Tag: electric vehicle charging

  • Revenge of the Plug-In Hybrid

    While growing vehicle electrification is inevitable, it always surprised me that US automakers would drop past plug-in hybrid (PHEV) technology to only embrace all-electric. While many have attacked Toyota’s more deliberate “slow-and-steady” approach to vehicle electrification, it always seemed to me that, until we had broadly available, high quality electric vehicle charging infrastructure and until all-electric vehicles were broadly available at the price point of a non-luxury family car (i.e. a Camry or RAV4), that electric vehicles were going to be more of a upper middle class/wealthy phenomena. Considering their success in the Chinese automotive market (and growing faster than all-electric vehicles!), it always felt odd that the category wouldn’t make its way into the US market as the natural next step in vehicle electrification.

    It sounds like Dodge Ram (a division of Stellantis) agrees. It intends to delay its all-electric version of its Ram 1500 in favor of starting with its extended range plug-in hybrid version, the Ramcharger. Extended range electric vehicles (EREVs) are plug-in hybrids similar to the Chevy Volt. They employ an electric powertrain and a generator which can run on gasoline to supply additional range when the battery runs low.

    Interestingly, Nissan, Hyundai, Mazda, and GM’s Buick have made similar announcements as well.

    While it still remains to be seen how well these EREVs/PHEVs are adopted — the price points that are being discussed still feel too high to me — seeing broader adoption of plug-in hybrid technology (supplemented with gas-powered range extension) feels like the natural next step on our path to vehicle electrification.

    Consumers are still looking for electrified rides, just not the ones that many industry pundits predicted. In China, Europe, and the United States, buyers are converging on hybrids, whose sales growth is outpacing that of pure EVs. “It’s almost been a religion that it’s EVs or bust, so let’s not fool around with hybrids or hydrogen,” says Michael Dunne, CEO of Dunne Insights, a leading analyst of China’s auto industry. “But even in the world’s largest market, almost half of electrified vehicle sales are hybrids.”

    As EV Sales Stall, Plug-In Hybrids Get a Reboot
    Lawrence Ulrich | IEEE Spectrum

  • Public EV chargers suck

    We have a Nissan Ariya and currently DON’T have a home charger (yet — waiting on solar which is another boondoggle for another post). As we live in a town with abundant EVGo chargers (and the Ariya came with 1 yr of free EVGo charging), we thought we could manage.

    When it works, its amazing. But it doesn’t … a frustrating proportion of the time. And, as a result, we’ve become oddly superstitious about which chargers we go to and when.

    I’m glad the charging companies are aware and are trying to address the problem. As someone who’s had to ship and support product, I also recognize that creating charging infrastructure in all kinds of settings which need to handle all kinds of electric vehicles is not trivial.

    But, it’s damn frustrating to not be able to count on these (rest assured, we will be installing our own home charger soon), so I do hope that future Federal monies will have strict uptime requirements and penalties. Absent this, vehicle electrification becomes incredibly difficult outside of the surburban homeowner market.

     J.D. Power reported in August that 20 percent of all non-Tesla EV drivers in its most recent study said they visited a charger but did not charge their vehicle, whether because the charger was inoperable or because of long wait times to use it, up from 15 percent in the first quarter of 2021.

    Fear of inadequate public charging has now overtaken ​“range anxiety” as the chief concern about EVs among the car-buying public, according to J.D. Power. ​“Although the majority of EV charging occurs at home” — about 80 percent of it, according to industry data — ​“public charging needs to provide a much better experience across the board, not just for the users of today, but also to alleviate the concerns of skeptical future customers,” said Brent Gruber, executive director of J.D. Power’s global automotive practice.

    EV chargers have a big reliability problem. Can the government fix it?
    Jeff St. John | Canary Media