Stay right where you are

EV charging stations out in southern Maine

EVgo electric chargers in southern Maine are not working this morning, part of the hundreds experiencing similar outages across the U.S. Thursday morning.

The issue is part of a system outage, an EVgo customer service representative told the Bangor Daily News. Hundreds of chargers in the system’s nationwide network of 850 chargers are not working, she said, from California to Florida. She did not know the exact number in Maine.

A broader issue with frequently non-working chargers could make it tough for the administration of Gov. Janet Mills to encourage EV purchases among potential buyers. They are a key part of its ambitious goal to cut carbon emissions 45 percent by 2030.

The state has no numbers for faulty charging stations because they are owned by private companies. National numbers vary, although they are concerning. A J.D. Power study in 2022 found that at least one in five recharging efforts nationally failed. Another study in the San Francisco area last year found one in four failed.

One of the closest working chargers to southern Maine that EVgo could locate was at a mall in Burlington, Massachusetts.

“People can accept an occasional major outage, but it’s the constant minor things where they have to reset it or you have to go to another charging station seven miles away,” said Adam Lee, chairman of Lee Auto Malls, who has owned multiple EVs in the past decade.

Lee discovered the network problem this morning when he tried to charge his Rivian electric truck at Market Basket in Westbrook. EVgo’s “Fawn” and “Rudy” chargers, each with two charging stations, showed that they were offline. Lee checked other EVgo chargers in southern Maine and all were out.

Home charging, like electric vehicles themselves, will be a luxury for the rich and the nomenklatura, and those plebes who park on the street or live in apartment houses will be entirely dependent on public charging stations. How unfortunate for them when those stations go down, but hey, they shoulda been rich.

And here’s a wonderfully deceptive headline from, where else, The Wall Street Journal:

Ultralong-Range Electric Cars Are Arriving. Say Goodbye to Charging Stops.

We drove 1,000 miles across two countries without stopping just to charge, thanks to a new class of EVs

Notice the caveat, “just” to stop. The reporter is claiming that he didn’t “have to” wait 12 hours, and 18 hours, respectively, while his car’s battery was recharging, because was intending to sleep overnight in Boston, and stay in Montreal for two days anyway. He doesn’t explore the possible reaction of drivers who don’t want to stop in Boston overnight on their way to, say, and god help us, Maine, or campers forced to cool their heels for two days in Montreal before proceeding ninety miles north to their intended destination, Mont-Tremblant national park. But because the new society being planned for us will be an immobile one, what does that matter?

Since I’d intended to stay in Montreal two nights, leaving the vehicle plugged in more than just overnight wasn’t a problem, but it is notable that on a Level 2 charger, it took a full 18 hours to completely refill the vehicle’s battery. 

On day one of my road trip, I set out with modest goals. The distance between where I picked up the vehicle on the west side of Manhattan and my destination in Cambridge, Mass., just north of Boston, was a mere 220 miles, according to Google Maps. I could drive all the way there and back in this vehicle and not break a sweat, I figured.

Had I attempted that, I would have ended up stranded on the side of the road.

Despite nearly ideal driving conditions—clear weather, a warm spring day—the Lucid Air Grand Touring used up a little more than half its battery capacity. That left me with plenty of range at the end of my trip, but suggests that if I’d kept driving into the night, the vehicle would have gone a total of about 393 miles before running out of juice completely. That is a far cry from the 516 miles of range the EPA estimated this sedan could achieve.

Here’s part of what explains the difference: EPA estimates for range are consistently 12.5% higher than what those vehicles yield in steady, 75 mph highway driving, according to a recent paper published by SAE International. This happens for a number of reasons, but the result is that some vehicles tend to match their range estimates—particularly German ones—and others do not—typically the American ones. 

The upshot is that anyone who buys the supposedly 500-mile Lucid thinking they could actually go 500 real-world miles on a highway on a single charge is in for a rude surprise. Real-world tests at 75 mph conducted by Car and Driver indicated the vehicle gets closer to 410 miles of range.

…. That first night, it took about 12 hours to recharge my vehicle to 100%—all while I ate, slept and had my morning coffee. [What’s your rush, Buddy?] This vehicle is capable of fast charging (more on that later), but such chargers remain relatively rare in the U.S., and anyone taking a typical road trip is far more likely to encounter the more common, and much cheaper, Level 2 chargers, like the one I used.

When planning the trip, I found a charging station on the popular website PlugShare. As part of the ChargePoint network, I could see from that company’s app that chargers at the local department of public works were available, and came with the added bonus of free overnight parking. [snicker]

In Canada, my good luck ran out. All the charging plugs were occupied at my first stop, and the next charger I tried didn’t work. At the third charger I tried, someone stole my California license plate as I slept. All this after the French Canadian border agent promised that his country has a better charging network than the U.S. Despite my misadventures, it is true that Quebec, and Montreal in particular, have made public charging widely available and affordable. 

The trip from Cambridge to Montreal spanned some 320 miles, and had taken me over a mountain pass in New Hampshire, which reduced the effective range of the vehicle even more than my less-than-conservative driving had. The result was that I arrived in Montreal with only a precious few kilowatt-hours of power left—just enough to scrounge for a charger and call it a night.

Once again, it was a far cry from the EPA estimated range of more than 500 miles, but it was still a full day’s drive. [With the added benefit of the thrill of an unexpected overnight roadside camping experince].