AAH #652 - Free EV Charging Is Making It Miserable For Everyone

I'll online after hours. This brought to you by Bridgedome Tires Solutions for your

Journey. Hey Gary, John, how are you? I'm doing okay?

I was driving Ford super Duties yesterday, the new Decent Truck Vamp version of their their heavy duty trucks. That was kind of interesting and not at all

what we're going to talk about on today's show. No, we're gonna we're

gonna be talking about things electric. But before we start, I want to

there was Today's a famous day in history and this this should not go unremarked.

On June fifteenth, nineteen eleven, Charles Kettering patented the electric starter.

Now, now this this is I got to read you this. This is

from the GM Heritage Collection, and it's explaining how it was invented. Now

I quote. According to legend, the impetus for the electric starter occurred on

the Bell Aisle Bridge when a fellow stopped to help a woman crankstarter car.

Tragically, the starting handle was flung when the engine turned over, injuring the good Samaritan, who later succumbed to his wounds. The man was a dear

friend of then head of Cadillac Henry Leland. Driven to act. Leland pushed

for the development of the electric starter that first appeared in the nineteen twelve Cadillac Model thirty. The Model thirty cost eighteen hundred bucks and sported a four cylinder

forty horsepower engine. I mean just Bellisle Bridge. I mean, we all

know that that's a famous island where they used to do the Grand Prix until this last year in Detroit. And you know, it's interesting to think that

the electric starter arguably transformed the automotive industry like that, and you know, we may see something like that happened in the electric vehicle space and maybe we'll learn something about that this afternoon. Yeah. Well, let's bring in our

guests because we got two really interesting people coming on today. Brent Gruber is

with JD Power. Tom Maloney is with State of Charge, his own website,

our YouTube channel. I guess is what I should say, right,

Tom, exactly. I've also senior editor over at Inside evs okay, And

and Brent, what do you do with JD Power. I'm the executive director

of the Electric Vehicle Practice. Okay, perfect. So, I mean a

lot of big news in the last week on electrics, GM and Ford announcing they're throwing in the towel. They're going with the Tesla charging system. We

saw Toyota announced it's going all in on electrics, and and then you know, we had the JD Power D Consideration Survey come out today, Brent, and it looks like a little bit more people are considering buying an EV.

Yeah. Yeah, there's there's definitely some interest, and I think a lot

of that's driven John by a lot of the new product that's coming out.

You know, we're seeing a lot of people considering electric vehicles who maybe would not have considered it previously with some of these new products that are resonating.

Yeah, so okay, you guys found that twenty six percent of those who surveyed would be very likely to consider an electric vehicle when they buy a new one, which is up two percent. So do you think that's purely the

availability of different types of evs out there. I do think it definitely generates

interests when we look at new products that come to the market. So the

consideration study looks at people who are in market for a new vehicle, not necessarily electric vehicle, and you know, certainly some of those people are interested in electric vehicles. And when a new product comes to the market or is

about to come to the market, we see some pretty big fluctuations based on interest for those. A great example of that is the new Honda Prologue,

right, you know, this this mainstream brand, popular brand. You know,

bringing a new product like the Prologue to the market generates interests. Gary

that kind of feeds through to the bottom line. You see that interest rise

when products like that come out. You know, I would think too,

this seventy five hundred dollars tax credit that's available is helping people get interested in electrics. You know, we just reported today Experience, which looks at registration

numbers, which is sort of a proxy for sales, because Tesla does not break out at sales figures for the American market or any individual market to just report global sales. But Experience knows who registered a new Testla and their sales

were up fifty two percent in the first four months of the year. So

and I think a lot of that has got to do with people going hot dog, I can qualify for that seventy five hundred dollars I'm in Yeah, yeah, I agree, John. But if that's not new we've had the

tax credit now for for many years, since George W. Bush era,

when when it was initially Keshla had run out of them, GM had run out of them. You know, it was all this confusion, and now

we seem to have a little bit more clarity. Now I agree, but

I still think that Brent was a little bit more spot on with why we're seeing in consumer interest spike now it's because of the models available not too long ago. A few years ago, electric vehicles meant little hatchbacks that one one

hundred miles per charge, and now we're seeing pickup trucks, SUVs, all wheel drive vehicles, crossovers, the type of vehicles that people want. They

weren't available five or six years ago, and now we're getting the types of vehicles that people want. And it's it's uh, it's people are interested.

But you know, one of the it's gonna ask you in light event, like what is the effect of reportability? Though? I mean, so you

know Tom mentioned that there were used to be little small vehicles. You could

get a Chevy Spark ev um and you know, now you're getting you know, these these very large vehicles, but they're large and expensive vehicles. What

does what does that do to demand? Yeah, Well, one thing to

keep in mind, Gary, that all vehicles are getting expensive, right, the cost of vehicles in generals going up, So you know, ev certainly along for the ride there, um. But you know, I was going

to add one thing that I think that really affects the affordability, Gary, are those incentives, and yes, we've had them for a while, but what we see that's different now versus years passed is being able to pass through those incentives on a lease. Right, So all those qualifications that people have

to uh, you know, meet those go out the window when you when you go to a lease, and manufacturers who can pass that on to consumers through leases. That makes those electric vehicles more affordable. And that's where we're

seeing the biggest difference is Gary, if you look at the affordability of an electric vehicle versus an ice vehicle, you know, on the surface, the MSRP is certainly going to be higher, but when you factor in things like the incentives, cost of maintenance, reduced costs of maintenance, those things, affordability is actually pretty favorable for a lot of electric vehicles. I agree,

and I think one of the things we have to get better at, or at least the dealerships and the OEMs have to get better at is conveying total cost of ownership, because while the initial MSRP may be slightly higher even after the incentives, it may be slightly higher if you look at a three or five year run on the vehicle. Quite often that flips because of the lower

cost of refueling or recharging and also the lower cost of maintenance. There's you

know, there can be thousands of dollars of savings over the course of three to five years, and that turns it upside down and actually makes a quality that look more expensive. An electric vehicle that looked more of actually is less

expensive when you look at your average monthly output between paying for the vehicle, maintaining it and be fueling it. Tim, I'll give you a good example

of that. So I changed the oil in the car myself and went to

the outer Part store to buy five quarts of oil and an oil filter.

Fifty bucks. You know, that's not including my time and labor in it.

Fifty bucks, you know. And I was stunned. I had no

idea that the price of oil had coming up that much. And you're doing

that every three to five thousand miles, right, right, So I mean a lot of these costs comparisons between ICE and BEV exactly to your point.

They if they're anti EV, they conveniently leave out the maintenance costs. And

I mean something as basic as an oil change has gotten if he really expensive spar plugs, tune ups, belts, all that stuff, you don't have to worry about someone climbing under your car and stealing your catalectic converter. Like

you know, there's just the overall total cost of ownership is much lower.

And I know this. I've been living with electric vehicles for twelve years now,

full time driving evs. I'm on my tenth EV now, and I

keep records of my fuel savings and maintenance savings. And you know, I'm

close to forty thousand dollars in fuel savings holy compared to comparable gasoline vehicles if I had owned them over the same period. I drive a lot of drop

about thirty thousand miles a year, So I've kept records and I'm well over thirty thousand dollars in fuel savings alone. Wow, so time in one year,

what would you say the savings is in fuel and maintenance. So it

does depend on what type of vehicle you own. If you have a little

economy car and you're comparing it to a Prius, it's not that much.

But right now, I own a F one fifty Lightning. It costs me

eighteen dollars to charge it at home, and I can drive between two hundred and fifty and three hundred miles on eighteen dollars. So what what's an F

one fifty the gas or diesel costs to refuel today? Sixty seventy eighty bucks

just every week. Just keep adding that up, you know, And it

depends on the vehicles what I'm basically what I'm saying, but I would save between twenty five and thirty five hundred dollars a year refueling my lightning versus an F one fifty gas or diesel. So, Tom, are you basically saying

that if if somebody had a Corolla and somebody had a Prius, it would not be as big a difference in terms of overall cost? So I mean,

there's they're both Neither one of those are electric vehicles as far as no, no, So let's say we did a Chevy Bolt EV and a Toyota Corolla. Um, you know, the fuel savings would would be would be

much lower than what my fuel savings are on a big vehicle like a truck.

It might be it might be eight hundred to nine hundred dollars savings per year, not twenty thousand dollars. Right, But I'm saying that. Okay,

somebody's going to go and buy a new vehicle. Okay, so they're

looking at Okay, I'll buy a Vault or a Bolt excuse me, or I'd buy a Corolla. The Corolla is going to have a reduced MSRP compared

to the Bolt, right, So the person has to make the decision.

Okay, in the long run, in the life cycle, is there going to be a significant savings or will this be exactly? You know. One

of the things I used to do for I don't know if any of your familiar with plug in America. They're a nonprofit worldwide nonprofit for the advancement of

electric vehicles. One of the things I did was I helped train dealerships.

We develop a program called Plugstar where we train dealers how to sell evs, and I worked with close to five hundred dealers in the last six seven years across the country, and one of the things we tried to do is teach the dealers how to do quick back of the napkin math on total cost of ownership and say, look, you know you might be if here looking for this Nissan Leaf, you might be cross shopping it with too Corolla, let's say, for instance. Um, but here's what you can expect with the

Corolla over the next five years. Oil changes, the X amount, tune

up, spark plugs, all this stuff. This is what you'll expect with

the Leaf. It's basically just electricity, tires and wiper blades. You don't

even need to replace the brake pads because that they last. If you know

how to drive an EV with the regenerative breaking, your bake breakpads can easily last more than one hundred thousand miles. Hey, y go continue at that

point, because I've seen the studies that say that you're going to wear out your brakes faster because the EV is heavier, and that just seems counterintuitive to me. With regtive regenerative breaking, its completely completely wrong. John, Unless

you're the type of driver that really doesn't understand the vehicle and you know we've all seen people gas break, gas break as they go down the road.

You'll wear out your brake pads if you if you're constantly driving that way.

But if you know how to drive, and you let the regendative breaking do a lot of your slowing slowing you down, they'll last for I'll give you an example of all my evs. The one that had the most amount of

miles when I sold it was a BMW I three that I had and had had seventy three thousand miles when when I actually got told I didn't sell it and I had it in for service right before that, I was at BMW because it was something that they needed to check out, and I said, while they're here, check my break pads. It's got seventy three thousand miles.

And the dealer said, your brake pads are still at about seventy five percent life. At seventy three thousand miles, I had only used twenty five

percent of the life on the pads. So even break pads will last a

very long time. The maintenance is I'm telling it's tires and wiper blades.

That's it. Yeah, yeah, And how many tires did you go through

in that time. Tom, So, I'm an aggressive driver, so maybe

a little bit more than what the average person would. But evs do wear

out the tires quicker, they work harder because of the weight and also because of the region, so you have more and the wear on the tires.

But I was on my third set of tires at that point. Yeah,

So, Brent, what I mean, one of the things that you guys found, and maybe this isn't in keeping, it's what we're talking about here, is that commuters who would drive forty five minutes or more each way were more likely to think about getting an EV than people who drove fifteen minutes or less per day. Is this predicated on things like fuel saving, fuel savings

or moreall cost savings, Yeah, exactly, Yeah, it's it's to Tom's point. You know, you see that that more tangible benefit. You know,

when you're driving more, there's more to save, right, so people recognize that. Um. You know, prior to COVID and all of this,

uh, you know, remote environment, Um, you know, I was driving three hours a day, um, and so it really made sense for me to have an electric vehicle driving three hours a day. And when

people have those longer commutes. They recognize that, and it's more advantageous them

to consider it. So let's get to some of the big news in time.

I want to start with you. What was your reaction when Ford announced

it was going with Tesla's NACS system and then it was just literally days later that General Motors announced it was going to do the same. Yeah. So,

you know, as dialed in as I am in this industry with regards to charging, and I make it a point to that's my wheelhouse. As

you could see behind me, I was blindsided by this, and I have a good relationship with Ford. I know all the people over there did not

see this coming, And you know, I think it's good overall for the industry, and I think I think Ford made the right decision. I was

waiting to see. Tesla desperately needed to get a whale on the hook if

they really wanted this to happen. I know Tera said they were going to

use that connector, but we don't even know if I've Terror's ever going to make it to market. But they needed a major legacy brand to say,

look, we think this is a good choice. We want our customers to

have access to these charging stations. And they got it with Ford. Once

that happened. In my opinion, I said this on our podcast a day

till later. I said, GM is going to be next and it's going

to be quick, and a lot of people disagreed with me. They had

to They had no dae. I mean, could you imagine thinking about buying

a Chevy Silverado ev in you know, the nick later this year, or Ford F one fifty Lightning cross shopping the two and saying, Okay, with the Lightning, you're going to get access to twelve thousand Tessa superchargers. With

the GM, you're just going to be what we have with ccs. How

do you how do you justify that it's such an advantage to have so much more charging available out there and charging that works that that they had to and once that first company like Ford did it, that's it. It's a tidal

wave. Now everybody has to do it, and the sooner you do it,

the better. Yeah, my line was GM can't let Ford get away

with that. So this last year when you guys did this study, UM,

arching stations were a big part of it, and UM, how do you see this this situation with with forward using in general orders using the supercharger network. Yeah. Like like Tom, I didn't have any indication that this

change was coming. Um. I think those of us in the industry suspected

that something like this may happen at some point. UM. And my first

thought was, you know, this is a really big announcement and this is really going to change the game. Um. And you're right, Gary.

We do evaluate satisfaction with public charging as well as reliability. And when I

look at those scores just from Q one of this year alone, the satisfaction among Tesla owners charging is you know, in some cases two hundred points higher than the non Tesla owners. So you know, taking these these people who

are charging and having you know, sub par satisfaction experiences and moving them to potentially, you know, much more satisfying experience is really a win win win.

But more than just the satisfaction is the reliability. And to put that

in perspective, So we track reliability on a quarterly basis. Our public Charging

study is in the field on a continuous basis, so we're collecting data around the country NonStop, and for Q one of this year, the reliability rate, or the way I look at it, is the percentage of people who weren't able to charge when they went to a charging station. For supercharger,

it was just under a hair under four percent, so about four percent of visits to a supercharger ended in no charge. For non Tesla Fast charging,

it was just under twenty two percent. So that shows you just how much

of a benefit that reliability is with the supercharger network. So, you know,

the folks that you know are going to be buying General Motors products and Forward products and having the opportunity to use those supercharge networks. You know,

my expectation it's going to be far more reliable and far more satisfactory than what they've been able to experience thus far. So put some color into that that

non charge event. So this means that somebody is driving their vehicle, they

need to get some electricity, They see a little icon on their screen saying, oh, there's a charger over here, they drive to that and for some reason it doesn't work, and then they leave nets will find another one.

That's right, yep. Yeah, They either you know, go find

another charging station or they charge it at a later date. And that's roughly

one out of five times it's ending in no charge. Now, there's various

reasons that would prevent them from charging. So we look at this from the

consumer's perspective. There's a whole host of things that could prevent somebody from charging.

You know, they could be iced out. There could be an ice

vehicle in the parking spot blocking the charger, right, it could be a payment authentication issue, right. But the vast majority of the time it's because

the charging station was malfunctioning or out of service, and that's the predominant experience for people who have those failure events. So, you know, it really

does highlight the reliability or lack thereof with these charging stations. Tom, why

use that? Why are Tesla chargers more reliable? Or maybe stated the other

way, why are the others so unreliable? So, um, I'm going

to go back to the first way you stated it. Um, probably with

regards to Tesla, Tesla's vertically integrated. They make the cars, they make

the charging stations, and they make the software. They write the software that

communicates between the two of them. Now, let's look at what ccs and

what the rest of the OEMs have to deal with. There are dozens of

car manufacturers, some of them have two three four different evs, and within the brands, some of the evs are running on different software. Okay,

now you've got dozens of equipment manufacturers ABB, BTC, Power, f SAC, you know, Flow, all these companies out there making the chargers.

Then you've got how many different charging networks that all have their own h software that overrides everything. Electrifi America we have up there on the screen, there's

ev GO Like, there's so many different networks. And then you have different

payment systems that are integrated into the chargers, and all of this software has to communicate. The car has to talk to the charger to the payment system,

and that's why we have so many of these errors. That's one part

of it. Then, of course that can just be broken stations, physically

broken pieces. The CCS connector, for instance, is not a very good

connector. It's not a very good design. And one of the reasons it's

so bad about it it's got that you see the top of it for those watching on YouTube, that locking pin that breaks frequently. If you drop that

in the winter, it breaks. Now CCS, the CCS Consortium loves to

talk about how CCS is a global standard. However, in Europe, the

version of CCS doesn't have that locking pin on the top. It just slides

into the car, So it's a major pain point has been eliminated with the European version of the CCS, the Tesla Connector or a NACS. The n

ACS doesn't have that type of a rocking block either. So we've got software

problems. We've got the connectors a very poor design problem. We have cables,

the liquid cooled cables that are made by so many different vendors, and some of them are better than others. Sometimes the sensors that sense the heat

in the cables fail, and we've got all these different manufacturers saying it's your full, it's your chore full. Whereas with Tesla, they do everything so

everything works and they can't blame anybody else. That's a big part of why

Tesla's network is so much better than what we see for everybody else. Yeah,

I think another part of that tom is also the maintenance or lack thereof.

If you look at the supercharger station, Tesla does a really good job of maintaining that, But then you look at their level two destination chargers, which are site owned typically, you know those aren't maintained to that same level.

And so when we look at reliability and some of the issues that consumers have a lot of that is some of those stations that have fallen into a state of disrepair and may no longer be maintained. So you know, there's

there's great incentive to maintain those fast chargers. The charge point operators who own

those fast charging stations, you know, typically do a very good job of that, likes the supercharger network, but a lot of the maintenance, you know, falls to the the the you know, agreements for maintenance falls to those site hosts who are no longer going to want to maintain those those older stations. I agree, but in that light only really charge point as far

if we're talking about DC fast now as opposed to level two Level two, a lot of time site owner does own it, as you mentioned with regards to like even the test of destination chargers, But if we're talking DC fast charging, the network control and own all of the equipment except for charge point.

Charge point equipment typically own the property owner, purchases it, installs it, and maintains it. So that's why I think the charge point DC fast

chargers typically may have more reliability problems because charge Point can't can't can't send a truck out to fix it if it breaks. The site owner haster. But

for ev Go and Blink and Electrify America, there's no excuse why some of these chargers are broken for weeks and months at a time. There's there's a

Blink charging DC fast charger, closest DC fast charger in my house, it's only like ten miles away, and the CCS port on it has been broken for like seven months. So what's the reason for that? You know,

they don't like making money. Yeah, so, Brent, you guys found

that forty nine percent of the people that reject evs reject evs because the charging.

Okay, what turns that around? Yeah, well it is. And

let me just add Gary that that's been number one for the last twelve months, right, So this is not a fluke thing. It's the biggest barrier

to consideration. It's also the least satisfying aspect of owning an electric vehicle as

well. One of our other studies, the EVX Ownership Study, we ask

respondents, you know, what their levels of satisfactions are with all these different aspects, and it's the least satisfying. So it's problematic from a consideration perspective,

and it's problematic from an ownership perspective as well. And I know a

lot of people like to say, well, most people charge at home, right, which is true right now about eighty five percent of charging occurs at home. But we have to think about the future and all of these people

who may not have access to home charging, which is a pretty sizable percentage.

And so knowing that it's keeping people from considering electric vehicles are adopting them, and then it's a bad experience once they own it. That's that's problematic.

So how do we overcome that? Part of it is education and you

know, uh sidebar conversation with Tom, you know, I know he does a lot of work around educating consumers on what this process looks like. Um,

you know, there's there's a lot of unknown when it comes to consumers and charging electric vehicles. How does this process work, where do they go,

how do they do it right? And so Gary Frankly, some of

that is making sure that customers know exactly what in public charging entails, where it's available, how that process works, how the payments work right. And

then certainly, you know, as an industry, whatever we can do to streamline it and make it more reliable, that's how we overcome that that objection, Tom, What do you see GM and Forward having to do because as you know, you know, you pull up to a Chesla charger, there's there's no touch screen, there's no credit card swiper. You do it all

through an app. And what are GM and Ford going to have to do

to have this seamless experience if they charge it a Tesla supercharger. So the

interesting thing is, you know, a Tesla opened up about a dozen or so of their supercharger sites recently with the adapter, the Magic Doc adapter, and they didn't you didn't have I charged my Ford F one fifty lightning on a Tesla supercharger and there was no agreement between Ford and Tesla at that point.

It was just it just worked, and it worked through You had to download a Tesla app and I would made my payment through the Tesla app.

From what I understand, what this agreement, the payment process is going to happen through the Ford app and through the GM app, So you won't use a Tesla app to authorize payment like do you do on the Tesla Magic doc stations, which now is Tesla going to continue doing them? Do they need

to? But that's a whole other, probably a whole other discussion that we

can have. So from what I understand John, that it's gonna the payment

is going to be authorized through the your native app from the vehicle, like my Ford Pass app is I'll roll up to a Tesla charging station, plug in, and then I'll hit them at station three, swipe to pay, and the payment system will authenticate and I'll be charging my vehicle. The big

question is as does does GM and Ford eliminate the J seventeen seventy two and CCS ports after twenty twenty five or do they have both. Nobody's really answered

that question yet, and there's people that have been, you know, arguing to both both sides of that. I don't know. It would be hard

for me to imagine that GM and Ford would eliminate those ports because there's so much infrastructure. I mean, Ford right now is making all their dealers install

all this high speed DC fast charging and charging stations. They're not gonna have

Tesla connectors on them, so Ford can't stop installing that on their vehicles they could, they could provide adapters, but now you're making the dealers charge vehicles to adapters, so that we still there's a lot to learn about how this is all going to work. John, Yeah, Hey, look, we

got to take a quick commercial break. There's plenty more to talk about.

We'll be back in just a few seconds. How do bridge don't entire stop

shorter on what roads? Is there hydrotrack technology, But you don't have to

know how the science works, just where the brain is. What really matters

is they're Bridgestone. Thank you Bridgestone for all your support. So eight big

news too this week Toyota coming out all in on electrics. I mean,

sure they're going to still continue to build ice engines and hybrids and all that, but they dropped a lot of news of what they're doing. Brent.

What was your reaction, Yeah, it's certainly reflective of their their need to you know, emphasize their direction and their focus on electric vehicles for sure.

Um, you know, encouraging to see what they're doing. Um, excited

to see what comes of this technology wise, you know, the solid state batteries and the ranges that come along with those, you know, addresses another barrier to consideration, which is the battery ranges, right, Um, you know, but I think you know what's what's really interesting though, is the promotion of those ranges and realizing that, you know, what the real world driving looks like for consumers, um, and trying to strike that balance between you know, the range that's necessary for a consumer and keeping costs down.

Because I see something like this, and you know, we were talking about prices getting away from us on vehicles and not just electric vehicles, and my first thought is, oh boy, you know we're going to see some some big price jumps here. But um, you know, I it's it's exciting

to see the technology evolved, for sure. Tom, What do you think

of Toyota's announcement? So you know, I'm I was always a loyal to

a customer. I owned I think four or five different Tacomas and god,

my first calls a Toyota to sell in nineteen eighty four Tourta to cell.

But you know, I'm not. I haven't been happy with how Toyota has

handled electrification over the last few years. I've been pretty blunt about that and

I'm still of the h The position is, you know, I'll believe it when I say it, because I think the brand has been well not I think they've been intentionally slow walking electrification, and you know, I have don't blame them as far as a business decision, because they make the best hybrids in the world. That's their bread and butter. They make a ton of

money on hybrids. So you know, it's kind of like the innovator's dilemma

when you're the best at something and you just keep making these incremental improvements.

You can't transition to that new technology that's going to wipe out what you've been doing so well for so long. And will that Is that an albatross around

Toyota's neck at this point of electrification? I tend to think it is.

They've been talking about solid state batteries for a long time. I think their

first announcement was they were going to have solid state batteries in twenty twenty, I believe, And now they're saying, what twenty twenty five was it or twenty twenty seven? I forget. So everybody has a solid state battery.

Let's talk about it when it's here, and you know, Toyota, talk a little bit more about your cars when you're selling a good EV because the Basy four X, in my opinion, was a half baked project that they didn't even really have their hard end, because you can't tell me Toyota couldn't build a better electric car than that if they really wanted to. Gary,

what was your reaction, What do you think about Toyota's move? Well,

I wasn't completely surprised. I mean for a variety of reasons. And one

of those reasons is that, as I mentioned a week or two ago on the show, that when we had Sandy Monroe on the show and you asked him about Toyota, because you were highly skeptical of them, and you know, echoing what Tom was saying about their their slow walk and you know, one step forward, two steps backwards sort of approached the evs and Sandy said, when they go they're going to go big, and I think that's exactly what we heard from them. Now to the point of the solid state battery,

whether you get that or not, whether that's going to be a big cost factor. You know, it seems to me that of almost any automobile

manufacturer on Earth, the company that can do the best job of production engineering that is Toyota, and if there's a means by which the cost can be taken down, they're going to do it, unlike many other companies. And

you know, and the other thing that was interesting is is that you know, the people you talk to a Toyota are buying large very modest people.

You talk to the engineers at at Toyota, they're they're very modest. And

Tom, I'm sure that if you ever met a Toyota engineer and you said to them, you know, my first car is a ter Sell. You

know, I owned several Tacos, they would have probably thank you, okay.

And if you said that to somebody who works at one of the big three, they say, yeah, yeah, of course, okay, that's fine. But so so this modesty of Toyota, I think goes to the

point of when they announced that they'd be using giga castings, right, I mean, so they're not saying, oh, we need to invent it all we need to do They're just like, yeah, this is the better way of doing it, and we're going to have costs down and we're going to you know, do whatever it takes to be able to provide those vehicles.

But at the same time, you know, they're still gonna be making a hell of a lot of hybrids, and they're still gonna be making a hell of a lot of vehicles with just straight ice engines. And you know,

they look at the world as being their market, and it's too easy for us to forget that there are lots of places on Earth where there will not be superchargers or any other electric charging stations. So, you know, I

think that what they did was measured but amazing. Yeah, I think it's

a huge move. Sorry, Brent, you're gonna say something. Yeah,

I was just going to add. You know, if you look at consideration

John By, you know vehicle electric vehicle models. You know, we know

that Toyota has a large following, large loyal audience. Um, you know,

but they have the busy four X right now. I think that there's

a lot of Toyota customers that are sitting by waiting for them to bring their products to market right that they're interested in electric vehicles. You think about all

those previous preous owners who were primed, no pun intended for electric vehicles, and you know all they have right now is the Besy Fourax. So I

think that you know, Gary you talk about the technology with the battery, but I think what people are really waiting for us to see what products they bring to the market that that consumers can can get excited about. So what

did you guys make up? You know, Toyota said that it's electric cars.

I mean, there's going to be different battery sizes and ranges, but they seem to be settling on a six hundred mile range and there was even talk of a nine hundred mile range brit What would that do to buyer consideration of having that kind of of driving range. I mean to me, it

would seemingly take away the worries about charging too, because at that point, for most people maybe a charge once a month a month, right right, you know those barriers to consideration. We talk about those being you know,

the the availability of public charging in the battery range. That seems to address

that right there. Um, you know, I think one of the things

that people are pretty surprised about with the studies in the data that we have is you know, sort of this disconnect between what people think they need in terms of range and what they actually need. Um. You know, so

as a as a surveyor, if I ask somebody well, what do you want? They're going to tell me as much as I can get, But

in the real world I don't need that much. You know, we talk

about daily commutes things like that, and I do a lot of threshold analysis to determine where the optimal range is for consumers in terms of minimizing impact on change behavior. So where does that range need to be so someone doesn't have

to change their habits or behavior at all. And for a mass market consumer,

it's two hundred and sixty three miles, so you know, it's quite a bit lower than a six hundred mile range. Now does that, you

know, prevent them from having to worry about public charging? Well, no,

because on those those off chances that you're on a road trip, you're going to need that and that's you know, on average, between one and two times a year. So the long range is certainly going to help with

that perspective, but it's in terms of daily driving. It'll ease the concerns

of people considering electric vehicles, but I'm not convinced that it's going to change the customer experience from an ownership perspective. What do you think six hundred miles

the way to go? No, definitely not. I certainly believe that as

public infrastructure improves, and it will improve, especially with the Navy funding that we have now. I mean, as I mentioned to you guys, I've

been driving evs for fourteen years now. When I first started driving evs,

there wasn't a single DC fast charger in the market anywhere nowhere, and in the over that cost of the last decade, now there's seventeen thousand superchargers, and I think equal amount of ccs DC fast chargers are close to that amongst all the networks, you know, almost forty thousand DC fast chargers in the country. And that was without even a lot of evs on the road.

Now, now that we're getting some serious market penetration and we have the Navy funding, between now and the end of this decade, I think we're gonna have DC fast chargers proliferating everywhere. And what that does is it reduces the

need for these long ranges, which in themselves make the car coust more, make the car less efficient because it's heavier and the vehicles are less efficient.

I've been saying this for a long time and I still believe it that yes, rangers are going to increase over the course of the next five to eight years. Maybe through the end of this decade, people are going to want

more and more and more and more. But by the beginning of the next

decade, and certainly by the middle of the next decade, we're going to see electric vehicle rangers reduced on most vehicles, not all vehicles. You'll still

see them long on work trucks and big heavy vehicles that need to work and things like that, and very expensive luxury cars. You know, the people

with a lot of coin are always going to want to have more than you in every regard, and range will be a premium. But I think we're

going to see the average new electric car range increase every year as over the course of the next five six years, and then it can start to pull back, and I think we're going to settle somewhere between what Brent said two sixty two and three hundred. I think that's going to be the average range

of new evs. Once you know, you can go right down to the

corner and plug into a DC ASK charger and charge up quickly. And I

know, as hard as that is to imagine today, with the state of infrastructure, we're going to get there, and we're going to get there sometime within the next decade, but by the beginning to the middle of next decade, that's going to be the case here and we just won't need six seven vs. Right. One of the findings that you guys had to this point

of charging build out was that last year when you did this study, there was a thirty three percent increase in charging availability. In this past year it

was down to thirteen percent. What's going on there, I mean, it's

it's you know, we all think that there's more and more and more, but this seems to indicate that there isn't. Yeah, really, what it's

indicating is that the charging growth is not keeping up with demand. Right,

So as a measure of how well it's meeting the customers needs, we're not doing a very good job there. So as more people adopt electric vehicles,

the demand for public charging goes up um but the rate of adoption is growing at a rate faster than the charging growth, charging insulation growth, and so that's what we're seeing, Gary, is that it's just not simply keeping up with the demand. So, you know, we have this product that JD

Power called our ev Index and what it does. It looks at the parity

between electric vehicles and ice vehicles across six different factors, and one of those factors is infrastructure, and it's probably where the you know, one of the greatest deficits are to parody with ice and that's simply because you know, adoption is increasing and the charging growth is not. Tom alluded to the fact that

we're going to see those investments accelerate and the insulation accelerate, but right now it's not keeping up with that that demand. And I need to follow up

on a point that is near and dear to my heart well on this topic.

So Brents one hundred percent right that the utilization is up, and it's because the charging stations aren't able to keep up with the growth of the electric vehicles introduced to the market. But there's one other factor here that's actually playing

a big role that It's one of the things that I've kind of been standing on a soapbox and trying to preach to the industry about. It's many of

the automakers are offering free, unlimited charging programs when you buy or lease their ev And while that sounds like a great incentive, like you know, Volkswagen Group is big on this because they own Electrify America. So they all the

Volkswagen brands, Volkswagen Autie Porscha, they come with free unlimited three year charging programs. And what that's doing is it's taking people that would have charged at

home and putting them on the DC fast charger that's three miles from their house.

That's not what these DC fast chargers are for. If you have an

apartment complex and you can't charge at home, then by all means, but people that can charge at home should charge at home and leave the strain.

So if you ever go, and this is one of the things, I spend a lot of time at DC fast chargers. I do recordings. I'm

always out there and I interview the people at the DC fast chargers. And

more than fifty percent of the people there locally when I do all my recordings and so forth, live within two or three miles from that charging station.

And they're only there because they have a free unlimited charging program. Now what

does that do. So now somebody coming up from Delaware in an audi this

was a couple of weeks ago and they had to sit and wait for forty five minutes because the charging station was full with people in their ID fours that are charging to one hundred percent, and you know with DC fast charging, the charging rate slows down dramatically after you get to eighty percent. But since

they're not paying, and you know there's no penalty for staying, they just leave their car plugged in, sometimes for two or three hours, and they're blocking the station. I've been calling upon all the automakers to stop these free

unlimited charging programs. It's hurting the industry and it's shortsighted. If you want

to give away charging as a perk, that's great, but it has to have a limit. You have to say. I'm like, I just bought

a Chevy Bolt to ev and it came with five hundred dollar credit on EVG network. That's fine. I have a defined limit on what's free, so

I'm going to use it sparingly. I'm only gonna use it when I need

it. But when you give somebody anything that's free unlimited, you're going to

get abuse. And that's what's happening right now, and it's blocking the charging

stations and it's creating a big problem. We need to end these free unlimited

charging programs because we don't have enough plugs and they're all being taken up by people that should be charging at home. Maybe they should be given out free

home chargers instead. Yeah, well GM does that. GM has a good

option. They'll either install a level two charging station at your home or give

you this five hundred dollars credit. Now, obviously I just bought my bolt

ev I don't need them to install a level two charging station at my home, so I took the five hundred dollar charging credit. But that's the way

to do it. That's how you automakers need to start incentivizing home charging.

For the people that can charge at home. A lot of people can't let

them use the DC fast chargers. You're absolutely right, Tom. You know,

I mentioned that when we look at the different aspects of owning an electric vehicle, that availability public charging was the least satisfying. The most satisfying was

home charging. Right. It's convenient, it's cost effective, it's you know,

the vast majority of people are charging at home, so I think, you know, incentivizing people to charge at home is really ideal. One more

example. I was at an Electrifire America station three or four months ago.

A lady pulls up in a BMW I for brand new and she needed to plug in. She was very low. She's new with this game, you

know, and she maybe drove it too far and she was like under five percent. And I was finishing up and there were two other cars waiting and

she she needed to get somewhere. She was in a rush, and they

were all there were two other cars charging at the time on free charging programs that people weren't even in their cars anymore, was not a target, so they must have plugged in went shopping and she couldn't plug in and charge because the other two people weren't going to let her go in front of her and I said, look all unplug and you can come. But they're ahead of

you. And I went over and talk to them and they said, no,

we've been waiting here for half an hour. She can wait too.

And she started crying and saying, you know, I have to pick up my son. And this said, I'm done with these electric cars. I'm

done. I'm taking it back to the dealership. I told my husband,

you know. And it was because there were people with free charging that were

just blocking these public charging stations. So it's it's a huge problem, guys,

Tom when you talk to the OEMs about this, I mean, so why did they think it's important that they give the free charging to their customers?

So, first of all, I think the Volkswagen Group does it to help boost their their elect America. They own Electrify America. Because what happens

is they they pay per vehicle like they pay Electrify America per vehicle um maybe a couple hundred dollars for every vehicle that goes on the road, so that they're they're feeding their own company and helping it help helping float it. Now

the other manufacturers feel the pressure of the Volkswagen Group. Like let's say,

if you're thinking about getting a Hondaionic five and you're cross shopping it with a Volkswagen ID four, the ID four comes with three years of unlimited charging.

So now you know, if you're at a dealership and the dealer says you don't have to pay a penny for fuel for three years, that's a that's a big carrot, you know. So now you know Hunday says, well,

we'll give you three years of free charging, and and and and BMW does it now and you know, Mercedes does it. So it's it's almost

like you have to because of the competition and every media drive I go on.

I'm at the dinner, I'm hammering the executives. They're saying, please

stop this, just phase it out. Give them, give them a perk,

you know, give them something good, a nice carrot, but stop the unlimited free charging because it's ruining the public charging experience for so many people.

Yeah. Well, it's one of the few levers that the manufacturers have

to influence the public charging experience. So you know, if someone gets free

public charging, that's going to boost their satisfaction, which you know ultimately has a ripple effect with their total ownership experience. And so you know satisfaction is

going to be much higher if they get that free public charging, and so manufacturers know that, and again that's a lever that they can they can pull.

It increases the satisfaction to a point print But we're getting to a point now, especially in some of the heavily populated areas with evs, where it's actually being a negative because the people are pulling up and they can't plug in, they have to wait, they have to queue up, and that that's an issue, and it's only going to get worse. I see us the

EV sales continuing to outpace the installation of the new stations for a while.

This Navy funding is going to take a while before we notice it make a difference. You don't just install a DC fast charger. It takes you know,

more than a year for siting, UM identification, utility interconnect all the engineering work and everything. So it's going to take us a while before we

get caught up. And in the meantime, it's kind of a mess out

there in a lot of areas, and between broken chargers and charges being fulled by people that don't really need to use them. They're only doing it because

it's free. That's it's a bad UM combination. So do you guys both

think that this may inhibit the growth of electric vehicles to the extent that it could grow were these problems not there. I think. I can't speak for

a prent, but I am convinced that it has already started to hurt EV sales because people are seeing in my area here in New Jersey that the charging stations are full. They get a new EV and and and they have to

wait to plug in. Uh. And it's and it's only going to get

worse. I think think it's a big problem, and I plead with the

OEMs to consider changing this or for free charging, but it has to be limited and give people the option of doing a home charging system instead. I

think another thing that we really need to seriously consider is the value and benefit at level two charging plays in the public domain as well. You know,

I love telling people this that our focus is very much on fast charging.

Everyone wants fast, fast, fast, but in reality, seventy one percent of EV charging in the public domain occurs at a level two charger. I

think they play a very critical role. I think it's a two pronged approach.

You know, pun intended with fast chargers and level two chargers and so gary the challenge of meeting the consumer demand can be met with fast charging and level two And we shouldn't have to wait a year and a half to put a fast charging station. And you know, it's much quicker for a level

two station, and that can certainly supplement the consumer demand. And I even

think level one should be more prevalent. Honestly, where places where people dwell

for a long time, airports, you know how easy it would be to just install rows and rows and rows of level one charging without having a huge expense. Workplace charging. Level one's great for workplace charging. We're there for

eight hours, so you know there's it's not all about fast chargers, that's right. Yeah. At the Detroit Airport there's an off site parking lot called

quick Park and they have exactly that tim rows of places where you can plug in because people are gone for days. So who cares if you're charging at

one time? Right? Why I spend three thousand dollars to install a level

two charger? You know how many Level one outlet you can install for three

thousand dollars. We should be doing more of that, absolutely, So,

Brent, are you are you finding that this need for consumers to change their behavior to be an inhibitor meaning that okay? You know, as Tom was

saying that, when that lady was going to try to charge her BMW, there were two ahead of her and they were saying, Hey, we've been waiting here forty five minutes. We're not going to give her the chance.

Versus you know, across the street somebody who was at a shell station and there was a line of eight cars and they went through in forty five minutes.

Do consumers resist because of that? You know, I think that particular

instance is probably the exception rather than the norm. You know, there's a

lot of frustrations. One thing that we do see and we saw this in

our ownership study this year because there was this huge influx of first time EV owners, So incentives are driving a lot of people into evs for the first time. And what we see when we isolate those first time EV owners versus

the veteran EV owner is that learning curve, particularly when it comes to charging.

So what are those behaviors that they have to change, how do they have to plan accordingly? What do they have to do differently? You know,

once they get through that learning curve, things change. And I think

the ultimate telltale Gary is you know, when someone owns an electric vehicle and then they've had that opportunity to experience it, are they likely to purchase another one again? And ninety six percent of EV owners say they're going to buy

another EV again. So to me that that shows that despite these issues,

these challenges, they're still sold on the idea of an EV. That's an

impressive number there. Ninety six go back to another electric you know, and

just to put some stats on what you guys have been talking about of EV sales growing faster than installation of fast chargers. Again, going back to that

experience data, EV sales in the first four months of this year were up seventy two percent compared to last year. I had no I mean, I

knew they were going strong. I had no idea it was that. I

think they that Automakers sold roughly three hundred and fifty thousand in the first four months. So you know, we're going to top a million easily this year

in sales. And I say that easily because you know, look what Ford's

doing of ramping up one one fifty Lightning production and MOCHE production. I think

GM slowly starting to get some of its production issues ironed out too, So we're going to see a lot more availability in the showroom. Right now,

John, we're at eight million, I'm sorry, eight percent of US retail sales are electric vehicles right now, battery electric vehicles. So you know,

it's it's a sizeable percentage of the market. By the end of this year,

we're forecasting we're going to hit about ten percent, and then just by the end of twenty twenty six up to twenty seven percent. Show it shows

you what that rate of acceleration is going to look like here in the next few years. I agree. I think we're right at the edge of they

say the hockey stick adoption right where it does that. You know, it's

been it's been a while, and I've been following the industry for a while, and we were hovering around one and a half two percent. Every year

we'd go up like a quarter of a percent. But now it's exponential growth

every year. It's just you know, just smashing last year's records. And

a big part of it is what we talked about earlier, the fact that there's more and more types of vehicles coming out. John just mentioned GM,

Equinox, EV, Silverado, EV Blazer EV. I mean Equinox Silverado Blazer.

That's Chevy, you know, and you know all three of their vehicles, their biggest vehicles are going to be electrified. So numbers are going to

continue to climb. Plus Chessla, you know, they're still getting noustin up

to full line speed and they've got to be getting pretty close to that too, So they're gonna be a lot of evs available. Yeah, Brent,

do you see this twenty seven percent being a plateau or do you think it will continue to rise from there? No, I think it's going to accelerate.

Yeah, I think that's where we're comfortable with our prediction as of right now. I think it's a very realistic forecast based on where we're at.

You know, Tom is exactly right. We're starting to hit that curve in

the hockey stick, and I think it's really a cautionary statement, right.

I tell everyone it's much easier to influence the market and address these challenges when we're at eight percent then when we're at twenty seven percent in a few years, so, you know, these challenges, particularly with public charging. Now's

the time good point. Well, look, guys, we're nearly at the

top of the hour. This is probably a good point to end it on.

But Brent Grubert, Tom Maloney, thanks so much for coming on.

I'm gonna have to take notes. This is really good stuff. Thanks for

having me. Yeah, thank you, Thanks guys, really good and thanks

everybody who has tuned in. Aut Online After Hours is brought to you by

bridge Stone Tires Solutions for your journey. If you like this program, I

would like to learn more about the automotive industry, check out our website at auto line dot tv, or look for us on YouTube on the auto line channel

AAH #652 - Free EV Charging Is Making It Miserable For Everyone

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