In a car, no one wants to wait at a charging station longer than at the gas pump. According to some, it is a question of life or death of the electric car. And yet, charging your battery already requires less patience than filling your tank…
Pierre Henry calculated it. At the same distance, we waste half as much time at the terminal as at the pump. The master trainer from the Atelier Branché compared the time spent connected to a terminal on the Tesla public network with his Model 3, to that spent refueling a Land Rover LR3.
The bottom line: in one year, to travel 50,000 km, he connected to a public terminal 13 times. He waited there for 5 hours and 1 minute, in total, to recover the energy needed to reach his destination. Over the same period, over the same distance, his gasoline SUV visited a gas station 123 times. He spent 11 hours and 43 minutes refueling. Each time he put $100 in fuel.
Pierre Henry’s LR3 is a more or less luxurious mid-size SUV, which consumes on average 14.8 liters per 100 kilometers. It’s a lot, but the auto mechanic expert is light-footed: this vehicle can consume much more than the 7,400 liters of fuel it needed to travel during the reference year. A small sedan that consumed half as much would still have spent more time at the pump than the Model 3 at the gas station.
It must be said that the famous Supercharger fast terminals exclusive to Tesla often manage to refuel in less than 30 minutes. The Electric Circuit’s fast terminals do almost as well.
That said, like at least 80% of electric vehicle owners, Pierre Henry also connected his Tesla to his own terminal at home. No time wasted here: charging takes place while the vehicle is not in use.
He also took advantage of the free recharges offered at the grocery store, restaurant or hotel. “Perhaps the shopkeepers thought I was pitying for offering me a free tank! “, he said, laughing. “In any case, we don’t see that with gasoline vehicles. »
We also know very few, if not no one, who has their own gas pump at home…
Think different
The automobile industry has set itself arbitrary criteria to define what a “good vehicle” is. Already, we have convinced almost everyone that an SUV is safer than a sedan, which is not necessarily the case.
We also determined that the ideal time to charge an electric vehicle from 0 to 100% should be the same as that needed to partially fill up with fuel, i.e. 5 to 10 minutes.
To achieve this target, manufacturers are investing in sophisticated electrical mechanics, such as 800 volt architectures, which are expensive to produce. Hence the high retail price of new electric vehicles, generally above $60,000.
In a surprise announcement earlier this spring, Kia announced that it was bringing on sale a new small electric SUV, called the EV3, with a 400-volt architecture. This vehicle will probably cost less than $40,000 when it hits the market next fall. This is the same price targeted by Tesla for its future new entry-level model, a stripped-down Model 3 whose name remains to be found (but which will not be Model 2, if you listen to Elon Musk).
To lower the price of technology, you sometimes have to get rid of preconceived ideas. You have to think different, Steve Jobs would have said.
Fear of change
L’Atelier Branché trains automotive technicians to prepare them for the arrival of electric vehicles. Their maintenance and possible repairs require special knowledge.
Mechanics, like the public, sometimes have an initial fearful reaction to what is not-so-new new technology. The persistent proliferation of false information about electric vehicles on social networks does not help, notes Pierre Henry.
“It’s the fear of change,” he notes. “We see people saying just about anything on social media. This is harming the electric shift. »
Cobalt, he continues, is a good example of this wrong. It is a metal that is used in some types of batteries, but not all. Some mining companies have been caught employing children to mine cobalt.
So people jump to the conclusion that electric vehicles are the product of child exploitation. These people forget, or they ignore it, that the biggest consumers of cobalt are the oil companies. It is used to refine petroleum into automobile fuel. Cobalt is also found in most electronic devices.
This does not absolve electric vehicles. Most are too heavy, too big, and too expensive. In the climate fight, it is preferable to prefer active and collective transport to individual and motorized transport.
But at the station as in the climate fight, those who waste our time the most are those who have the most to lose from getting rid of fossil fuels.