Yeah. You saw the thumbnail.
Every electric car, every single one
can be charged with a standard household outlet using a cable like this, which they often come with for free,
or which can be purchased for about 100 bucks.
Electric cars don't need a special kind of electricity.
They need the same electricity you have at home.
The only thing that matters is how much electricity they'll need,
and that depends almost entirely on you and how much you drive.
And if you have a typical commute,
this is probably all you need.
Hi.
If you've been considering an electric car
a little more closely than you might have in the past due to world events
and the precarious nature of oil prices,
well, you found the right video.
If you don't know who I am, my name is Alec,
and I run the channel Technology Connections.
This is my second channel Technology Connextras, where I make stuff more off the cuff.
But I have had to script this one because I've tried
too many times to film this, and it has been a disaster each time.
And today I would like to help you form
some technology connections between your daily life and an electric car
because as you saw from the title,
it's really easy to overthink them.
And yet we are also not thinking about them enough
because as technology has progressed,
we appear to be focusing all of our time and energy
on what I would claim is the wrong thing.
Right now, we're approaching this exactly backwards,
because all you really need to charge a car is wires.
And if we were smart about it, we would be doing the easy thing.
But instead we're doing the hard thing because it's flashy and cool
and we're just pretending it's smart
because it makes more people more money.
I'll explain what I mean by that shortly,
but first I want to talk about who my intended audience
for this video is, and also who it is not.
I am very aware that not
everyone can charge their car at home.
Perhaps you live in an apartment building,
or you live in a neighborhood with on street parking.
When I talk about how easy it is to charge an electric car at home,
I'm not intending to deny your reality.
In fact, I'm trying to demonstrate
how ridiculous it is that you are stuck in a situation
where you cannot charge an electric car
somewhere that's convenient to you,
because all you need is wires.
And if I were in charge, we'd be doing things quite differently,
which is kind of the point of this video.
But also, if I were in charge,
I wouldn't want to just give everybody an electric car and call it a day.
I am very plugged in to conversations about car dependency
and how frustrating our built environment is,
because it caters so heavily to the car and is often
hostile towards other modes of transportation,
like transit or biking, or even our own two feet.
I make videos about electric cars
because I think they are better and less destructive cars,
not because I think they are the solution to all of our problems.
I just wanted to put that on the record,
as I often get accused of that very thought.
But right now we have a severely car
centric infrastructure here in the US,
which I believe is going to take longer
to unwind than a lot of people wish it would.
So we need to walk and chew gum at the same time.
And my desire is to help people.
Today, activism is not a zero sum game,
and I say this with respect.
I think activists would do well to remember
that in conversations on the internet.
With that out of the way, it is not really my intention to debunk
a bunch of misinformation about EVs or anything like that.
I will touch on a few of those things,
but what I really want to do here is to reframe the conversation,
to try and help you get over some of the common mental hangups.
I know many people have when it comes to using an electric car.
I'm also making this as a sort of test video for a remake
I want to do of my EV charging guide.
Some information in that video is out of date,
particularly the information on charging connectors.
But there's actually great news there,
and I'll be talking about it towards the end of this video.
But I'm going to start with a mental hang up,
which is the result of a bit of misinformation
and that is battery pack lifespan.
Way too many people still believe that the battery pack in an electric car
is something of a consumable item,
which is going to need replacement down the road.
This is not true
and has essentially never been true.
But the good news for people who might be watching this video
is that this misconception has depressed the value of used
EVs quite heavily,
or at least it did.
One of the reasons I'm trying to rush this video
out, though I clearly didn't do that good of a rush job,
is that if you are considering a used electric car,
you might want to do that soon.
More and more people are waking up to the realities
of what might happen to oil prices,
and it already looks like the value of used
electric cars is going up.
Now, if you are worried about
assessing the battery health of a used electric car,
there are tools you can use to do that
and I will link some information in the description.
But truly, you should not be worried about buying a used EV.
I would avoid used Nissan Leafs for reasons
I will talk about later in the video,
but pretty much any other model
is likely to be a great choice and serve you very well
for many years to come,
even if it was made before the world ended in 2020.
But anyway, this video is not really about the wrong things
people believe about electric cars.
It's more about understanding all the different ways
they can be charged because there are so many opportunities
we're just not taking advantage of right now.
But I'm going to say something
now which will probably get some people upset with me.
Yet I believe it to be true.
The last people you should be getting advice
from when it comes to electric cars are electric car enthusiasts.
They can be really good at keeping up with new information
and knowing what the best of the best might be at any given moment,
but they largely do not know what is important
to normal people at this point, and will likely steer you towards things
you almost certainly don't need.
A lot of those people get very obsessed with optimizing
their electric car experience,
and they don't necessarily have a very good grasp
of how off putting their preferred strategies
look to those who aren't familiar with electric cars yet.
What I'm saying is they mean well,
but they can make it seem a lot harder than it actually is.
Also, it's not important right now,
but Tesla enthusiast is a very distinct subset
of electric car enthusiasts, and, well,
they have a bad habit of giving advice, which is not relevant
because they don't keep up with what the other industry players are doing.
If they did, they'd be embarrassed by the fact that Tesla currently
has just four 800 volt capable DC fast charging stations
in the entire world, but they're not embarrassed about that
because they're not actually interested in the technology,
which makes electric cars work.
They're just interested in their Tesla.
anyway, something that I think can be very confusing
to people outside of the electric car world
is that today's electric cars can operate in two
radically different but complementary paradigms.
One of those paradigms is the one you are already used to,
where you use the car like a car,
and once the battery charge gets low,
you take it to a place to refill it quickly.
We have made great strides here and now.
Charging times for electric cars are getting close to refueling.
Time for gasoline.
My car, for example, only takes 18 minutes
to charge from 10% to 80% in good weather.
It gets slowed down a bit in the cold,
and at the same time I'm releasing this video.
I'm releasing a trip report where I drove my car from Chicago
to Cincinnati in very cold January temperatures
with terrible wind conditions.
So if you want to get a sense of what that looks like today,
you can watch that.
It's really not a big deal.
The only real issue I have is my car's terrible navigation software,
but that's not important in any context, but a road trip.
And now that we have charging networks like Ayana,
which are freeing us from the tyranny of app based charger activation,
using an electric car like a gas powered car
is actually a pretty normal experience these days,
and this is only going to improve.
Lots of people are getting excited by the headlines
coming out of China about their latest cars, which can charge
in just about five minutes.
But I would like to argue
very strongly that you should care a lot
less about that than you currently do because the much better, cheaper,
and more convenient way to charge an electric car
is the other operating paradigm they offer us, and always have.
Charging them slowly while they're parked and you're not using it.
This is something that seems obvious once somebody tells it to you.
But it might not be obvious if you haven't thought about it before.
Your car spends a lot of time parked and not going anywhere.
It's parked when you are sleeping.
It's parked when you're at work.
It's parked if you've been bad or good.
So plug it in for goodness sake.
I'm sorry.
I don't know why I'm like this.
The point is, you've got a lot of time where your car could be charging
without actually waiting on the car.
And the beautiful thing about electric cars
is that we can charge them with incredibly simple infrastructure,
which doesn't cost very much money at all.
And what is that infrastructure?
Wires.
This is the second operating paradigm,
which, ironically, is the one that early adopters
of electric cars were very excited about,
but which has been getting far too little attention in recent years.
So let's give it some more attention,
because it really is the smarter way to do this.
As I said in the intro, electric cars
don't need a special flavor of electricity.
They just need electricity.
The stuff you have at home and to give them access
to that electricity, all they need is wires.
And I do mean that literally.
Electric car charging infrastructure can be as simple as a power cord.
In fact, lots of electric car charging infrastructure
literally is a power cable and nothing more.
This is the case for AC charging, which has two categories
level one and level two.
For those outside of North America, this is a naming convention
unique to us and our weird split phase power.
But for those of us who have 120 volt household power,
well, that's what level one means.
It simply means charging a car on 120 volt AC power.
It has a few flavors, though.
Almost always we use the term level one to mean
charging a car on a standard household outlet
using a portable charging cable such as this.
To reiterate, every electric car can do this.
Every single one.
This is the slowest way to charge a car.
However, it is much more impactful than many people realize.
In fact, level one charging can work for the majority of people
as their exclusive source of charging energy.
And I'm serious.
This charging cable, even with a car like mine
that has a very large battery
pack, is all most people actually need
to keep their car charged up for commuting and errands.
However, it requires a pretty radical
reimagining of what refueling a car is like
and can be quite frustrating to certain brains.
See, a modern electric car will take several days
to get a complete charge on a cable like this,
but a complete charge and a modern electric car provides
a few hundred miles of driving range.
And unless you actually drive that far in a day,
you can simply charge it up little bits at a time
and replenish what you used.
There's no consequence to battery pack longevity or anything like that.
The only practical downsides to level one charging for most people
are that it is less energy efficient due to higher charging losses,
which makes it slightly more costly than level two,
though it's still going to be way cheaper than gas.
And if you're electric, utility offers time of use discounts.
Taking advantage of that is very difficult with level
one charging, where your car has to be charging.
Basically, whenever you're at home.
But here's the brass tacks
for a mid-sized car and smaller,
you can expect a charging cable like this to provide
40 miles of driving range with every overnight charge.
So if you drive 40 miles or less each day,
which is the case for the majority of commuters in the US,
then you will replenish all of the energy you used to commute
simply by plugging your car into this thing.
When you get home.
now remember that thing I said about how electric cars
operate under two complementary paradigms?
If you decide to try using level one
charging for your electric car at home,
you can still use DC fast
charging for quick top ups when you're out and about.
Whatever limitation you might have for your charging situation at home
is not a limitation for how far you can drive your car.
It's just a limitation for what you can do with the power
you have at home.
But if you're even more adventurous with your mental framing,
you can drive more than 40 miles a day without visiting a fast charger.
So long as you have extra idle time on the weekend.
Say, for example, you had a 60 mile commute
and you left home on Monday with a full charge.
When you get home,
you might be down to 75% state of charge in a car like mine,
and a level
one charger is not going to be able to completely
recharge the car by morning,
but it might get you up to 92%.
And that means you're only operating with a deficit of 8% per day.
On Friday morning, your car might only be at 68% state of charge, meaning
you'll get back home with 43% that night.
But now you've got the entire weekend
to keep your car plugged in and charging whenever you can.
And there's a very good chance it will be back to 100% by Monday morning.
To be clear, I am not suggesting this is ideal,
but I am saying it is possible.
And if you've got a DC fast charger near your home,
which you can easily find out by looking at the plug share app or website,
you can just try this out without risking much at all.
Worst case scenario, you have to run down the street to charge up
like a normal car.
Now, there are two remaining caveats to level one charging.
The first has to do with electrical safety.
This is a very minor issue,
and I don't want to make it sound too serious,
but you should be aware that plugging
in an electric car charging cable to the wall
requires the same level of attention as plugging in a space heater,
because the car will draw 12 amps through an outlet.
This means you should pay
attention to the connection between the plug and the socket.
If the connection is poor, the plug may overheat
and could potentially start a fire.
Engineers are smart and decent.
Charging cables now have temperature sensors
in the plug to detect this is happening and will slow down
or even stop charging in that case.
But cheap charging cables
may not do that, so make sure the outlet holds onto the plug tightly.
If it feels loose, the connection is likely to be poor,
and you should replace that receptacle before charging a car with it.
And if you're worried, just feel the plug to see if it's getting hot.
After the car has been charging for a half hour or so,
it's normal for it to feel a little warm.
But if it's uncomfortable to touch, there is a problem.
Also,
you really shouldn't use level
one charging cables with extension cords.
I'm not saying it's not possible,
but I am saying you need to be extremely cautious about doing that.
And if you don't understand the fundamentals
of electrical safety and wire gauge,
you probably just shouldn't.
Oh, right.
Also kind of related the 12 amp draw from an electric car
charging on this will max out a 15 amp circuit's capacity.
So if you've got other things on that circuit like a fridge or freezer,
it's possible the car will cause the circuit breaker to trip.
It's not a big deal, but it's something to be cognizant of
and this is less of a concern
if you have a 20 amp circuit to charge your car.
the other larger caveat with level
one charging is cold climates.
You probably know by now that cold weather reduces
electric cars driving range, and this is true.
It is getting better with the addition of heat pumps to electric cars,
but it is still quite significant,
especially when the weather gets extremely cold.
This is one reason you may want to upgrade
to level two charging, which I will be discussing next.
But the other important part of this caveat
is that if your car is parked outside in extremely cold conditions,
a level one charging cable may not actually add
very much energy to the battery pack.
This is because the car will be using an electric heater
to keep its battery pack warm in those extremely cold conditions,
and the power it needs to do that takes away
from the power available to charge the battery.
However, the impact of this depends
a lot on the car and even the situation.
For example, back when I had a Chevy Volt,
I plugged that thing in at work to a standard outlet outside,
and I never saw a slower charge than I expected.
Even when the weather got quite cold.
And if you're parked in a garage that's freezing temperature or above,
you probably won't ever see slower charging happen.
But I wanted to mention it.
So now let's talk about level two charging.
All that level two means is 240 volt charging.
And I'm saying this because not enough people
appreciate how flexible level two charging is.
And a lot of electricians don't know this either.
You're going to hear a lot of advice from people,
which says to install a Nema 1450
receptacle, the matching one for this plug,
and that's capable of providing 9.6kW of charging power to a car.
And let me be clear,
if you can do that, I would recommend it.
But what an electric car enthusiast is not likely to tell you
is that it's overkill for almost everybody.
A charging circuit like that will offer you
the ability to completely recharge most cars overnight,
which is something a lot of people would like to have.
But very few people genuinely need.
And the reason I think this is important
is because we have to deal with people
who have a limited electrical service in their home.
I'm hoping we see electric code reform,
and I'm probably going to make a main channel video about this,
because there are some very artificial limitations here,
which only matter on paper.
But for now, an electrician is going to have to do a load calculation
to determine how much available capacity
your electrical panel actually has.
And in many homes, that capacity is limited
such that you cannot install a name of 1450
without getting a very expensive electrical service upgrade.
But this does not necessarily mean
you cannot have a level two charging station.
With the electric service you already have,
because you can put a charging station on a 30
amp circuit or a 20 amp circuit,
or even a 15 amp circuit.
And even that weedy little 15 amp
circuit will give you eight miles of driving range for every hour
your car is plugged in.
Meaning even 100 mile commutes become feasible.
Using that charger exclusively.
But let's back up a bit.
The reason I said to charge an electric car.
All you need is wires
is that that is literally what this thing is.
The technical term for this is EVs
or electric vehicle supply equipment.
But all it really is, is a fancy power cord.
In fact, this is the exact same thing
as the level one charger right here.
It just has thicker wires so it can carry more current.
And it has a Nema 1450 plug so it can accept 240V.
Otherwise, it's doing the exact same thing.
It sends a signal to the car which announces its presence
and tells the car how much current the charging cable can safely provide.
In the case of this cable, that's 32 amps.
And when the car requests power from the cable,
it closes a switch inside this box and provides AC power
directly to the car's charging port.
That is, all these things do.
The car is what actually handles
battery charging, and it has an onboard charger
which will convert the AC power coming from the wall
to the DC power necessary to charge its battery cells.
And since this thing is really just a long range cord
with a car charging connector on one end and a fancy box in the middle,
you might guess that they're pretty cheap.
And you're correct.
These things can be had for less than 200 bucks these days,
though I might go for something a little more expensive to avoid.
Amazon sludge.
The only expensive
proposition to installing an electric car charging station
is getting wires from your electrical panel
to where you want the charging station to be.
And the reason I get pretty frustrated and cranky about this
is because nobody bats an eye.
When we think about running wires for appliances.
For instance, when we're building a house
and we decide to put in an electric dryer,
it's just taken as a given that the electrician
is going to install a two pole 30 amp breaker
in the electrical box and run ten gauge wire to the dryer outlet,
wherever that might be.
And yet, for some reason, when people imagine what it takes
to install an electric car charging station,
they often think it's more complicated than that.
Despite the fact that it is literally the exact same task.
In fact, there are electric car charging cables like this
which plug into dryer outlets.
And this means if you have an electric dryer in your garage,
or maybe in a utility room next to a carport or something, congrats!
You already have a very powerful circuit to charge an electric car.
And there are even devices out there which will let you plug a car charger
and a dryer into the same receptacle,
and it will automatically stop your car from charging
when you need to use the dryer.
It's just wires.
And the thing about wires, right, is that they just sit there
in your walls undisturbed and will last 50 years or longer.
If you elect to run a new circuit for a charging station.
You only have to do that once.
It's essentially permanent infrastructure.
And while the charging station or cable
might fail at some point down the road,
you already did the hard part and replacing it is a snap.
If you go with a receptacle and cable like this,
you literally just have to unplug a dead one and plug in a new one.
I don't know why the world isn't getting excited about this.
You can literally have a gas station at home
using the exact same technology that operates your clothes dryer.
And because, as I have already said,
your car can charge while you do other things like sleep.
You do not have to care if your car takes five, six, seven, eight,
even ten hours to charge.
All you need to care about is whether you can recover the energy
your car needed to do your commute, errands, and whatnot.
In the time you have to do that.
And what I'm trying to say is you have a lot of time.
So do not stress too much over
how much power your charging station can put out.
There is no need to go overboard.
And if all you can install is a 20 amp circuit,
you are almost certainly going to be fine
so long as your household doesn't drive more than 100 miles a day.
Yeah, that's right, you can charge two cars with one cable.
Electric cars have such a large range
now that they don't need charging every day.
So if you've got two cars in your household,
you can charge one one night and the other the next.
Imagine that.
And again, I know Midwesterners are very confusing
to a lot of the rest of the world, so let me just stress.
I am not saying you should not desire a more powerful charging station,
or that a more powerful charging station is not useful.
I am saying you probably don't actually need one,
and you should think through your needs before you spend lots of money
you don't need to spend.
It's good to be smart and frugal.
Which reminds me, there's probably going to be some talk
in the comments about technological solutions available to us,
which allow us to install higher current charging stations
even when we have limited electrical service.
I've even talked about these on my main channel and they're really cool.
What they essentially do is monitor
how much current is being pulled by your entire home,
using inductive clamps on the main feed wires in your electrical panel,
and then they'll automatically tell your car to slow down
its charging if other electrical loads appear in your house.
For instance, if your water heater switches on or you use the dryer, etc..
But here's me with my frustrating Midwestern energy
saying you probably don't need that.
I would rather you keep it simple, stupid, and install a smaller
charging station and just live with that.
Especially since we now have DC fast chargers popping up everywhere,
which can provide a quick charge should that need arise.
In fact, you could ask an electrician
to install a 240 volt Nema 620 plug.
These look just like our normal plugs, but they're all a little wonky.
And charging cables for these exist
and they'll provide ten miles of driving range
for every hour your car is plugged in.
If you actually need to drive
more than 100 miles a day, then that won't work for you.
But I just got a message from someone on Patreon
telling me that they've been charging their Chevy Silverado
EV, a gigantic truck
exclusively on one of these Nema six 20s,
and it has not been a problem for them because again,
your car spends a lot of time parked,
and if it can be charging whenever it's parked,
you're going to get a lot of range back.
Even if you have limited power.
But as much as it annoys me when electric car enthusiasts
spend so much time on optimization to the point of paralyzing people
who are not very familiar with electric cars yet,
I am going to give you one piece of optimization,
which you can do if you have higher power charging available
and which I take advantage of, and that is time of use rates.
Many utilities offer variable rate plans,
and my electricity is dirt cheap.
Between the hours of about 10 p.m.
and 5 a.m., pretty much all electric cars
allow you to schedule charging to take advantage of this,
and I have my car set up to start charging at 11
and it will stop charging at five.
If I had a slower charging station,
I might not be able to do that,
except here I am being a midwesterner again,
I actually could, I would just need to plug my car
in more frequently than I currently do.
At this point I charge my car about weekly.
I do have a shorter than average commute, so keep that in mind.
But if you have a 40 mile commute,
a full charge on an electric car sold
today is going to last you for the bulk of the week.
So I personally don't think there's much of a point
trying to install a charging station, which could get you an entire charge
in seven hours or whatever,
when you could simply plug your car in 2 or 3 times a week
and still take advantage of cheap overnight
electricity or whatever, the rates are cheap in your area,
that's probably going to start changing
as more solar power ends up on the grid.
But here in Illinois, we've got quite a lot of nuclear power on the grid,
and I'm happy to use it in the dead of night.
And to give you some additional context,
my charging station
actually takes about 12 hours to completely refill my car,
but that's not a
situation I ever actually encounter
because I limit my charging to 80%,
which is believed to prolong the life
of a nickel manganese cobalt battery pack
and I plug it in when the car is down to 30%,
which means the actual time it takes my car to charge
is just six hours.
I haven't explicitly said this yet,
but this is why I think it's kind of foolish to focus on
how quickly a charging station can get a car charge from empty to full.
That's just not a thing that actually happens if you're charging your car.
That way, you either drive a terrible commute or you're being very silly.
And at this point, I'm going off script for the rest of the video.
So buckle up.
Really, I just want to get this done
and we'll make the rest of my points from my notes.
The reason I keep saying all you need is wires,
and we're doing this exactly backwards, has to do with the opportunities
we are not taking, which would make this so much cheaper and easier.
The way we appear to be solving the problem of
I cannot charge my car at home
is to try and replicate the old fueling paradigm
with DC fast charging.
And again, this is technically possible,
but it's far from ideal.
In fact, it is the opposite of ideal.
This is a $300 charging cable.
The DC fast chargers you see out and about are five figure machines,
which require enormous electrical hookups from the power grid.
And that means every DC fast charging site
you see was probably a six figure affair at minimum.
Or if it's a larger charging site,
a multi-million dollar affair,
and somebody has to pay for that,
and the people that are going to pay for that
are the drivers who use those charging stations.
And that means the electricity you get from a DC
fast charging station is often 3 to 5 times as expensive
as retail electricity.
So not only are we saying renters
who can't charge at home should just have to deal with a worse experience,
but it's also a much more expensive experience.
I've already identified several scenarios where having DC
fast charging available close to your home is useful,
but something that I need to stress is that if we do this right,
we should not be using those except
when we go on road trips.
Because I have this charging cable at home.
Well, really, I use a different charger than this,
but it's exactly as powerful as this because I have one of these at home.
I do not use DC fast charging in my local area.
The closest DC fast chargers I use are in Wisconsin and Indiana.
I have used a local DC fast charger one time
because my plans
suddenly changed and I didn't have enough range
to get to the city and back in the winter, but actually I did.
I was just being overly paranoid about that,
and I figured, why not have that charging station there?
It's about five minutes from where I live.
Spent five minutes on that charger
just to give myself a bit of a security blanket.
And there we go.
But that is literally the only time I have used
DC fast charging infrastructure in my local area,
except for making YouTube videos about DC fast charging.
And this is what I mean about
we are not thinking enough about electric cars,
because for someone who understands them, well,
I can tell you
we are going to need to have the density of electric car
charging that we see today for gasoline on interstate corridors.
Basically, truck stops are going to have
to install a bunch of DC fast charging
so people like me
can make trips at the drop of a hat to wherever we want to go.
But when we're at our destinations,
we shouldn't be using those things,
because every building in this country has electricity.
This is the thing, right?
I keep saying all you need is wires because
all you need is wires.
And one of the ways we could be solving
charging for people who can't charge at home
is to let them charge at work.
I am sitting in a commercial building
which has, I just checked a 500
kVA pad mount transformer.
That means that transformer can supply half a megawatt of charging power.
And I know for a fact that this building
is not using anywhere near that capacity.
This is an industrial building.
It has that transformer
because people could be using industrial machinery or whatever.
And every unit in here has 203 phase service.
But based on the businesses that are in this building,
I can guarantee nobody is using anywhere near that.
So right here we have the electrical capacity
to install a few dozen
powerful charging stations in the parking lot,
and we could charge people minimal amounts of money to use them
because it is basic electricity rates.
Now, it's a little bit more complicated than that
because that's a commercial power bill
and there's going to be demand charges.
But what I'm saying here is
we have the opportunity
to simply trench some wires out to the parking lot,
install a bank of chargers, and solve the problem that way.
Now, obviously, I know a lot of people work from home these days.
That doesn't solve the problem for anyone.
Everyone. But my point is
all we need is wires.
And if your car is going to be parked for eight hours,
you don't have to care how fast it charges.
This is the thing I'm really trying to get more people to understand,
because those of us that were early adopters
of electric cars just intuited this very quickly,
and we see this as an obvious benefit.
But I keep encountering people who are very hung up on
the fact that their car will take hours to charge.
They just haven't yet thought through
that you don't have to wait on the car.
You can do other things.
and another reason I personally think it's important
to get chargers at workplaces
is because as more solar power gets put on the grid,
it would be most useful if we can use it while the sun is up.
And a great way to do that is to be charging electric cars.
Because I charge my car in the middle of the night,
I can't take advantage of that.
Whereas if I had a charging station here
in the parking lot, I would probably plug in here
assuming the electricity was, you know, cheaper than I can get it at home,
which again, it may not be, but my point is
we are not going to be able to do things like utilize solar energy
during the day and vehicle to grid technology.
If we don't get charging cables like this installed, where people work.
So if we do that,
we are also going to have a more sustainable charging infrastructure
and will solve the problem of people who cannot charge at home.
What I imagine happening is
that a lot of workplaces will start saying, okay,
we offer EV charging as a perk,
but if you have charging at home, please don't use it.
It might be difficult to manage, but
probably the charging at home is still going to be cheaper
for people who can access it than charging it at work.
But charging even charging at work on a slow charger like this,
even if it cost twice as much as retail electricity at home,
that's still cheaper than a DC fast charging station.
To give you some context,
Ayana is one of the cheapest DC fast charging providers right now,
and this station in Janesville,
Wisconsin is charging $0.33 per kilowatt hour.
That is triple what I pay for electricity at home on average,
and six times
what I pay for electricity for my car by charging it overnight.
So yeah, some charging stations are over
$0.50 per kilowatt hour or even $0.70 per kilowatt hour.
And it is not fair to force renters into using those things
when if we just ran some wires
from the building to the parking lot,
they could take advantage of cheap charging infrastructure,
which is cheap to install and cheap to operate.
So that is why I've been saying we're doing this exactly backwards.
Our attention is on the technology
which is enabling road trips because that's important.
But unless you drive professionally,
you just need a charger like this.
And this is what we should be prioritizing in my opinion.
But I believe I'm correct.
and now I'll finish up by returning to used
EVs and talking about the charging connector change we are going through,
but which miraculously doesn't actually matter.
To be clear, this is only for North America.
The rest of the world is not going through this nonsense
because y'all are smarter than us.
But here we are making a transition
from the old J1 77261 charging connector
to the Tesla connector, which is now an SRT standard.
You're probably going to hear it referred to
as the Tesla connector or Max Nax.
The North American charging standard,
or three 3400, because that is the new Seiki standard.
That's good thing.
Number one, it is no longer proprietary.
It isn't as a standard.
But good thing number two is the miraculous bit
in the process of creating the standard,
the SRT decided to have new max chargers
speak the exact same language as the old CCS chargers.
So the signals that go on the communication pins are identical.
And that means we can simply use these passive adapters
to go from one charging standard to the other.
All this thing is, is a big it's two big bus
bars connecting these two pins to these two pins,
although they have to flip around because the polarity is different.
Isn't that fun?
And it's just a dumb adapter.
It just passes power and signals from the charging station
to the car through this thing.
But you'll notice I have two of them.
And it's not just commitment to the bit.
You will need two adapters, and this is the one thing
which is a little bit frustrating about the transition,
but we'll make our way through it.
So the cool thing about the Tesla connector,
which I, I still have reservations about, but it's apparently fine,
is that it uses the same two pins
for both AC and DC charging.
That is why the Tesla connector is so small for J.
For cars one.
They added these two chunky boys down here
to accomplish a DC charging.
And so in the case of my car,
there's a little flap which covers these two pins.
You pull that thing out and then you can charge DC
or else the top of the connector,
you just use a standard AC charging cable.
Because Tesla combines the functions.
I need these two adapters and just say no.
Adapters for the other direction
also exist in fact, Teslas have been coming with them forever.
So you can use a charger like this.
Stick an adapter on there and plug it into a Tesla.
So if you're installing a charging station at home,
just pick the connector that the car you're looking at has.
In the end, you'll just slap.
If once you get a new car, you'll just stick an adapter on there
and it's fine.
But the fact that we're going to need
two adapters is a little bit confusing.
So the small one is only really going to be needed.
Like if you're visiting someone and they have a Tesla charger,
or I've used this a couple times at hotels which had Tesla wall connectors
and was able to charge overnight at a hotel.
This is the one that you use for DC
fast charging, and I have only
I haven't actually needed to use this.
And I will explain why, which has to do with the thing I mentioned
at the start where Tesla is crazy behind with charging technology,
but their fans don't know that
and they forgive them for it.
Even when you tell them,
because Tesla fans are a special breed.
So my car is an 800 volt native car.
This is not important for most cars,
but this is some weeds that you might be interested in knowing.
My car is an 800 volt native car.
That means the battery pack voltage is about 800V.
It's not really, it's a little lower than that, but we
we classify between 400 and 800V.
And when you DC charge these pins
directly, connect the off board charger
to your battery pack.
This means the charging station has to be able to put out
at least 800V to charge my car as quickly as possible,
and because almost none of Tesla's charging infrastructure can do that,
it does not make any sense for me to go to Tesla Superchargers.
So for the most part, I've been using other charging networks
which have six one connectors, because even these
even the oldest chargers out there from,
Electrify America, they have all been 1000 volt capable from day one.
What really happened here?
And again, Tesla fans, just forgive them for everything.
Was Tesla made a very big strategic error
when they designed the original connector because it was not capable
of handling voltages higher than 500V,
and they have made a hardware revision, which has made that possible.
But Tesla basically just thought we don't need higher voltage.
It's fine.
And the rest of the industry understands
higher voltages allow you to charge the battery pack faster,
because resistive heating is cut almost in a quarter.
When you double the voltage.
But again,
Tesla fans are not that interested in the technology of electric cars.
They're interested in their Teslas.
Sorry, I don't want to keep beating that dead horse,
but seriously, do not listen to them.
They will tell you.
For instance, they will tell you advice about charging a car
to get it down to like 5% before you plug in.
Because Teslas charge faster that way.
My car does not.
My car's fastest charging window is between about 30 and 55%.
So if you're trying to optimize on a road trip,
the advice someone will give you for a Tesla is exactly wrong.
For my car, you don't want to get it down to 5%.
You will waste time.
It's ideal to plug it in around 20%.
But again,
let's not beat that dead horse.
I'm just saying I haven't actually really needed to use this thing,
because the most useful thing it would do for me
is unlock Tesla Superchargers and my car.
While it can charge on those things, it has to do a
this really cool trick it does with the rear motor inverter, where it uses
the rear motor as a buck converter.
I think that's the right term and steps.
It steps the voltage up, but it can only do that
at about 80 to 100kW of charging power.
So it's very slow to use a Tesla Supercharger because again,
they are way behind when it comes to charging technology.
But also something which is important for people
that might be looking at used electric cars to know
this adapter only works on version
three and version four superchargers.
It does not work on version two or version one superchargers.
So if you've if you're aware
that the Tesla Supercharger network is opening up to other cars,
a good deal of their existing charging stations
do not work with non Teslas.
And this
I think is actually the most confusing thing about the transition.
And this is entirely Tesla's fault
because they never update their old charging hardware.
They maintain it well, but they never update their old charging hardware.
So that so a lot of their earliest charging stations,
they're still there and usable to Tesla drivers,
but they are not usable to non Tesla drivers.
And I my friend Robert has shared several pictures
with me of non Tesla drivers plugged into version two superchargers
and they left their car there.
They apparently just thought they could plug it in and walk away.
But no it is not charging so
that's that's not great.
But every other charger that uses
the new connector is going to work directly with a car with CSS.
And I have used this adapter at that ionize station to test it.
Even though the ion station had plenty of CCS one chargers
available, I didn't need to use this adapter, I just wanted to test it out
and also again, this is weeds stuff nobody needs to care about.
But Hyundai cheapened out.
They gave me this adapter for free.
That's nice of them.
But this adapter can only handle 350 amps,
which is not a problem for my car at all.
But if you tried to use this adapter
with a different car, it could be a problem. So
again, we're
we're kind of it's going to be a little bit
fine as we go through this adventure.
But I don't I don't really care about that.
A lot of people got really up in arms about Hyundai's decision,
but this lives with my car.
It's going to stay with my car forever.
Is it silly that they cost cut this a tiny little bit?
Sure, but it doesn't matter.
So the important thing of this nonsense section
I've been rambling about is that if you get a car with A61 connector,
do not feel as if you bought a car with an obsolete charging connector.
It will work just fine on new charging equipment.
The only exception is a car with a CHAdeMO connector,
and this is basically just the Nissan Leaf.
There were a couple other cars that ended up here with that connector,
but the CHAdeMO connector is big in Asia,
and Nissan brought it over.
And basically it's now obsolete.
So if you want to buy a used Nissan Leaf, you certainly can.
But understand especially the first two model
years, had a very poor battery pack design
and a lot of them have really degraded quite badly.
But even the better later ones with longer ranges,
it is not really going to be possible
to DC fast charge them in the future.
Somebody has developed a
CHAdeMO two wks one adapter,
but that thing is a wild contraption
because it has two actually translate
the CHAdeMO signals coming from the car
to CCS to tell the charging station what the car wants and back.
I believe it has batteries inside there.
It's it's amazing
that somebody went through the effort to make this thing.
And I've seen tests.
It appears to work,
but it's very clunky and you don't want to be dealing with that.
So if you want to look at a used Nissan Leaf, just understand
that car is only going to be a runabout.
You're probably not going to want to take that on a road trip.
But you know, one of the arguments
EV people have been making for a long time is
you could rent a car to go on a road trip.
You don't have to take your own car to go on a road trip
if you want to go on a road trip, so that's an option.
I understand that's an option a lot of people wouldn't want to take,
but it is an option.
So that's pretty much it.
I'm going to end the video here.
Please ask questions in the comments.
Because as I said earlier, I want to
I need to remake my EV charging guide.
And I want to do that fairly soon.
But and so I'm using this
as a test of that kind of see what things
I might have missed in here that people are curious about.
So, please ask your questions below.
But seriously, the most important thing I want to stress is
this is different, but it's not difficult.
It only seems difficult because you haven't tried it yet.
Once you get used to plugging your car
in at home or at work somewhere, you park it.
You're going to wonder why on earth
you would want to have a gas powered car.
Again, this is an almost universal experience for EV drivers,
but that experience does not happen for people who purchase an EV
and expect to use it like a gas car.
And I know there's a lot of people
doing that, which saddens me, quite frankly,
because they may not realize
they are signing up for a less than ideal experience.
And it just frustrates me to no end
because the ideal experience is cheap as chips.
It's literally just wires.
And if we had smart policy, we would be getting wires in more places
and we wouldn't be encouraging
multi-million dollar fast charger installations
within the city limits.
As I said, we're always going to need some.
But you know, circle K is installing a lot of DC
fast chargers at the shell stations around here.
I think they're doing it all across the country,
and it almost just feels like a
like a waste because I'm never going to use those.
And,
the only people that I can think of in my life that might use
those are people that I know from out of town that are going to visit,
but also they can use my charger.
So it's
yeah, it's it's
frustrating how we're doing this
because like I said, we're doing it backwards.
We're getting very excited about the headlines of faster charging cars,
but not enough people are realizing
that context only matters on road trips
or for professional drivers, and that is one caveat to say
that is professional
drivers, rideshare drivers, delivery drivers, etc.
are going to be the main users of DC fast charging
infrastructure in a local area,
and we will need that infrastructure for them.
But for typical car driving,
you should not be using DC fast charging
unless you're going on a road trip or you have an oops moment.
So this is what I meant by there's two different paradigms.
We're focused on the wrong one, and I hope you understand what I mean.
But thanks for watching
and I hope you consider driving an electric car soon.
If you're wondering why I haven't talked about hybrids,
well, I'm going to talk about hybrids
soon on the videos I'm doing on my main channel with, engine management.
But here's something I will say.
And I just realized I should have said this earlier.
If you cannot charge your car at home,
don't buy a plug in hybrid.
I'm noticing this thing now where a lot of people think
the word hybrid means the car has a plug.
I don't know how this happened because hybrid cars don't have plugs.
They just have a small battery pack
and electric motors, which assist the engine.
Plug in hybrids are a recent category of car,
but now I'm seeing more and more people
assume the word hybrid means the car has a plug.
And I'm telling you, if you cannot charge at home,
don't buy a plug in hybrid because the use case
for those makes absolutely no sense
except home charging.
Even workplace charging with a plug in hybrid is arguably kind of silly.
Because,
as I said, public charging tends to be more expensive.
Now, the math might be changing,
but plug in hybrids do not make sense
unless you can regularly charge them at home.
So if you cannot charge at home, don't consider a plug in hybrid.
Just don't.
It is a worse hybrid.
You're going to pay more money for more battery capacity
you won't ever use,
and they get worse fuel economy
because they're carrying around more batteries.
So I will say that
if you're wondering why I'm not talking
about hybrid cars, it's because ultimately
I think the combustion engine is a dead end
and we need to move away from it as quickly as possible.
But I understand that during the transition period,
a lot of people would be better suited to have hybrids.
Frankly, hybrids should have been the default
drivetrain technology for the past 20 years.
But again, there's a lot of misconceptions about them.
People have.
I'm noticing people have wild
imaginations of what hybrid drivetrains are like.
The reason why Toyota's hybrids are so bulletproof
is because that drivetrain is simpler than a transmission.
People think it's like two separate drivetrains,
but it's actually an engine connected to a transmission,
which isn't really a transmission.
It's two motors and a planetary gear set.
That's why they're so reliable.
There's way fewer moving parts in the transmission.
A and they're simpler cars
than a car with an even like a four speed automatic transmission.
Hybrids are much simpler cars.
It's just they have more complicated electronics to drive those motors.
But anyway, I will actually end now.
Thanks for watching.
Hope this helps.
Let's move towards a better future, please.
I'd rather we spend less money moving about the country.