PILOT SPIN
Spin Zone => Spin Zone => Topic started by: Lucifer on September 10, 2023, 05:48:44 PM
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https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2F2023%2F09%2F10%2F1187224861%2Felectric-vehicles-evs-cars-chargers-charging-energy-secretary-jennifer-granholm
When Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm set out on a four-day electric-vehicle road trip this summer, she knew charging might be a challenge. But she probably didn't expect anyone to call the cops.
Granholm's trip through the southeast, from Charlotte, N.C., to Memphis, Tenn., was intended to draw attention to the billions of dollars the White House is pouring into green energy and clean cars. The administration's ambitious energy agenda, if successful, could significantly cut U.S. emissions and reshape Americans' lives in fundamental ways, including by putting many more people in electric vehicles.
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Granholm approaches a charging station to charge the Cadillac Lyriq she was riding during a four-day road trip through the southeast early this summer. The electric vehicle had charging problems due to an "isolated hardware issue," Cadillac says. But Granholm's team encountered plenty of not-so-isolated problems too.
Camila Domonoske/NPR
On town hall stops along her road trip, Granholm made a passionate, optimistic case for this transition. She often put up a photo of New York City in 1900, full of horses and carriages, with a single car. Then another slide: "Thirteen years later, same street. All these cars. Can you spot the horse?"
One horse was in the frame.
"Things are happening fast. You are in the center of it. Imagine how big clean energy industries will be in 13 years," she told one audience in South Carolina. "How much stronger our economy is going to grow. How many good-paying jobs we're going to create — and where we are going to lead the world."
Going along for the ride
The auto industry, under immense pressure to tackle its contribution to climate change, is undertaking a remarkable switch to electric vehicles — but it's not necessarily going to be a smooth transition.
Not every vehicle in Granholm's caravan was electric. The Secret Service, for instance, rode in large traditional SUVs.
Camila Domonoske/NPR
I rode along with Granholm during her trip, eager to see firsthand how the White House intends to promote a potentially transformative initiative to the public and what kind of issues it would encounter on the road.
Granholm is in many ways the perfect person to help pitch the United States' ambitious shift to EVs. As a two-term former governor of Michigan, she helped rescue the auto industry during the 2008 global financial crisis, and she's a longtime EV enthusiast. (Her family recently switched from the Chevy Bolt to the Ford Mustang Mach-E.)
That makes her uniquely well positioned to envision the future of the auto industry and to sell the dream of what that future could look like.
But between stops, Granholm's entourage at times had to grapple with the limitations of the present. Like when her caravan of EVs — including a luxury Cadillac Lyriq, a hefty Ford F-150 and an affordable Bolt electric utility vehicle — was planning to fast-charge in Grovetown, a suburb of Augusta, Georgia.
Her advance team realized there weren't going to be enough plugs to go around. One of the station's four chargers was broken, and others were occupied. So an Energy Department staffer tried parking a nonelectric vehicle by one of those working chargers to reserve a spot for the approaching secretary of energy.
That did not go down well: a regular gas-powered car blocking the only free spot for a charger?
In fact, a family that was boxed out — on a sweltering day, with a baby in the vehicle — was so upset they decided to get the authorities involved: They called the police.
The sheriff's office couldn't do anything. It's not illegal for a non-EV to claim a charging spot in Georgia. Energy Department staff scrambled to smooth over the situation, including sending other vehicles to slower chargers, until both the frustrated family and the secretary had room to charge.
Getting it together
John Ryan, a driver of an electric BMW, pulled up after everything was settled. It was his turn to wait.
"It's just par for the course," he shrugged. "They'll get it together at some point."
"They" would be the government, the automakers, the charging networks like Electrify America and ChargePoint, and the companies like Walmart, Shell and 7-Eleven that are entering the charging game.
And they are, in fact, desperate to get it together. Carmakers have hundreds of billions of dollars of investment on the line, and they are embracing Tesla's technology and teaming up with rivals to try to tackle the charging problem. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is pouring billions into a nationwide network of electric chargers, trying to fix the very problem Granholm was encountering.
I drive an electric vehicle myself, and I've test-driven many more as NPR's auto reporter. I know how easy it can be to charge when everything goes well and how annoying it can be when things go poorly.
Riding along with Granholm, I came away with a major takeaway: EVs that aren't Teslas have a road trip problem, and the White House knows it's urgent to solve this issue.
Solving the road trip problem
The road trip has long loomed large in the American automotive imagination.
Road trips are a tiny fraction of the trips Americans take; drivers mostly commute or drive around town. And at home, charging an EV is much easier (not to mention cheaper) than fueling up with gasoline; you just plug in overnight, and you're good to go every morning.
On a practical basis, making sure everyone can charge at home would seem much more important than building road trip chargers. And this is a real concern for some drivers.
But for many drivers, it's not charging at home that worries them: It's what they'll do on the road.
According to the auto-data giant J.D. Power, worries about public chargers are the No. 1 reason why would-be EV buyers are reluctant to make the switch, even outranking concerns about high prices. And driver satisfaction with public chargers is getting worse, not better.
Tesla chargers are significantly better than the competition, and most of the electric vehicles in the U.S. are Teslas.
Tesla is opening up its exclusive network to more vehicles, which could transform the charging experience as soon as next year, but not all automakers have embraced Tesla's technology. And although Tesla dominates the EV market, the Biden administration wants every automaker to go electric quickly and every driver to have access to fast, reliable charging.
"Ultimately, we want to make it super-easy for people to travel long distances," Granholm told me.
But as she knows, long-distance travel in non-Tesla EVs is not always "super-easy" today.
Problem 1: Planning is cumbersome
The secretary's trip had been painstakingly mapped out ahead of time to allow for charging. We stopped at hotels with slower "Level 2" plugs for overnight charging and then paused at superfast chargers between cities.
That required upfront work that a gas-powered road trip simply doesn't require. My car can hypothetically locate a nearby charger on the road — as with many EVs, that feature is built into an app on the car's infotainment screen — so I shouldn't have to plan ahead. But in reality, I use multiple apps to find chargers, read reviews to make sure they work and plot out convenient locations for a 30-minute pit stop (a charger by a restaurant, for instance, instead of one located at a car dealership).
At a stop in South Carolina, Granholm told audiences she recognized the importance of making chargers easy to find on apps.
For chargers to qualify for new federal money, the energy secretary explained, "they have to be every 50 miles and within 1 mile off the charging corridor, and they have to be app enabled. So you have to be able to see with your phone, is this charger available so that I can go use it, right?"
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I'm guessing Granholm didn't do any of the driving.
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Why would anyone try to do this? EVs aren't ready for prime time. We're going BACKWARDS in capability. Local trips are OK. Not anything more. And if it's cold or hot kiss your 200 mile range goodbye. ::)
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Why would anyone try to do this? EVs aren't ready for prime time. We're going BACKWARDS in capability. Local trips are OK. Not anything more. And if it's cold or hot kiss your 200 mile range goodbye. ::)
That's by design. Making it impossible to travel outside the cities. We don't want the urbans exposed to any freedom out there, do we? Stay in the city. We'll keep you safe. "There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your television set."
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That's by design. Making it impossible to travel outside the cities. We don't want the urbans exposed to any freedom out there, do we? Stay in the city. We'll keep you safe. "There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your television set."
I recognize that!
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That's by design. Making it impossible to travel outside the cities. We don't want the urbans exposed to any freedom out there, do we? Stay in the city. We'll keep you safe. "There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your television set."
So basically, we are living in "The Outer Limits". I agree!!!