Boy, there’s a loaded question if I ever saw one. It depends on a few factors, including where you live and the charging infrastructure that’s around you, what you’ll be using the vehicle for and how far you’ll typically travel.
Do you live in California or some other place where charging infrastructure is ubiquitous? Then you’ll have far fewer challenges. The proof is in the sheer number of electric vehicles in that state (903,620 at last count). Right now, the electric car industry expects that the majority of charging is going to be done at home, preferably overnight. If you live in a place where charging at home isn’t possible, you’ll have to rely on public charging facilities. Depending on where you live, that might not be practical. For example, Tesla only has one supercharger station near Calgary, and it’s at a mall in Balzac, north and outside of the city limits. For non-Tesla owners, there’s one Electrify Canada station in the city and one of a different brand at a Chevron. That’s it. Two charging stations in a city of over a million people. Compare that to Portland Oregon, which within its city limits alone has 5 Tesla supercharging stations rated for the maximum 250kW and 10 Electrify America or EVGo stations rated for at least 150kW. That’s a city of less than 700,000 people. We are quickly falling behind and this doesn’t help adoption, nor does the abysmal lack of financial incentives.
The next thing you’ll need to consider is how you use your vehicle. Is 95% of your driving a simple commute to work and back and maybe a few shopping trips in town? You won’t have much of a problem, especially if you can charge at home. But even if you can’t, if you have the option of charging at work or while you’re shopping, that’s not bad considering that many newer electric cars can get from 20% to 70% state of charge in under 30 minutes at a fast charging station. According to the very accurate web site “A better route planner”, a new Tesla Model Y standard range car can get from 10% state of charge to 86% at a fast charger in 13 minutes. That’s bloody amazing! Not all cars are going to charge that quickly though. If you owned a Volkswagen ID.4, charging from 10% to 70% is going to take 30 minutes. A Chevy Bolt is even worse, being limited to a 55kW charge rate. So your experience is going to depend on the charge curve of the vehicle and the potential charging rate of the stations suited to your make and model. This is one of the main reasons Tesla has an edge over other brands, as they make their chargers work really well with their own vehicle brand. Kind of like how Apple apps work so great on Apple devices. They’re made for each other. You might have read that statement I just made about Tesla chargers working well with their own brand and think, “Wait a sec. Tesla chargers ONLY work with their brand of vehicle.” That’s true today, but Tesla has promised that they will be opening up their charging network to other brands fairly soon.
When someone says that they primarily commute, but also want to do a lot of long road trips in their car, I’m going to tell them they’re dreaming if they live in northern Alberta. But even if they live in Calgary, a non-Tesla road trip in an ID.4 from Calgary to Vegas is going to take the usual driving time of 19 hours, plus 5 additional hours is going to be spent sitting at a charging station. The same trip in a Mercedes EQE would reduce your charging time to 3.5 hours. The same trip in a new Tesla long range Model Y would involve a total of just over 2.5 hours of charging en route.
But getting back to the person whose needs are simple, just using their vehicle as a daily driver around town, pretty much any car will do. It’s just a question of your charging needs and available stations and the ability to charge at home. The thing that is different about owning an electric car in 2023, is that unlike driving an ICE (internal combustion engine) car where there is little planning for refueling required, actual planning and forethought is necessary when you own an electric car. That may change in the future as charging infrastructure becomes more commonplace. The real issue electric car owners have to deal with, especially on the non-Tesla side, is charging station reliability and compatibility. When you drive a Tesla up to a public Tesla charger, there’s a very good chance it’s going to work on the first try. When it doesn’t, either a re-attempt or moving to another charger port usually solves the problem. Charging speed might be affected by whether each port is sharing the same power feed, but in terms of reliability of the system, Tesla is hard to beat. For the rest of the charging providers, there’s a lot less consistency. I’ve watched dozens if not hundreds of YouTube videos where the owner of a brand of electric car other than Tesla pulls up to a charger, regardless of the brand, and either isn’t able to charge at all (because it’s offline), or can establish a connection, but the charge rate is severely handicapped. Worse, many new electric car owners don’t even realize that all it might take is to try another port on another charger. This is somewhat to be expected though, as while it’s fairly easy to use a charger designed for a specific brand of car (Tesla), getting an Electrify America / Canada, EVGo or ChargePoint charger working with a Ford, a Volvo, a VW, a Hyundai, or a Chevrolet is another story. Never mind the exotic brands like Rivian, Lucid, Polestar, BMW, Audi, Mercedes, Porsche, etc. The charger and the vehicle have to speak the same language and it’s unlikely that all the brands agreed on the same exact protocols with every charge service brand. This is a failing that will have to be sorted out soon. We don’t worry whether a brand of gasoline will work with our car, it just works.
Something that I find amusing is when naysayers will declare “electric cars aren’t sustainable or good for the environment.” You don’t say. And how is this different from how material is sourced for your computer? Or your phone? Your big screen TV? Your home appliances? You’re picking battery powered electric cars as the hill you choose to die on?
While we’re on the subject, There are a number of people who would rather that we stop manufacturing battery powered electric cars, and switch to hydrogen powered cars, whether the hydrogen is being used to generate electricity for the motors, or being burned as a fuel in an engine. I have always wondered about the feasibility of hydrogen as an alternative to batteries, and I was quite surprised to hear people like Elon Musk state that hydrogen will never be the answer. After spending many years reading articles by scientists, and studying the thoughts of experts in the field, I have noticed a few things that could work against hydrogen adoption. Firstly, hydrogen is a very reactive element and requires a very special kind of storage tank. Hydrogen is also extremely flammable, so you definitely don't want a situation where it could be allowed to explode. Then there's the challenge of how to make a lot of hydrogen, and the two most common ways to do it are the dirty way, which is converting natural gas to hydrogen, or the cleaner way, which is using electricity to turn water into hydrogen. The problem with both of those methods is that natural gas is something we are trying to use less of, and how is the electricity being used to turn water into hydrogen being produced? If it's being produced by a renewable source, fine. but if the electricity is being generated by natural gas, again, it is dirty hydrogen.
But let's pretend that we figure all of that out. You still have to get the hydrogen to the consumer and build filling stations. This is not an impossible task, but if you take British Columbia as an example, which is one of the greener provinces in this country, try and find a hydrogen filling station right now. If you're lucky, you might find five in the entire province, and a few of those five probably aren't even public stations. So the infrastructure for hydrogen is not just lagging, it's non-existent. A battery powered electric car can usually be charged at home. Then we have to look at the subject of hydrogen powered cars. Who is making them? Nobody except Toyota, who say they plan to put all of their eggs in the hydrogen basket for now. Honda is still teasing the possibility of hydrogen with one model on the road (Clarity) in miniscule quantity (2116 leases in California only). But there are no coherent mass production plans to build hydrogen cars in the near future. And yet, practically every brand of vehicle you can think of, is not only making more than one model of electric car, many of them are planning to ONLY make electric cars within the next 10 years. I'm not a betting man, but if I was, my money would not be on hydrogen as a future vehicle solution, unless something very dramatic happens industry-wide.
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