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by WorldMaker
1389 days ago
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Even the least efficient EVs still get some charge at 120v. One of the worst offenders only gets 1 mile per kWh so that's roughly 1 mile every hour at home. Even if your inefficient EV is only plugged in for the roughly 8 hours you need to sleep, that's still 8 more miles of range when you wake up than you had before you went to bed. A lot of people like to discount that as "basically nothing", but a gas car isn't going to have 8 more miles it can drive when you wake up. It's a subtle seeming shift, but it's still a useful shift, because it adds up. 8 extra miles a night is still 56 miles a week you don't need to "fast charge", even with the most inefficient sort of EV and the least time at home. Cars spend more time parked than in use by a great margin, even among those drivers that drive hundreds of miles every week. The US is at a disadvantage with our 120v standard and that a lot of people don't think 120v is "adequate" for EV charging ("it's only an additional mile per hour range in my inefficient EV Hummer!"), but we should normalize 120v charging because it should be easy and affordable to almost every household and a lot of shared parking. We've more than a century of experience installing "regular plugs" everywhere. We could start there and do a lot of good in the US to encourage charging everywhere a car is parked. We have to reduce the stigma that it "isn't good enough" because people can't think fourth dimensionally that 1 mile per hour is "adequate" because it is still more than the car would have had otherwise. Dryer plugs are great, too, but we don't have as many free circuits in our fuse boxes and circuit breaker boxes as we'd all like to put extra dryer plugs in all our garages, because the US made the mistake of standardizing on 120v instead of 220/240v like most of the rest of the world. (Thanks, Edison.~) We can start with regular plugs, and need to destagmatize it/normalize it if we want cheap charging everywhere and less focus on "how do we install chargers" as if it's this deeply complicated bootstrap process. We have outlets everywhere, let's use them better. We install new outlets all the time for relatively pennies (the labor investments far dwarfs the supplies/capital investments), we can install them near every parking lot a lot cheaper than we can add 240v circuits to parking lots (or "fast chargers"). If we can start to think of it as "adequate" because it is still additive. |
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