The hard life of traveling with an electric car in the USA – 05/29/2023 – Market

For the past few months, our new electric car has been working perfectly. One of the first BMW iX SUVs to hit the US market, the model draws raves from parking valets and car enthusiasts alike. The rapid charger we installed in our garage easily powers it for the daily commute.

So we tried to take it on the road. The lack of charging stations in most of the Midwest made this route impossible.

Then, along the supposedly well-served highways between Boston, New York and Washington, we find screens that don’t respond to touches, connectors that don’t connect and charging very slowly. At one point with eight stations, the first three we tried didn’t work.

Adding insult to injury, our BMW-funded two years of “free” cargo disappeared from the system mid-trip, forcing us to pay and claim a refund later. Online newsgroups are full of similar stories, suggesting that mine was not an isolated experience.

That can be painful: The number of EVs (electric vehicles) on US roads has multiplied in five years to three million, and many of the 135,000 public charging stations are new. But it also raises questions about whether the focus on making and selling electric vehicles has led us to overlook changes that will make people happy when they own one.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that one in five new cars sold this year will be EVs, up from one in 25 three years ago. Much of the growth is concentrated in China, which bet early on technology and supported manufacturers, buyers and electricity suppliers with subsidies.

The adoption of electric vehicles has been so fast that foreign automakers have not been able to keep up, allowing Chinese brands like BYD to capture market share.

In the West, Norway’s experience is instructive. Battery EVs jumped from 20% of new cars to 80% in less than five years, thanks to tax breaks. However, the charging infrastructure has struggled to keep pace despite broad government support, leading to long queues at highway charging stations on bank holidays.

The US experience is likely to be even more bumpy. The Biden administration has announced plans to have 500,000 public charging stations by 2030, but that’s a far cry from China, where 1.8 million are already up and running and the government envisions 20 million by 2025.

The situation in the United States is complicated by the fact that Tesla, which has more than 60% share of the EV market, operates a proprietary charging network and until recently refused to open it up to other brands. But that is starting to change. Volkswagen, which operates the country’s largest network, Electrify America, deliberately made it open access.

Ford on Thursday announced a deal that will give its vehicles access to 12,000 Tesla Superchargers.

Ford chief executive Jim Farley argues that adding chargers will reduce not only wait times but also the overall cost of electric vehicles. Customers will be more practical with smaller, less expensive batteries that travel 320 km instead of 640 km as many manufacturers are trying. “We should make the smallest battery possible,” he said.

Shrinking batteries would also help solve another emerging issue. If current standards hold, converting just the US fleet to EVs would require three to four times as much lithium as the entire world produces.

“You need a 1,500x scale up in mining, processing, manufacturing and then what do you do with it in the end,” says Keith Czinger, one of the pioneers of EVs. “What is the impact of this on the environment?”

So far, EV charging providers have failed to address the problem that the process takes much longer than filling up with gasoline. No one wants to be stuck in a mall parking lot for 45 minutes like I was last month.

History suggests that someone will make good use of this opportunity. South Dakota’s Wall Drug has become a national tourist destination, offering free ice water to travelers to Mount Rushmore in the days before air conditioning in cars.

The construction of the interstate highway system helped spur the rapid spread of McDonald’s and its competitors, especially after they opened their “drive-through” windows.

However, the nascent electrical charging industry has so far failed to monetize the growing demand. Shares in EVGo and Chargepoint are down 80% from their 2021 peaks, and Volta sold out to Shell at a similar loss earlier this year.

The lack of infrastructure has real consequences. Concerns about charging helped 25% of early U.S. electric car buyers switch back to the internal combustion engine, according to a government study. The share of Americans who say it’s “very unlikely” to buy an EV is increasing. If this is the wave of the future, there are rough seas ahead.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves