How do you charge an electric car in rural area

[harllee]

OP here, some people on this thread seem to be saying I am misleading when I report the Tesla ladies story. I am just reporting what she said. I had never met her before, I just helped out a stranded distraught lady from NJ. I had never had any experience with an electric car and started this thread to learn more. I have learned alot and I now know that you need a way to charge these cars either at your house or at public places. Where I live 6 month of the year there is no public charging around. One question that I have is why there are not more public charging facilities for travelers?

 

[NW-Bound]

OP here, some people on this thread seem to be saying I am misleading when I report the Tesla ladies story. I am just reporting what she said. I had never met her before, I just helped out a stranded distraught lady from NJ. I had never had any experience with an electric car and started this thread to learn more. I have learned alot and I now know that you need a way to charge these cars either at your house or at public places. Where I live 6 month of the year there is no public charging around. One question that I have is why there are not more public charging facilities for travelers?

I am the one who first asked about whether the car could have made it to the destination.

And I did not suggest that you or even the stranded woman misrepresented the fact. I myself simply said that something was wrong. Maybe the car had a failure of some sort.

I am not an EV owner. I have not even owned a hybrid. I am an engineer, and simply tried to understand the limitation of the car by doing some calculations.

About more charging facilities for EVs, it takes money. And as a norm, campgrounds in national parks have no electricity. Not even power for campers to plug in their phones or a small light, let alone an EV to suck in mucho power to charge its battery.

Again, it takes a lot more power to charge an EV than people realize. If you want to charge an EV with a Honda generator carried in the trunk of the car, you are talking about running the generator at full power for 24 hours non-stop in order to be able to drive the car 100 miles.

Even if the woman made it to her destination, she might have a problem getting out!

 

[harllee]

NW Bound, you are right about the federal campgrounds along the Blue Ridge Parkway, no power of any kind. The Tesla lady said she stopped at a small commercial campground right off the Parkway, it had some sort of power (probably just 30 amp), she charged her car several hours but it only charged the car a very small amount so no help.

 

[NW-Bound]

The moral of the story is: Do not take an EV for a cross-country drive without carefully planning your trip.

And it will be a very very long time, perhaps never, that you can drive an EV from the lower states to Alaska. It is hard and expensive enough to bring gasoline to some of the remote places, let alone stringing wires there and to repair the transmission lines after winter storms.

 

[Midpack]

OP here, some people on this thread seem to be saying I am misleading when I report the Tesla ladies story. I am just reporting what she said. I had never met her before, I just helped out a stranded distraught lady from NJ. I had never had any experience with an electric car and started this thread to learn more. I have learned alot and I now know that you need a way to charge these cars either at your house or at public places. Where I live 6 month of the year there is no public charging around. One question that I have is why there are not more public charging facilities for travelers?

Relax, if anything there is something off about what the lady told you, or something very wrong with the car. According to the Tesla thread I linked, using 292 miles of range in a 100 mile climb doesn't add up.

Surely you know the answer to the public charging facility question. Supply & demand meets changing technology/early adopters. Some municipalities and other orgs are trying to prime the pump (pun intended), but it's a real chicken and the egg situation between (charging) infrastructure and the growing but still relatively small number of EVs on the road. In the meantime owners have to do a little planning, and it appears most are aware and more than capable. But between the onboard (Tesla) tools and many online/web range tools, there's almost no reason any EV owner has to get caught stranded.

 

[COcheesehead]

My neighbor has the BMW electric. It needs service. Nearest dealer about 250 miles away. Chargers in between, but it turns the journey into a multi day event.

 

[Chuckanut]

Plus shouldn't the regenerative braking gotten back some of that energy?

Couldn't they have pushed it around for a while to get the battery charged to the point where they could drive it to a nice long downhill stretch of road. Then coast downhill and let the battery charge.

FWIW, I remember push starting my old VW. Put it in gear, depress the clutch, get a couple of friends to push it, pop the clutch, and there you go!

I have no problems with EVs, and like others think there may be more to this problem than we know about. I'll keep watching to see what Tesla owners think.

My current new car is a hybrid, which I believe for the next decade or so is the best overall compromise for one car families like me, my self, and I. 40mpg on a RAV4, and a driving range well over 500 miles on a tank! Time to hit the road and not look back.

 

[NW-Bound]

There are other factors that may impact an EV range even more than climbing hills. Carrying a roof rack loaded with some "stuff" hurts the mileage more than people would imagine. Modern cars are designed to be aerodynamic to slice through the air, and anything that messes that up will cause a big increase in drag.

I wonder if the woman of this thread had anything on the car roof, and if she was going camping.

A Tesla owner asked on a forum about the penalty for having a bike roof rack, and here's what another owner reported (the boldface emphasis is mine).

amer | May 26, 2019

As a data point - comparing a trip I did in August 2016 vs May 2019, both trips done with the same Model S on the exact same route (~90 miles):

August 2016, family of 4, loaded for a long distance road trip, outside temp 77-82, inside temp 69, average speed 56, top speed 75 = 299 Wh/mile

May 2019, family of 4, loaded for a camping trip, with 2 bikes on a upright roof rack and a 5G water carrier on Thule square roof rails, outside temp 79-89, inside temp 69, average speed 74, max speed 80 = 549 Wh/mile

So, that's 43% range loss from a combination of temperature change, roof rack and gear and speed. I think the roof rack contributed the most - I'm not sure about how much the software accounts for with temperature and speed, but it definitely was getting thrown off by how inefficient the roof rack was making it and had very bad range estimates that I had to second guess using abetterrouteplanner.com.

 

[Sunset]

What is the cost to recharge at one of these supercharger stations when doing a cross country trip ?

 

[travelover]

There are other factors that may impact an EV range even more than climbing hills. Carrying a roof rack loaded with some "stuff" hurts the mileage more than people would imagine. Modern cars are designed to be aerodynamic to slice through the air, and anything that messes that up will cause a big increase in drag.

I wonder if the woman of this thread had anything on the car roof, and if she was going camping.

A Tesla owner asked on a forum about the penalty for having a bike roof rack, and here's what another owner reported (the boldface emphasis is mine).

Increasing average speed from 54 to 74 is a big deal on any vehicle, but especially with a roof rack, 'cause as you know, drag is very nonlinear.

 

[NW-Bound]

Ah, I missed that average speed increase from 56 to 74. It is indeed a big deal.

Aerodynamic drag increases as the square of speed, so the higher speed already causes an increase in drag to 1.75x, even without the roof rack.

However, there is also rolling resistance that should be roughly the same in both trips. Else, with the additional drag from the roof rack, he would have seen even a higher reduction factor.

PS. On the same thread, other Tesla owners reported a reduction from 10% to 20% with their roof rack+bicycle. And hopefully, they did the test with the same speed for a better comparison.

 

[papaof2]

I don't own an electric vehicle and probably won't in the future. We do enough off-the-beaten-path driving to make routing to/from charge stations impractical. Extra gasoline I can carry in the bed of the truck. Depending on the area, 5 gallons could be 50 to 125 miles so you do need to know your vehicle and where you're driving.

I do watch for things that will be a convenience for others and I pay attention to places that have charging stations - there's a historical site in Townsend, Tennessee ("The quiet side of the Smokies") that has charge stations in their parking lot.

I'm the techie (I designed and built a solar-charged backup power system for the frequent, usually short, commercial power outages we have here) so I would know how long the standard charge would take and would have plugged an electric vehicle in as soon as I parked it at the campground (NOT driving back for firewood and another trip for snacks and another trip for takeout and another trip for ...). If you're setting up camp while it's still daylight, that should give you at least 12 hours of charge before you leave.

The lack of planning and forethought makes me want to ask if this is a blonde joke...

 

[Gearhead Jim]

Our doctor is a gearhead, a track instructor in the local BMW club, etc. He bought a Tesla about two years and mostly drives to/from work, 6 miles each way. He said it's a practical road trip car if you like to read books- start in the morning and drive for several hours, then sit somewhere and read the book for a couple of hours while charging up. Repeat in the afternoon.


Early this year we took a road trip through SW Texas and the Big Bend area in a gasoline car. Even with a 350 mile comfortable cruising range, we would have had to change our routing from the original plan for fuel, but discovered there is a gas station in BBNP that Gas Buddy didn't know about.


Out where the pickup trucks work for a living, range is crucial.

 

[swakyaby]

Our doctor is a gearhead, a track instructor in the local BMW club, etc. He bought a Tesla about two years and mostly drives to/from work, 6 miles each way. He said it's a practical road trip car if you like to read books- start in the morning and drive for several hours, then sit somewhere and read the book for a couple of hours while charging up. Repeat in the afternoon.

It doesn't take "a couple of hours" to charge up.

 

[Animorph]

Currently we can add about 25% to a Google Maps route time to allow for charging. Roughly 30 minutes for every 2 hours of driving. That's with a Tesla Supercharger, and our relatively inefficient Model X. If you don't use a Supercharger it can take more like 5 hours instead of 30 minutes to charge the same amount. Fine for overnight charging, but not something to use on a long trip.

Tesla recognized the need for Superchargers long ago. No one else has their own charging network as far as I know. And it's still chicken or egg with car manufacturers not producing many electric cars and third party charger companies having to create large dense networks of chargers without many cars that can use them. When the car companies get serious about long distance trips things will pick up.

 

[TromboneAl]

We have a 2016 Leaf S (effective range of about 80 miles) and a Toyota Tacoma. We use the Leaf only for local driving. When we do a bunch of errands (main town is 30 miles away), we sometimes charge while eating lunch.

Today, for example, we wanted to stay away for three hours while our housecleaner cleaned the house. We drove to the BMW dealer 20 miles away and charged up for free while we read and laptopped at Starbucks. Then we did errands. Had 57% when we got home.

If we go on a trip, we take the Tacoma.

We're thinking about buying a Tesla Model 3. One question was whether we would want to drive it all the way to Denver (DD) or whether charging would be too time-consuming and problematic.

But currently, it seems that to drive 600 miles in one day, we'd have to stop and charge for at least 2-3 hours, which would simply add too much time to the trip.

So, one option would be to not pay the extra for the 300-mile range (vs 200), and continue to use the truck for long trips. We could still use the Tesla for overnight trips.

With a 200-mile range, we'd only charge at home.

 

[JJpop]

I spend the summer in the North Carolina mountains, right off the Blue Ridge Parkway. I went to lunch at a local cafe and met a woman and her children traveling on the Blue Ridge Parkway who was stuck with a Tesla that she could not charge. She only had 8 miles of charge left and the closest charger she could find was 25 miles away. Her cellphone (ATT) would not work so I loaned her mine (Verizon). She had to call AAA and was going to have her car towed 25 miles to the nearest charger. She had been trying to charge her car with a regular household plug in at a campground but she said it charged very slowly. What do people do with electric cars when they are traveling in a rural area like the Blue Ridge Parkway and there are no car chargers?

A simple case of poor planning.An EV is a poor choice unless you have a charger at home in your garage.To take it to a rural area on vacation is senseless unless you know what you are doing and pre plan the charging.Even then the station could be out of order or occupied and can be a big pain.

 

[Mr. Tightwad]

It takes me 22 minutes to charge my Tesla from 50% to 80% at a Tesla supercharger. My electricity is free. It all depends on which Tesla you bought and when you bought it.

 

[Midpack]

It doesn't take "a couple of hours" to charge up.

It does if you don’t have access to a Supercharger. Not everyone does. If you’re typically charging at home overnight and usually stay within range, a couple of hours isn’t an issue anyway. Many/most EV owners charge at home more often than not, so far.

I suspect almost no one buys any EV intending to use it for frequent extended trips, e.g. more than 300 miles at most, much less for many other EVs. When/if superchargers become commonplace, that may well change.

It can take anywhere from an hour to 12 hours to charge your Tesla. Your Tesla charge time is dependent on how full your car’s battery is and the type of charging station that you use.

https://www.energysage.com/electric-vehicles/charging-your-ev/charging-a-tesla/

Tesla is to be commended for building out superchargers “the automaker now says that 99% of the US population is within 150 miles of a Supercharger. Tesla now has 10,836 Superchargers in operation at 1,339 stations around the world.” But keep in mind there are over 250 million cars in the USA alone, so superchargers are scarce in the big picture. Chicken and the egg...

 

[Just_Steve]

My a/c circuit is 50A.

My a/c is 50a to the air handler 50a to the condenser.
In the kitchen double wall oven is 50a x 2, cook top is 50a.

 

[harllee]

It takes me 22 minutes to charge my Tesla from 50% to 80% at a Tesla supercharger. My electricity is free. It all depends on which Tesla you bought and when you bought it.

Mr. Tightwad, how is it that your electricity is free? Solar panels?

 

[NW-Bound]

For the first few years, in order to sell its cars and to promote its supercharger network, Tesla gave free unlimited supercharging to early buyers of the cars. This privilege was not offered to cars used for taxi service or for commercial purposes such as Uber, Lyft, etc...

It was offered on the early and more expensive Models S and X, and I don't know if it was ever offered on the Model 3.

Even Musk has said that this practice was not sustainable, and that Tesla should have stopped it long ago. He said it was meant to encourage people to take cross-country drives with the cars, and not for people to use daily.

Indeed, this offer was stopped, and replaced by a lesser offer such as only 1,000 mi per year. This unlimited charging was recently offered again on the Models S and X in order to goose sales.

The unlimited lifetime charging is also not transferable from the original owners, if the cars are resold.

See: https://electrek.co/2019/07/22/tesla-removes-free-unlimited-supercharging-used-cars/

 

[Mr. Tightwad]

Mr. Tightwad, how is it that your electricity is free? Solar panels?

To spur sales, occasionally Tesla gives free electricity for life for the Model X and Model S vehicles. This is at the superchargers. If you charge at home it's on you. I have one X and a Model 3. It doesn't save me all that much getting it free, but it feels good to charge and not pay. I believe Tesla is offering that deal again at the moment.

I live in LA. Last I heard 25% of Tesla sales are in Southern Ca, 25% are in Northern CA and the other 50% are in the rest of the US and the world. Charging facilities are numerous where I live. A 6 year old could handle the challenge of charging.

I realize many on this forum are living in remote areas. For those that live far from cities, one would have to think things over to see if an EV works for them.

My model 3 has a range of 310 miles. I would be ok if my range was a third of that, but that's just me.

 

[Chuckanut]

IMHO, the 'deal' for EV owners is that they don't pay the gasoline tax that builds and maintaines the roads. This needs to change, IMHO, as a matter of simple fairness and justice. The tax deduction for EVs also needs to be ditched.

 

[mpeirce]

IMHO, the 'deal' for EV owners is that they don't pay the gasoline tax that builds and maintaines the roads. This needs to change, IMHO, as a matter of simple fairness and justice. The tax deduction for EVs also needs to be ditched.

If you view ICE vs Electric as a personal choice, you are correct!

If you view Electric as something the government need to encourage, boy are you so wrong!