EV Charging Dilemma

Early in my career I got involved with the SAE J1772 committee. This was before NACS hit the market. Charging an EV with J1772 and later CCS was suppose to be an easy process. With the saturation of different companies entering the CCS world with varying levels of quality and compliance, it quickly became a headache to charge an EV. Charging my company prototypes was also a chore and not easy in the early days of CCS.

After owning multiple Teslas and experiencing the beauty and simplicity of a single company controlled charging network from start to finish it makes perfect sense that manufacturers are going the NACS route.

I just got back from a 900+ mile round trip, from Detroit to St. Louis, in my 2024 Cadillac Lyriq and once again got to experience the “joys” of non-NACS charging. Coming across several inoperable Electrify America and EVgo stations along the way. On a high note, ChargePoint had more stations and but would be nice if they had higher output stations. Meanwhile the numerous Tesla stations were all up and running.

Thankfully I planned my route to accommodate for possible broken stations and was never at risk of being stranded. However, as an engineer who works on EV’s and drives one regularly, it’s easy to see where the improvements need to be focused for the future success of EV’s. It is also easy to see why the adoption rate of EV’s is not much higher (with the exception of Tesla).

Key take away: you can road trip in an EV, but plan ahead, plan to find downed stations, plan a route with more chargers along the way, and plan to charge as if the next station was double the distance of the actual next point to charge

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