Electric Vehicle Charging: Where are the newest EV chargers? A survey from LAA, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, and the New Challenges
An issue that is quickly growing in importance. California was the first state to restrict sales of gas-powered vehicles by 2035. More people are buying electric vehicles than ever before — monthly sales are nearly triple what they were four years ago — and the United States is set to have 500,000 new electric vehicle chargers by 2030 to keep up with the demand. But the placement of those chargers will be critical to how easily Americans can travel long distances by car across the US — and remains one of the biggest question marks to get to mass adoption.
The reliability problem has been addressed by placing its charging stations in large groups. (Tesla, the largest seller of electric vehicles, has a 35,000 fast-charger network.) If one charger is out, another one is likely to be available to drivers. But many other networks place small clusters of a few chargers, which could potentially lead to an EV driver with a low battery being stranded at a dead charger.
Experts say it is difficult to predict the number of seanof charges a state will need. Even still, the number of public chargers is growing exponentially with each passing year.
The Alliance wants chargers to go as fast as 350 kilowatts per hour, which would speed charging, but also increase costs for builders and operators. Most states are focused on meeting the government’s 150 kilowatt requirement, and some have described reaching 350 kilowatt per hour charging in limited circumstances or in future years.
“It is imperative that customers have a convenient refueling experience,” the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents major automakers, has said. It believes the nation would be better off if they had a reliable, accept credit cards and clearly communicate their pricing at all times. For many years, there was no standards for charging electronic devices.
A University of California-Berkeley study found that while San Francisco Bay Area charger operators said they were up and running 95-98% of the time, only 72.5% of charging equipment was functional.
Gas pumps will also have a different dynamic than the cees. Most charging is expected to be done at people’s homes, and fast chargers are likely to be used mostly for long trips.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/30/us/electric-vehicle-charging-gaps-dg/index.html
The Massachusetts Electric Car Charger Network Needs a Wide Range of Service and Coverage for All Regions in the United States, according to ABB
The company that builds the charging infrastructure said that they were adding features such as remote monitoring to identify reliability issues faster and more easily.
“EV chargers are not set it and forget it infrastructure,” ABB spokesman Michael Touhill said. “We know how to do this, and have done this, in other critical infrastructure sectors like hospitals, datacenters, the power grid, and many others.” Touhill and ABB did not respond to CNN requests to comment on the Berkeley study.
The number of electric cars in North Dakota is less than 400 and it is too many for a station to hold them all. It wants to build two-port stations and expand them as demand grows.
Some states like Florida and Washington State are planning to use toll credits they’ve received from building toll infrastructure to pay for the 20% of charger construction costs that the federal government won’t cover.
Massachusetts believes it can structure agreements with charging partners to make sure there is a return of investment for everyone on a broad set of sites.
Some sites may be uneconomical to operate for many years, but are still needed to provide a network with adequate geographic coverage that serves all communities.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/30/us/electric-vehicle-charging-gaps-dg/index.html
Production of The First Sony-Honda Autonomous Models in Florida, a report by the Florida Department of Power and Environmental Protection
Electric vehicles sales make up less than 1% of sales in Florida, according to the state. It expects that even a conservative rate of adoption requires an intensive build out of the charging station. It estimates that by 2040, 10-35% of its vehicles could be electric.
There are 170 fast chargers in Florida today. The state says it needs more, for uses like supporting evacuations as the state has been affected by 79 tropical or subtropical cyclones since 2000. In 2017, nearly seven million residents evacuated during Hurricane Irma.
“The first delivery [of vehicles] is expected to be in North America in the spring of 2026. In Japan, delivery is planned to begin in the second half of 2026,” Yasuhide Mizuno, chairman of Honda Mobility, told reporters at a news conference, according to Nikkei Asia.
Production of the Sony-Honda cars will take place at one of Honda’s 12 facilities in the United States, though no details have been shared on planned volume. AP News reports that the companies say the first vehicles are not intended for mass sales.
The Sony-Honda cars will have different systems. This image shows the interior of Sony’s prototype Vision S-02 SUV. Image: Sony
BMW Proliferation Rules and Implications for the American-Made Autonomous Vehicles (Amps). Mr. Zipse: “I don’t want a lot of American made vehicles on a ship
The largest BMW factory is in Spartanburg, South Carolina. 40% of the SUVs it produces are sold in North America. The rest are exported to 120 other countries.
The rules allow consumer tax credits only for electric vehicles that meet increasingly strict goals for US-based manufacturing of the vehicles themselves, as well as their batteries. They also require US sourcing for battery raw materials and they place caps on the cost of the vehicles and the income of the buyers. The vehicle must meet the required requirements for buyers to get full tax credits.
He said not to put a lot of batteries on a ship or fly them around the world. “You’re not going to do it. You will localize anyway.
Zipse said that the IRA’s rules were unneeded and that they risked negative repercussions for the jobs they were designed to protect.
The IRA provides no benefit for vehicles, regardless of how “American made” they are, if they aren’t sold inside the US. More importantly, though, protectionist regulations attempting to wall off American-made vehicles for American buyers can spark retaliation, endangering valuable export business, said Zipse.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/20/business/bmw-chairman-ev-regulations/index.html
The Road to Electric Vehicles: On the Road, the Road to Innovation, and the Road To Success: A Review of Zipse’s Warnings
He said that a regulation can’t be made without considering the consequences from other regulators. I warn that we will get a regulation of our own.
“The assumption that you can incentivize an industry which is completely from A to Z inside one region in the world, in such a complex industry, like the car industry is a wrong assumption,” he said.
Zipse also warned of the possible unintended consequences of regulations, like those in some US states and in Europe, that ban sales of non-zero-emission vehicles after a certain date. It could mean overall industry sales will decline.
Zipse said not all consumers would be able to buy an electric vehicle charging station at home, so many would decide instead to keep their gasoline-powered cars.
The industry needs to keep up with innovations to further reduce the costs of owning an electric vehicle. There are three broad buckets where this can occur—the vehicle itself, the software, and the production method. The first is what most cars focus on. After Tesla showed that software is crucial for electric vehicles, many are now focusing on the second as well.
He said that regulators should impose more stringent emissions limits, while allowing automakers to decide how to reach those targets, similar to what regulators have done before. To date, that approach has not halted increasing global warming.
For far too long, commercial vehicles remained an underserved sector of the electric vehicle market. Despite making up over 23 million vehicles worldwide and 82 percent of vehicle emissions, the sector is still dominated by legacy manufacturers that have struggled to make the shift to electric. In 2023, however, we will see a transformation in the industry as government mandates are implemented and new electric vehicle players start delivering vehicles to customers. This will transform our cities, reducing carbon emissions and having a radical impact on clean air.
Supply chain problems and inflation are what have hampered Amazon and Rivian from fulfilling their goals of an electric delivery fleet. When then-CEO Jeff Bezos announced a deal with the EV startup in 2019 to buy 100,000 vans, he said they should be on the road by 2024. 100,000 vans are predicted to be on the road by the year 2030.
Starting in July, the EDVs first rolled out in Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Nashville, San Diego, and Seattle. Since then, they’ve been put into service in a bunch of new cities, including Austin, Boston, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Madison, Newark, New York, Oakland, Pittsburgh, Portland, Provo, and Salt Lake City.
The cost of electrifying an EV factory is going to be dramatic: How American automakers are choosing to invest so that they can be more sustainable
But let’s back up for a second — one of the world’s largest automakers is saying it has to shutter a plant indefinitely because of how much electrification is costing? That’s a bold claim, especially since it’s coming from a company I’d consider to be in distant third in the big three American automakers’ race to move their lineups from gas to batteries. It also doesn’t help that Stellantis has been promising quite a few electrified Jeeps, and it’s hard to see why this factory couldn’t play a role in making those vehicles, at least one of which is due out next year (and many of which have been very difficult to find).
Ford’s an interesting comparison, though, because it also went through a recent round of layoffs, cutting around 3,000 jobs. No prizes for guessing one of the excuses it gave employees; “We have an opportunity to lead this exciting new era of connected and electric vehicles,” read a memo from CEO Jim Farley and chairman Bill Ford. “Building this future requires changing and reshaping virtually all aspects of the way we have operated for more than a century.” That meant cutting jobs.
What are we doing right? The government has been trying to combat climate change through progressive transportation policy. Since 2020, Germany has offered car buyers up to 9,000 euros in incentives if they choose to go electric, a scheme that’s worked so well that the government will reduce the payout in 2023. China has aggressively invested in its domestic electric car industry for nearly a decade. The US government this year passed several programs that aim to support an American electric vehicle supply chain from vehicle assembly to battery manufacturing and even the mining of rare minerals involved in EV batteries.
Arrival is tackling all three. In 2023, our team will be producing vehicles in an entirely new way of manufacturing, in local “microfactories.” It is designed to be placed near cities, support local jobs, scale in parallel with lower commission time and lower costs of assembly, and be more green than traditional methods of production. Think of a warehouse in your city, building vehicles for your city. We need to rethink how vehicles are designed and engineered to do this. For instance, we had to create new, lighter materials that do not require painting, and are more durable than steel. We’ve also had to design and build our own components, allowing us to better control the cost and functionality of each system in the vehicle.
Why do we buy electric cars to survive the road? An analysis of Melin’s frustrations with electric-car buyers in the United States
Hans Eric Melin thinks of battery waste when he thinks of America. The cars are well-equipped, large, and handsome, like the cars of yesterday, with off-road ready. They also do things that those cars didn’t do, like go from zero to 60 in three seconds and travel 400 miles without emitting any carbon. They carry a lot of weight, which means their battery pack is very large and can push the vehicles over 10,000 pounds. Most of the time that pack is parked, or is being used to a fraction of its capabilities on school pick-ups or runs to the grocery store. Unless those cars are flying hundreds of miles down the open highway, which they rarely are, the precious atoms of cobalt, lithium, and nickel inside of them have very little to do.
That’s a tough sell, especially in the US, and especially at this moment of EV adoption. There has been a push for more power. More range. Faster zero-to-60,” says Gil Tal, a professor at the UC Davis who studies the choices of EV buyers. It is partially related to an effort to save the narrative about electric cars. For a long time, an EV’s image was that of a golf cart on a road. But battery technology has improved immensely. Now automakers are eager to show off improved power and range—even if that’s more battery than most drivers can actually use. Tal says that the problem is that we buy cars for the dream. We buy bigger than we need when we buy a dream in the US. We buy four-wheel drive. We buy towing capacity, dreaming that one day we’ll get a boat.”
When a recent New York Times op-ed asked how often people actually used 300-mile battery range, readers responded with indignation. Each person had a routine long-range commitment that was obvious from the article’s point of view: extensive work commute, season football tickets at their alma mater halfway across the state. It was not within reason for a 20-minute change along the way. “This is the kind of silly coastal stuff Republicans like to ridicule,” one wrote.
Did 2022 become the electric tipping point? An EV sales record as a challenge for the large-scale supply chain of the United States
An annual passenger EV sales record of more than 7 million has been set by the world halfway through the 21st century. The firm projects 10.6 million in sales by the end of year—even despite ongoing stresses on the vehicle supply chain that have made it difficult to get electrics into dealership lots.
For one thing, electric vehicle chargers aren’t nearly widespread enough. Governments and the private sector need to build out a global network of electric vehicle chargers that can serve not only passenger cars but also fleets of vans and trucks with a ubiquity that can rival gas filling stations. For another, it is hard to get the battery minerals out of the ground because of the limited supply. Was 2022 the electric tipping point? It’s a question that can only be answered in hindsight.