Wyoming EV Road Trip Hell: Cheyenne to Casper in 15 Hours
cowboystatedaily.com
cowboystatedaily.com
Wyoming was definitely a little tricky because the charger density was the bare minimum to get across but otherwise was manageable.
(Source: I live in Rapid City, South Dakota, and have driven across Wyoming many times, in both ICE vehicles and EVs.)
It doesn’t acknowledge the fact that planning will be required for road trips to ensure optimal charging times.
It also fails to acknowledge that some makes and models are simply better than others in terms of charger compatibility and battery range. A Better Route Planner estimates a Model 3 can complete the trip in 2 hours and 20 minutes with no charging, assuming you start at 100% charge.
I hate to blame the consumer, but Alan bought the wrong car.
Also, AAA definitely has charging trucks. That’s the only reason I’m a member.
Why should it? If I need to become an amateur logistician just drive my car across the state, that car is not fit for use outside the realm of dedicated hobbyists.
(I guess people should never have done them back then…even although that helped pave the way for making it easy today. But this isn’t my main point, it’s an aside)
And this doesn’t even touch on the way just a few decades ago many ethnic groups had to plan extensively for road trips for their safety.
Nowadays it seems like we’re on the path to WallE’s world where even a modest amount of planning is unthinkable for some. What has google maps done to our perspective?
Although I have hope, it used to be single use plastic bottles were the complete standard because no one wanted to plan slightly ahead. Now substantial numbers of people fill up a reusable bottle in advance like good amateur logisticians.
It's just a different use-case. Whether folks are aware is largely an education issue, not an inherent issue with BEVs. It's like complaining a truck doesn't have 3 rows of seats and can't fit 7 people.
That said, this is not the fault of the car manufacturer. It's the fault of a national lack of urgency regarding charging infrastructure. I'd support some sort of mandate to require Level 2 charging be included in apartments (or some sort of heavy federal subsidy) to accelerate the transition. Cause obviously apartments are going to be a thing forever... so we need to change parking structures to accommodate EVs.
<Sees person buy a triangle and try to shove it in a square hole, thinks triangles are inherently bad>
<sees climate change, doesn’t care because part of solution requires some temporary minor inconveniences during transition. Hashtag not worth it>
Using a car intended for short daily commutes for a road trip is going to be awkward in a state that has not really been trying to build ev infrastructure. If they don’t do many trips in laggard states, Renting a Tesla or even an ice would work on that rare occasion. If they do many trips then they bought the wrong car.
Even with that non-road-trip car, it would have been okay on most long trips in California because the state is actually encouraging evs.
Expecting a new tech to have the same infrastructure as the old from the get go or otherwise abandoning it would have left us with horses. Stables existed gas stations did not.
Evs are so much quieter, Much more pleasant to drive. They produce less “horse manure and smells” so their adoption is inevitable. Although the worst manures ice cars make are unfortunately not plainly visible, the visible ones are enough to drive people away from them.
It is like going from cars back to horses and pretending that it is better.
All started as expensive niche items most people could not afford.
Look at them now. They became cheap and widespread. They all had naysayers and doubters in their time.
With the logic in those comments, all of those should have been abandoned. No computers, no cars, no airplanes. All too expensive initially!
No one is going to force you to like EVs. If they aren’t your thing it’s okay.
But the writing is on the wall, they are definitely horses, and on the way out.
They’re loud and stink especially when cold. They require annoying expensive trips to fuel up and require more maintenance. (Side note, of the handful of times my credit card has been stolen, it’s usually been a gas station skimmer.)
Unless on a road trip, Evs don’t required one to go to fueling stations. And you’re right some people don’t have charging at home, but most people rightly see that as only a matter of time.
There is no reason to lie, see ICE bans around 2030-2035. BEVs with current price and current user experience are dead end technology going nowhere kept alive thanks to subsidies. Like a Windows Phone in the world dominated by Android and iOS. Like a 3DTV which nobody asked for.
Anyway So the nefarious scheme is found out, cat is out of the bag: Anyone who dislikes EVs will be forced to take bags of antidepressants until they are at at least ambivalent to EVs, just as is done with taxes. /s
Your comment points keep returning to cost and user experience completely ignoring any counter points brought up. What is the goal of those comments since they’re just repeating the same argument while ignoring any counterpoints people bring up?
Go up the comments, as said before it’s a typical new tech trajectory to start out expensive and rapidly decrease in cost. Same with user experience. Not acknowledging, let alone accounting for that, is baffling in an assessment of how logical future plans are.
As before, no one forces anyone to like change but change is happening, and for the better. I personally find EVs to be a far more pleasant experience than ICE cars. many people agree based on the demand for them. one can pretend everyone dislikes them, it’s totally not true but oh well.
Most importantly, the Nissan Leaf still uses the antiquated CHAdeMO connector for fast charging... which is both becoming more difficult to find these days, but also cannot provide as high of power as the most traditional CCS1 (or, Tesla's Supercharger network), which results in extremely slow charge times compared to other standards.
Obviously, the OP also didn't even use DC fast charging... but that appears to be because they chose go via a route that has no DCFC between the two cities. Both cities have DCFCs in each city, so if you could make the drive in one charge (which, almost every modern EV can... BESIDES the Nissan Leaf), then you'd be fine.
Funny enough, if you look at the route in Plugshare... the only company that has any sort of DCFCs inbetween those two cities is Tesla. There's a Supercharger that is directly inbetween the two cities.
Imagine being Chinese and reading this. It's like the leader of a pack of hyenas openly limping.
You can only publish this kind of thing in America because people are so ignorant of what is possible and what is already being done in other nations.
Like not publishing bad GDP numbers during a party conference [1]? The comparison to China is doubly misplaced: the problem here is range—most Chinese EVs have reduced range in favour of a cheaper price.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/93daf530-14c1-4877-8d59-d4f184fec...
Obviously some stats can be gamed, but people are aware of this and try to confirm via other methods. Being a world leader in the manufacture and deployment of EVs is a pretty big thing, it's not like climate change that you can fake up with a couple of poor post-grads on the payroll.
edit: after doing some digging it seems China has about 4x as many EVs and a slightly higher average battery capacity.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1258399/china-bevs-avera...
Which makes sense, as they make most of the batteries too:
> Currently, Chinese companies make up 56% of the EV battery market, followed by Korean companies (26%) and Japanese manufacturers (10%). The leading battery supplier, CATL, expanded its market share from 32% in 2021 to 34% in 2022. One-third of the world's EV batteries come from the Chinese company.
is all you need to know
China has 65% of all fast DC charging stations in the world, and it did not take them 13 years to build them all [2]. Tesla spent $1B to build its own global fast DC charging network [3]. This is not hard. It is work, and it does cost resources, but it is not hard.
Tangentially, there is a Tesla Supercharger station halfway between Cheyenne and Casper in Wheatland, WY [4], strangely not mentioned. Rolling into that station on empty would require no more than a 20-40 minute charge to continue to Casper, assuming worst case charge curve of the smallest current production battery pack and a 150kw max charge rate of that station.
"Ideally, before getting stranded in an EV, one could pull off to a public charging station. Unfortunately, there are no Level 3 charging stations between Cheyenne and Casper."
(I have driven 100k miles cross country over the last 4 years in my Tesla)
[1] https://electrek.co/2022/08/15/tesla-tsla-dominates-us-elect... ("Tesla (TSLA) still dominates US electric car market with 68% market share")
[2] https://www.thebuzzevnews.com/china-public-ev-charging-stati... ("According to the latest data on Statista, China has a total of 1.15 million publicly available EV charging stations. Of China’s total figure, 677,000 stations are slow-charging ones, while 470,000 are fast-charging stations. Thus, 41% of stations in China have a fast-charging capability. If these numbers are correct (which, is always hard to say for sure when it comes to China), China has a disproportionately high number of stations compared to the rest of the world and a comparatively high share of fast-charging stations.
The United States finds itself in the second spot worldwide. According to the data, the U.S. has only 113,527 charging stations, of which only 21,752 are of fast-charging capability. Hence, a massive 81% of stations in the U.S. have only slow charging capability.")
[3] https://supercharge.info/map
[4] http://www.tesla.com/findus/location/supercharger/wheatlands...
Are Supercharger stations able to charge non-Tesla vehicles? If not, then it hardly seems "strange" to not mention an option that's entirely useless to someone driving a non-Tesla vehicle (in the article's case, that vehicle being a Nissan Leaf).
> But despite the attractive price point, the Leaf never really achieved full liftoff. First released in 2010, Nissan has only sold around 170,000 Leaf EVs in the US over the last decade. Compare that to the total number of Tesla vehicles sold in the US in just 2022 — 564,743 — and you can start to see the headwinds facing Nissan. (The automaker said in 2020 that 500,000 Leafs have been sold globally since the launch in 2010.)
It it’s true that if you buy an EV from a legacy automaker, your charging story is going to be depressing currently. That would’ve been a fine story to run with full context provided, instead of generalizing all EVs as having a poor experience. A little more honesty is all I’m asking for.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/14/23219044/nissan-leaf-phas...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/801337/chevy-bolt-ev-sal...
https://www.electrive.com/2021/06/28/bmw-i3-to-end-sales-run...
That doesn't mean they always will be. Not everyone can afford a Tesla; if your response to "not everyone drives a Tesla" boils down to "lol just buy a Tesla", then your response is the precise opposite of useful to the vast majority of current drivers in the US.
Of course not! I expect legacy automakers to commit financial resources towards charging networks if they want to encourage their development. Less share buybacks, more investment to move the EVs they supposedly want to sell.
Tesla is used as an example because they don’t fuck around. No network existed, so they built the supercharger standard and then went and built the charging network. Legacy automakers just flail about half heartedly. Innovator’s Dilemma and all that jazz.
The lower half economically speaking will be waiting for some time for an affordable EV unfortunately, until the manufacturing flywheels pickup steam, pushing down costs. The evidence clearly shows folks will stretch to buy more expensive EVs (like Teslas) versus buying Leafs and Bolts.
Sure, whereas I additionally expect those financial resources being put toward networks from which all EV owners benefit rather than ones which rather transparently act as monopolistic vendor lock-in. It's entirely asinine on Tesla's part to push a proprietary network that only Teslas can use, and it's entirely asinine on the part of EV advocates to respond to "there are no generic charging stations on this route" with "but Tesla put one of its proprietary ones on it so why are you complaining?".
It's not mentioned because it can only be used by Tesla cars, of which the gentleman"s is not.