer about 50 kilowatts of DC power, enabling the same Ford Focus to reach 90 miles of range in 30 minutes (battery chemistry causes charging to go more slowly after a battery is 80 percent full). The electric carmaker Tesla has a proprietary “supercharger” for its vehicles that provides 120 kilowatts of power, adding 300 miles of range in 75 minutes.
A new generation of charging points, the first of which are being installed in Europe this year, offer 350 kilowatts of power. Such a jump would slash charging times to 10 to 15 minutes, depending on the vehicle’s range, according to Charlie Yankitis, director of business development for the German manufacturer Bosch’s electric vehicle unit. Elon Musk, Tesla’s founder, has hinted that charging at even faster rates was being studied.
Several companies are making big bets on the technology.
Electrify America, the Volkswagen subsidiary, is planning on installing such high-capacity chargers along highway corridors throughout the United States. It is investing $2 billion in electric vehicle charging infrastructure and education nationwide, $800 million of which is earmarked for California alone.
By the end of 2020, Electrify America plans to have built 350 Level 2 charging sites in urban areas in California, like workplaces and apartment buildings. It will also build an unspecified number of fast chargers along roadways, each of which will have several charge units. A further 540 are to be built elsewhere in the country in that time.
ChargePoint, the largest installer of vehicle charging stations in the United States, plans to install 400-kilowatt sites in the coming months. But its chief executive, Pasquale Romano, did not specify how many.
Similar pushes are being made elsewhere. In Europe, the German automotive giants BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen have joined with Ford in a joint venture to install 350-kilowatt chargers across the Continent. They will start installing them this year, initially planning to get 400 fast-charging sites up and running, with “thousands” in place by 2020.
“We’re looking for similar solutions across the globe,” said Mike Tinskey, Ford’s global director of electrification and infrastructure.
There are, however, hurdles that need to be overcome.
Read the article at The New York Times.
