How Do You Charge An Electric Car Without A Garage?

Post date: 19-Apr-2020 10:22:14

Charging your car at home if you don't have a garage and can't install a charger can be tricky but it doesn't have to be. The show where we decode the data behind Tesla and today we're gonna take a look at how to charge your EV using publicly available locations. Now ideally you'd have a setup at your house.

For example at my home I have a NEMA 14-50 outlet. From there I have a Tesla mobile connector plugged in. When I get home at night, I plug in and in the morning my Tesla's all juiced up and ready to go. I don't necessarily care how long it takes to charge either since it'll charge all night long.

But what if you don't have a garage?

Maybe you live in an urban area and you don't even have a parking space or you live in an apartment complex and they won't allow you to install one. Well, that's when it becomes time to go public.

Okay, not that kind of public. Public as in, a publicly available charging location. Before we get into where to charge and how to use those resources, I thought it made sense to just

introduce the different types of chargers you're gonna find out in the wild. Now at home, depending on your equipment, you're likely going to get what we call level 2 charging rates.

These will get you around 25 miles of charge per hour which is around 37 to 38 kilometers per hour of charge. This amount of charge is pretty commonplace for the public charging networks as well. If you need to charge from a days commute, expect to wait about an hour at one of these stations.

Now if you don't want to wait that long and you're not alone for one and second you'll want to find DC fast charger. Some even call these Level 3 chargers. Although that's sort of a misnomer since they don't provide AC power to your onboard charger in your EV.

They provide DC energy direct to your battery bypassing the onboard charger, making it a much faster and efficient process. The most common connector for DC fast charging is the CHAdeMO plug which is popular both in the US and in Europe.

Nissan really drove this standard with their LEAF program which includes two years of free charging on the EVgo network. The last option in terms of charging connectors is specific to Tesla.

We'll get into more details in a little bit but the Tesla supercharger is sort of a level 4 charger that offers the fastest charging rates available. Although that could change in the near future.

I included a chart here of popular EVs that support fast charging and how many miles you'll get on a 30 minute charge. This data comes from an article on evobsession.com that I've linked in the description in case you want to dig into more details.

You can see that Teslas get the most range but on an average day these other EVs will get enough juice to handle most daily commutes. A big caveat to these numbers is that your EV battery

doesn't charge at the same rate for the entire time.

When your battery is at one percent it fills up much faster than when it's at 80 percent for example. Think of filling up a glass of water. When you first start pouring in the water, it fills up the bottom of the glass really fast.

Then, as you get closer to the top, you need to slow down the rate of which you're pouring the water in otherwise you'll spill it over. The same is true for how an EV batter charges.

So all these numbers for this 30 minute fast charge range between 75 and 170 miles, your results will vary greatly depending on how much charge you start with.

Now that you understand the basics of the different connectors and charging levels, let's take a look at what options are available to us publicly. I happen to live in one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the United States and so I was able to go see these first hand.

Here's what I found. The first stop on our tour is an EVgo station. This station has a few regular level 2 charging options and a couple of those level 3 DC fast chargers. With over a thousand locations across the US EVgo is relatively small but does seem to have decent coverage in most urban areas.

They even have a route that goes from Monterey California to Tahoe in which that provide free fast charging. This is called the Advanced Recharging Corridor or ARC and they have an app that you can use to get free charging along the way.

As far as costs go, EVgo offers several plans depending on your needs. When you look at these it seemed rather confusing to be honest. Especially since they charge base on the amount of time vs the amount of energy.

So if you're coming in with an 80 percent battery you're gonna get a lot worse rates than if you come in with a one percent battery cause it's just gonna charge a lot faster in that case.

EVgo also partnered with BMW and Nissan to offer owners some free charging to help grow EV adoption and subsequently their own network.

Next, we have the largest charging provider, ChargePoint. You may have heard their name recently as they partnered with Chevy for the Bolt EV to help new owners build up their range confidence.

I couldn't really find any details or discounts or anything between the two so I'm not really sure what that means by partnership but they seem to be pushing this envelope together. At the station by my house, the rate I saw was 35 cents per kilowatt hour.

This may sound high but when you consider our peak rates here in San Diego are over 40 cents it's actually not a bad deal. ChargePoint also offers DC fast charging at their express chargers of which they have over 600 worldwide.

In addition to the per kilowatt hour rate, they limit the amount of time you can charge at each station. This is to presumably to prevent people from just using these stations as parking spots for their EVs.

At the station by my house, you get the first four hours for free and then after that it's a $1.50 per hour. I wanted to add that I really liked how non-intrusive these stations appear.

At least the ones I saw blended in to the street well enough that if you weren't paying attention you wouldn't even know they were there.

This is a sharp contrast to some of the other options on our list. Another popular network here in southern California is Blink. Blink reports over 4000 chargers and they do offer fast charging.

In my experience this is probably the most convenient option. However, the prices can be significantly more than you would pay at your home. I've even seen rates as high as one dollar per kilowatt hour for a charger connected to a solar array.

So their essentially getting free energy and charging you, in San Diego anyways, double what you would probably pay at home. All that said, Blink is extremely prevalent at shopping malls and other locations so it does make sense if you live in an area where there are a lot of stations to use them.

A new startup from San Francisco, Volta, is looking to disrupt this market with free charging. Yep, free charging. The model appears to be based on showing ads on their large display stations located next to where you plug in your EV.

They're small but growing with just under 300 chargers mostly in California but many more planned in the near future. With over seven million dollars in funding, it looks like Volta has a bright future ahead of them.

Now for Tesla owners, we have some additional options that are pretty special. The Supercharger network is currently the fastest way to charge for any EV. In about 30 minutes, you can get upwards of 170 miles of range.

That's just under 275 kilometers. That's an incredible rate and Elon has even promised a Supercharger version 3 which could triple that rate. Effectively letting you fill up in about 10 minutes.

The Supercharger network has over 7000 chargers and is prevalent in the US, Europe, and Asia. Tesla has also stated that their looking to double this in the coming years to support the growth of their fleet.

Tesla's even making smaller chargers for urban environments which promises to help build that range confidence among owners who already have it pretty good. For Model S and X owners who purchase before May of 2017 supercharging is free for life.

New Model S and X owners that use a referral code such as ours which you can get at teslanomics.co/td also get free supercharging for the life of the vehicle. If you purchase a Model S or X without a referral code, you still get 400 kilowatt hours of free charging per year however, that won't last you very long if this is your main form of charging.

Now for future Model 3 owners, unfortunately Tesla does offer any free charging. They recently announced that you'll have to pay per use. To help you understand what you'll pay, we built a map showing you the rates for each different location.

Check the description for a link to this so you can see exactly how much you're likely to pay in your area. In addition to the superchargers, Tesla partnered with many local grocery stores, hotels, and malls to offer destination chargers similar to what you can install at your house.

These chargers are free for all Teslas but often are reserved for patrons of the store or hotel that's hosting them. Now this is a normal Level 2 charging so you're not gonna fill up in 30 minutes like you would at a supercharger but while you're there, it's a nice convenience to be able to plug in and get some range back.

Many Tesla owners look at the destination network when choosing which hotel they'll stay at on a road trip. Just like at home it's super convenient. You get there, you plug in, and when you wake up in the morning you're all charged up, ready to go. If you're feeling left out by not having a tesla here and being able to use this network, there is a company which is making an adapter so you can plug in your Nissan Leaf or other EV into a Tesla Supercharger.

I'm gonna go on the record and say this is a bad idea, I am not recommending this. There's no guarantee from this company that doing this won't hurt your battery in your car or even do something like catch fire.

You're also essentially stealing this from Tesla so yeah, don't do it. Some cities are also installing free public stations. I've found one at the YMCA near my house recently. Check it out.

Here at the YMCA there are about six different chargers in the parking garage.

All of them are connected to this big solar array on top of the parking garage which powers this plus a lot of what the facility uses. You just simply come in, you plug in, and you're good to go.

Now for this one for a Tesla, you do need an adapter but this is the typical Level 2 charger port that most cars in the US use. So I know this is all well and good. You have a great understanding about the different types of charging, the connectors, and the different networks out there but how do you find them?

How do you actually know where to go? Well there are tons of apps and websites aimed at helping you find these spots. In my research the best on I could find was PlugShare. On the PlugShare website, you can see a really big map here with all the different stations near you and you can even filter by type, including residential stations.

A residential station is someone that is offering up their charger for free to you. Once you sign up you can find one near you and message them to see if it's available. I haven't tried this yet but I do love the idea.

The other stations found here vary from different network providers, many of which we've already discussed. When clicking on one of them, you'll see details about the charging station including the network, how many stations, and the types of plugs.

PlugShare also has an app for you phone that you can use to find the nearest one based on your location. Overall I really like PlugShare but to be fair there are many websites and apps available.

I've put a few of them in the description for you to check out if you want to dig in deeper. Another startup worth mentioning in this space is EVmatch. It's similar to Airbnb and what they're trying to do is pair drivers and people that need to charge with people that have chargers in their homes.

The person charging will pay for the electricity and they'll pay a convenience fee to the owner. So the owner can help them out by giving them use of their location and their charger

and earn a couple extra bucks on the side.

It doesn't seem like this is gonna be a mainstay in how you'll make a ton of money let's say but you are helping grow the EV industry and helping out people that maybe don't have a location of their own to charge at.

So now with all this knowledge of chargers and charger types and different public networks and how to find them, I hope you can rest easy and not worry too much about how to fill up your EV

if you don't have an option at home.