EV in America

10,000 kilometre update

Let me say that the story I am about to tell is not typical. Most days, the chargers all work—even if they sometimes take a little coaxing, or a call to the service centre. But this is the kind of thing you will sometimes deal with if you take a long road trip in an EV in North America.

Leaf-the-Not-Always-Lucky contentedly charging outside a cannabis superstore in Columbia, Missouri

Price, Utah, has precious little to recommend it. Situated in the mesa between Salt Lake City and Denver, it is the seat of Carbon County—that is to say, this was once coal mining country. Price is within an hour’s drive of beautiful landscape, but it is itself a run-down little town where the brightest lights are the McDonald’s and the Taco Bell.

I was staying at an overpriced Quality Inn which, besides anything else, didn’t have the hockey game I wanted to watch.

So why was I there? Because my PlugShare app—the best option for locating chargers in the US and Canada—said there were seven chargers. Three fast chargers and four Type 2 chargers, which are slower but easier on the battery.

After checking in, I started with an array of ChargePoint chargers at the town hall just a few hundred metres from my hotel—two of them fast-chargers and two Type 2s. I have had no end of trouble with ChargePoint chargers. They will not allow me to use my Canadian ChargePoint app. Nor will they let me sign up for the American version because of my Canadian postal code and my Canadian credit card.

What they will let me do—fitfully—is use the the Canadian ChargePoint RFID in my Apple wallet.

I tried one of the Type 2s and it rejected my attempt. Infuriatingly, the Type 2 chargers were free—they just required you to be registered with ChargePoint, and for the terminal to recognize that you were.

Then I tried one of the fast-chargers. No go. Then the other. Still no luck. There was someone plugged into the other Type 2, so it seemed like it was a me problem.

At that point, I decided to drive to a couple of free chargers provided by an electricity company a little way along a nearby highway. When I plugged into that fast charger, it repeatedly gave me an error message. Oh-oh. I plugged into the Type 2 charger, which worked. Hurray!

But I wasn't going to sit there for five hours while it charged. And this charger was an hour’s walk each way from my hotel and it was threatening to rain. Was I that desperate? Not yet. I decided to drive back to the ChargePoint chargers and try the one that had been working for the other guy. He was done and this time I succeeded!

My Leaf charged peacefully overnight. But now, I had another concern.

Neither of the fast-chargers from two different companies had worked. Was there something wrong with my car? I was heading for a place in the Rockies called Glenwood Springs. But would I make it that far? What if I couldn’t fast-charge anywhere along the way?

And if it was a problem with the car, where would I find a Nissan dealership deep in the Rockies? It would be Saturday afternoon before I figured out if my car indeed had a problem. If I did find a dealership, I would probably have to hang around somewhere until Monday at the least. Maybe even then, I might have to wait for some spare part to come from Denver.

It made for a miserable day. I should have stopped to take pictures of the stunning mesa landscape. But I was too focused on my potential car problem. As it turned out, there was nothing wrong with my car. All the chargers after Price worked for me. A couple of days later, I rolled into Denver, no problem.

the main takeaways

I’ve now driven 5000 kilometres stateside in my 2020 Nissan Leaf. I have far to go, but do have a number of observations about driving a (Canadian) EV in America.

First of all, just as in Canada, there are big gaps in the fast-charging network—and even in the distribution of the lower-cost, lower-tech Level 2 chargers that can recharge a car overnight.

A few weeks ago, I posted about the problems my friend, Ross, and I found looking for fast chargers in the Palouse region of eastern Washington state where we had travelled to take pictures. (If you didn’t see that post, it also has some nice photos.)

Early in my planning for this trip, I rejected the idea of driving across the Plains states because of the absence of chargers in Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas. Instead, from Washington, I dipped south through Utah to Denver.

From there, I opted to take a more northerly route eastward along I-80 rather than along I-70 because of long gaps in the charging network.

As I write, I am in Kentucky where I am going to visit friends. I stayed overnight at a motel just south of Evansville, Indiana, which I picked because it has a free Type 2 charger. But as I head further south into Kentucky, I am going to have to go out of my way in the next few days to keep charged.

Second, as in Canada, there is a bewildering array of apps and payment methods required by different companies. In a number of cases, as I alluded to above, having a Canadian address may be an obstacle to signing up.

Infuriatingly, several of the companies will freeze your card for an hour if you have several failed attempts to operate a charger. That means that even when you phone customer service, they may only be able to help if you have an alternate card.

Third, most of the main providers have excellent customer service lines, which are answered promptly and can usually help, particularly if it is a payment issue. The exception is ChargePoint.

the main companies

These are the main providers of fast-charging services, from best to worst in my experience.

Electrify America: This seems to be the most extensive network of fast-chargers and their machines are higher quality. I have encountered only one location where the CHAdeMO outlet was broken, which was a problem for me. Most EVs use the CCS standard and typically Electrify America has several of these at any one location.

Typically the Electrify America chargers are in Walmart parking lots, so at least there’s a washroom nearby. Usually they have a set of four chargers, so if one is down, CCS users anyway have the benefit of redundancy.

I had trouble the first time I tried to charge at one of these terminals because I tried my Electrify Canada app and then tried swiping my credit card. I’ve found that when I insert my chip, I can almost always charge. When that hasn’t worked, the service centre has been able to sort me out.

EVgo: They have the same high-quality terminals as Electrify America and customer service is similarly helpful if there is a problem.

EVCS: I haven’t had as much experience with these, but when I have, they’ve been fine.

Shell Recharge: I have hardly ever managed to charge with one of their terminals without talking to customer service. And to make things worse, if you have tried three times unsuccessfully, they lock your card so even customer service can’t help. On my last couple of charges, I seem to have had more luck by preloading the (Canadian) app with twenty bucks and using that.

ChargePoint: ChargePoint claims to have the biggest network in the country, partly because they provide a lot of Type 2 chargers, which are sometimes free, as well as fast chargers. In my experience, they have a unique combination of crappy hardware, crappy software and crappy customer service.

If the hardware is working, I have found my best luck is by using the Canadian ChargePoint RFID in my Apple wallet rather than their app. They don’t seem to have an option to pay directly by credit card.

It’s hardly even worth phoning customer service with these guys. They usually refer you to the owner of the facility where the terminal is located, and they never know anything about it.

However, the other day, when a ChargePoint terminal wouldn’t stop when I wanted it to, because someone had put a hard plastic cover over the touch-screen, customer service did come to my rescue.

conclusions so far

As my friends Tom and Sumire drove me around the Denver area in their beautiful gull-winged Model X Tesla, it did occur to me that a Tesla could be the answer—a line of thought encouraged by Tom.

Teslas go further, charge faster, and have a very extensive and reliable charging network. There’s no doubt they remain the standard for long-distance EV travel.

I have two problems. The first is perhaps obvious: price. Even a second-hand Tesla is a reach for me. Second: the minute I start thinking seriously about a Tesla, Elon Musk says something stupid or racist. I’m not judging people who have Teslas. But I have fled from Twitter in part because of him, so….

One thing I can see with certainty is that driving a CHAdeMO connector vehicle like my Nissan Leaf will not long be practical for long-distance driving. Most other non-Tesla EVs use CCS. Even Nissan has switched to CCS with its latest EV, the Ariya. When Electrify America has four terminals, it provides only one CHAdeMO connector—though most other charging companies still have a 50-50 ratio. But clearly CHAdeMO is the Betamax of charging standards—it is on its way out.

In the next few years, a lot more chargers will be installed, but there will also be more EVs on the road. Since the growth of chargers and the increase in number of EVs will never be perfectly synchronized, it’s a little hard to predict the near future. If Tesla opens up its chargers to other EVs, as Musk has sometimes suggested it would, that will make a difference.

I would say that non-Tesla EVs remain practical mainly for people who do not plan on frequent multi-day car trips. I have had a lot of fun on this exploratory journey. I am not at all discouraged and this will not be my last trip of this kind. But there’s a good reason this is a solitary trip. I don’t think a companion would be willing to put up with what I do.

And even I am going to be out kicking tires when I get back.