Living Fully Electric! Answering EV Questions
We’ve been living with only electric vehicles for nearly two full years now and we get quite a few reactions when people find out we willingly chose to not have a car that fuels up with gasoline. Many people think it’s impossible to survive with an all electric household in the USA. Well it is indeed possible and here are some commonly asked questions we get asked all the time.
Start of the Journey
We got the Tesla Model 3 in March of 2019 and were living in an apartment/condo at the time. While we didn’t have a means to charge at our home as it was a shared parking structure without any charging infrastructures, we did drive seemingly for free for quite a while because I was able to charge at work and we had free supercharging credit thanks to Tesla. Living in Southern California was also a big benefit as most of the big employers I worked for supplied their offices with ChargePoint chargers that employees could use for free.
We ended up getting the Polestar 2 at the end of 2021 and since moving into our single family home, we’ve started charging both of our cars at home. We do have free charging for two years through Electrify America too if we need to charge on the road. With two capable electric cars, we no longer owned an ICE vehicle.
How Do We Charge At Home?
Even though this current wave of EV adoption has been going on for a while now, it seems the general public still doesn’t really understand the concept of charging at home. Most concerns from prospective buyers seem to be with the mentality that their cars need to be charged outside in a “gas station-like” environment and that there just isn’t enough public chargers. We’ll talk about that in the next section.
In our garage, we have a 240-volt Level 2 charger that we plug the car that drives more for that day or requires more charge. We then trickle charge the other vehicle through a 110-volt Level 1 wall outlet. We charge about 90% of the time at home.
If we absolutely need to charge both vehicles more quickly or fully due to an emergency situation, we’ll take one of the cars to either a Supercharger or an Electrify America station.
How Much Does It Cost To Charge At Home?
While the cost of electricity varies depending on region, it is fair to note that we live in Southern California and our electricity prices are quite high and fluctuating all the time. Our home does have some solar panels because we purchased a new home and California mandated that new homes built after 2020 are required to have solar panels on them. Our system isn’t enough to be self sufficient, but it does contribute a bit. Our bill comes in the form of a superbill at the end of the year because our solar panels don’t generate enough to allow us to fully sustain our own energy.
That being said, because our charging bill is tied to a lot of other things like our electricity use outside of our vehicles like air conditioning and such, I would say we average about $150-200 per month on electricity as a whole. This is also inclusive of me using electricity at home almost 24/7 because I work from home fully remote.
But according to Tesla and the charge stats portion of the app, on average we spend about $68 on charging in a month and charge about 285 kWh paying $0.27 cents per kWh. It reports that from April of last year to now, we’ve charged a total of 3,310 kWh with a total spending of $660, that according to Tesla, would’ve been $1,874 if we had filled that equivalent in gas.
Are There Enough Reliable Charging Stations?
In most parts of Southern California, finding a public electric charger is fairly easy. What that charger does and actually outputs is a crapshoot. If you’re looking for a Level 2 public charger, which essentially takes 8 hours to fully charge a vehicle, those tend to be in shopping areas like market plazas and malls. It’s pretty difficult to find an open one as they are usually only in pairs. Many of them are actually free too. This allows shoppers to enter a store and plug their car to slightly top off on range.
That made driving an EV feel like this strange experiment where people pay you to drive your car. At some point we began disregarding the thrifting aspect of driving for free for the convenience of just never worrying about having to refill your car by waking up to a ready car at home.
Now moving on to Lvl 3 fast chargers, which should be able to get an EV back on the road in around 45 minutes, they tend to have a few more spots depending on the company that owns the station. Typically EA and EVGo chargers have 3-5 spots. Tesla’s Superchargers on the other hand have a dramatically bigger range of spots. Some Superchargers have even 20+ spots. That being said, because we now have the experience of owning both a Tesla and non-Tesla EV, I think I can confidently say that Superchargers are lightyears more reliable than Electrify America or other chargers. I don’t think I’ve ever come across an EA charger where one of the stations wasn’t down.
On the bright side, Tesla has already begun opening their network up to other car brands by incorporating CCS compatibility through what they call the Magic Dock to various locations. Tesla will continue to expand their Supercharging Magic Dock integration with each passing month so that makes other EV’s much more viable since they will have access to a portion of the Supercharging network.
On the other hand, losing that exclusivity as a Tesla driver may further muddy the Supercharging etiquette that Tesla drivers have kind of developed over time. The different locations of charging ports on non-Tesla models also affect the flow of traffic. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops in the long run and what Tesla does to alleviate the added flow of cars to their network.
Do you get range anxiety?
While public chargers are still being built across the country and nowhere near as common as gas stations, after going fully electric we haven’t looked back. We haven’t gotten gas in years with the exception of driving a rental gas vehicle on a trip to Canada last year.
If you’re using your vehicle for day to day and work commute, there’s never a need to worry about range anxiety. If you’re going on a long road trip, I still recommend doing some planning ahead of time to plan your route. There are plenty of apps that help EV’s map out locations of charging facilities to be able to comfortably make it to the final destination. Some cars will even map the routes through the infotainment of the car like the Tesla Model 3.
We’ve traveled to other states multiple times without ever setting foot at a gas station. It does take longer stops than if we drove an ICE vehicle, but for our tendencies, we prefer to stop within 2 hours of driving regardless so it works out for us. However, we still feel more comfortable driving the Model 3 than the Polestar 2 simply due to the Supercharging network. Our view of the Supercharging network is similar to how we feel familiar with gas stations at this point.
Would We Go Back to an ICE?
The short answer is also a bail out answer because it’s maybe. There are plenty of intriguing and terrific cars we potentially want for our family like the Maverick, Bronco, or Telluride. One of the reasons we bought a PS2 instead of those cars is because of one pedal drive. We’ve gotten to the point where driving an ICE vehicle, and being restricted to the logic of creep (where the car moves forward without your input), just doesn’t make sense to our brains anymore. A microwave doesn’t start unless you press a button. A light doesn’t turn on unless you tell it to. Why does it make sense that a car moves without the driver’s permission?
People freak out over the whole automated driving concept, but ICE vehicles literally move by themselves when you shift it into drive without a driver’s input on the accelerator and nobody seems to find that strange from a logical standpoint. After driving exclusively with one pedal for a couple of years where the car has the ability to never do anything the driver doesn’t want it to do, that creep logic just makes no sense at all. It makes it much harder for us to consider non-EV vehicles no matter how much we like them.
The lesson we’ve learned as EV owners for the last 4 years is that electric cars are not the future. They aren’t going to be ready to be on the roads in 5 years. Electric cars are already here and they are already viable as the only transportation platform.
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Lida
Always the number cruncher, the former narrative journalist turned data scientist, can’t help but find herself bursting with excitement with each new generation of tech gadgets. After all, predicting future trends is Lida’s forte. Any gadget that survives Lida’s torturous, adult working woman itinerary of over 700 notifications a day deserves praise!