My first electric road trip into rural Colorado
Last weekend, my girlfriend and I drove down to attend the Monte Vista Sandhill Crane Festival. It's a roughly 4 hour/200 mile drive from Denver down to Monte Vista, with lots of variation in elevation. I got a Tesla Model Y last June, and since then haven't really had the chance to go out into the remote mountains of Colorado with it.
This weekend would be my first such excursion. Getting down to Monte Vista is absolutely no problem. At about the halfway point in the trip, there's a Tesla Supercharger. That, combined with the range of the car meant that conserving battery was no problem at all.
I was worried, however, about how the car would fare down in Monte Vista for the three days we would be there for the festival. There are no charging stations of any kind in downtown Monte Vista itself (though there are a couple of slow chargers on the outskirts of town, slow chargers with nothing around them are kind of useless). However, there were fast chargers in the towns nearby! One in Del Norte, and another couple in Alamosa, both a 20 minute drive out of Monte Vista. My plan was to charge up at those every evening while we were down there.
On the trip there, we left Denver at 100% SoC, and the battery and cabin preheated for 30 minutes beforehand. We arrived at the Poncha Springs supercharger with about 17% SoC, plugged in and charged to 90%, which took about 40 minutes. The reason for charging this high was because I wasn't sure what state the non-Tesla fast chargers would be at when we got down to our destination area. My plan was to head from Poncha Springs toward the Del Norte fast charger; arrive at 60% and charge back up to 90% before driving around to look for the cranes.
We arrived in Del Norte at 60% SoC as expected, but we found the one fast charger already occupied when we got there. Thankfully, we waited less than 5 minutes for the owners to get back finish charging, after which I was able to plug in and start charging.
This charger was advertised as a 62 kW charger, but for the hour we spent charging there, the charge rate never went above 30. I'm sure part of this was that I was charging from 60-90%, and part of it was that it was cold out, and the Tesla lacks the ability to precondition the battery en route to non-Tesla fast chargers. We ended up charging there for about an hour to get the same charge that the supercharger gave us in 15-ish minutes.
Luckily, there was a brewery/pizzeria and a neat antique shop just a block away.
At some point in the trip, I became aware through Plugshare that the fast chargers down in Alamosa were being taken down that weekend for upgrades. They were installing more stalls, and I guess that necessitated taking the existing ones offline. Now instead of 3-4 fast charging options in this area, I was down to just one. I was certain that because those chargers were down in Alamosa, many more people would come up to use the single charger in Del Norte. Further, I knew that lots of people came down for the crane festival, and so I was worried that there would be an increase in the number of EVs competing for this one charger.
When we got to our hotel in Monte Vista, I noticed there were outlets near the parking lot. I asked the front desk for permission to charge my car in the lot overnight, but was denied because "it would cost them too much money". I thought about offering to pay for the privilege, but the person at the desk didn't really seem interested in pursuing that line of conversation further.
Overnight, the battery stayed charged at pretty much the same level, only losing 1% indicated charge. We got up at 5 AM in order to see the cranes take off from their roosting location in the wetlands, and go out into the fields to loaf (this is the technical term :D). We spent the rest of the day driving around the back roads and farm roads, watching the cranes in the fields.
The whole day I was checking the charge point app to see if the one fast charger available to us was in use, in order to judge how busy it was, and to plan when we might go charge there. Surprisingly, not once did I see it in use!
Since we had had a great day watching cranes, we decided to leave a day early. We had enough charge to get to the Poncha Springs supercharger, and from there back home with no issues.
I thought I would conclude with a few bullet point takeaways from this trip:
- Range anxiety is real. I spent a lot more time thinking about where to charge and if I could charge enough on this trip
- Being away from the Tesla Supercharger network sucks. A whole set of fast chargers I was relying on was taken down exactly when I needed them. They're slower, you have to worry about them not functioning much more.
- Tesla is opening a supercharger site in Alamosa! They filed for the permit just this week. This will basically erase the anxiety I had last weekend on future trips
- Total energy costs for this 500 mile trip were about $35. That feels pretty cheap to me!
To be frank, a lot of chargers out there are just plain broken. The nicest thing about Tesla Supercharger stations is not the chargers themselves, but the simple fact that they tend to have a lot of them in one spot, so you don't have to worry nearly as much about outages or excessive demand.
(but yes, it could have also been the weather or that the batteries were closer to full as well)
Honestly I'm kind of impressed things went so smoothly when you had the deck stacked so high against you; between the cold, the mountains, and the lack of public chargers, I probably would have just rented an ICE car for the weekend.
They also seem to have much higher individual reliability as well! Whatever their internal design is, they seem to break down much less frequently than other charging providers. And they also get repaired much faster as well! I can't wait for more of the network to open up to other users. More charging availability in general is better for the EV community!
I considered renting an ICE car for the trip, but I decided that I wanted the challenge. The main driving force was that there were two towns with separate fast chargers nearby, so if any were broken I would have ample backups. There are also a fair number of 6 kW slow chargers in the area, that could get us limping back to the Tesla supercharger if we needed it. I judged that at best, having an EV for the trip would be a minor inconvenience, and at worst a major inconvenience, but we wouldn't get stuck somewhere and need a tow.
Great writeup, blitz! I only just got an EV, but I definitely get the panic you felt about trying to get on that one charger. I’ve been commuting with mine and charging regularly at the only charger near where I work. One morning when I was driving in and my battery was pretty low, the local Chargepoint network was down, so that station that I use and all the others in the broader area showed up as having an “unknown” status. I had a mild panic that I wasn’t going to be able to charge at work — what did “unknown” mean? Would it even work? Were people already parked there?
I thought I was possibly going to have to park my car somewhere new after work and have my husband pick me back up and drop me off again hours later, which would have been a huge pain for both of us. Luckily the plug still worked when I got there despite the network being down, but it was definitely a lesson in the inconvenience of having a charging pattern disrupted (even if only theoretically).
Another time I was charging, I came out to find a big gas truck parked in the charging spot next to my car. I’d read online about some people with gas cars intentionally blocking EV charging spots online but assumed that was one of those very infrequent things that social media liked to give overexposure to because of its outrage- and conflict-generation potential.
I’m choosing to believe that the rest of the lot was full when the truck got there so I can give it the benefit of the doubt, but regardless of the driver’s intent, this was also a reminder that even if the charging spots show up as available on the app, the actual spot might not be able to be used if someone else is parked there but not plugged in.
As charging infrastructure expands, hopefully these pain points will alleviate. If charging options are numerous, neither of us will have that one plug we need and will instead have plenty of easy backup options. We won’t have the panic of “oh my god I might not be able to charge my car” because any disruptions to one or a few plugs will easily be alleviated by the ready availability of others nearby. I feel like roughly five years from now EV charging will be a lot more ubiquitous and there will be a lot less stress should something disrupt a charging plan — especially for road trip travel.
Yeah, I forgot to mention that I was also pretty apprehensive driving around a rural town in a shiny Tesla. I've seen videos of people vandalizing parked Teslas in the midwest, so that was a worry of mine as well. Tesla has Sentry mode to at least record if people are hanging around your car, but that drains battery so I chose not to use it.
How far is your commute? Are you not able to charge at home enough for the trip to work and back? Having to rely on public charging every day seems like a real hassle. My absolute favorite thing about driving an EV and charging at home is that I don't have to deal with fueling my car at a gas station anymore, and in fact on the vast majority of days, I don't have to worry about range or charging at all.
I’ve been charging at work because I’m waiting to have the plug for my home charger installed, which should be happening this week. Definitely looking forward to that convenience!
To semi hijack this post. How are we going to do electric overland? My tdi has a range over 600 miles and I can carry a couple extra jerry cans. The rivian is half that, and you can’t carry extra batteries.
Edit: By overland, i mean trips into the backcountry, tough terrain, remote, hauling gear, etc. I don’t see how existing or foreseeable tech can pull this off.
I think that will be limited to sequential hybrids (a la the Volt) for the forseeable future, but I can also see it becoming even more of a niche activity, like horse people are today.
I'm not going to cry over the fuel use of a couple thousand (at most) people, especially if they can be put into sequential hybrid vehicles that can just have jerry cans strapped to them like they do currently.
What’s the successor to the Volt? I have one myself and it’s shocking they stopped making them. It’s the perfect car for Americans that want an electric car.
Apparently they stopped making them because it was based on the Cruze, which was being discontinued, and it wasn’t a big enough seller to continue.
To more directly answer your question, my hunch is that the next series hybrids for the market will be either pick-up trucks, or the Prius/RAV4 (before the go all-electric completely).
Simply put: You won't.
And honestly I'm firmly in the camp (get it? puns!) that while people are pretty gung-ho about EVs at the moment, reality is going to set in at some point and plug-in hybrids are going to become much more frequent if not the outright norm.
I think you are a little late with this prediction to be honest. EVs are not a niche trend anymore, growth is exponential with ~7 million pure EVs sold worldwide last year while gas car sales have been declining for 6 years now. Norway is close to 100% of new car sales being EVs already, and many countries are considering or have already passed bans on new gas cars (often including plug-in hybrids) starting around 2040. Some car companies are onboard, Volvo for example has announced they will be fully electric by 2030 (which is pretty soon now).
The EV transition is inevitable. We are not going to switch to plug-in hybrids, which kind of suck to be honest, look them up. The electric range is very low, it's not like a Tesla that also has a gas engine in case you need it.
Overlanding is the tinest of tiny car subcultures, and it's ok if it continues to be gas-powered. Gas cars aren't going to disappear, you just won't be able to buy a brand new one in 10 or 15 years. There are also already EVs with 500+ mile range, I wouldn't rule out some beating the 600+ mile TDI in a few years. Add on an efficient solar array that can top up the charge in good conditions, and you're good to go.
I may be wrong, but I believe I'm right on time and the math backs me up.
Plug in hybrids (PHEV) aren't a stepping stone to EVs, they're an affordable alternative to EVs when pure ICE cars are going away and with the very real lithium shortage on the horizon.
That 500 mile range EV (and the 600 mile prediction)? Extremely expensive toys for rich people that don't actually need to drive that far without charging.
The people that do need that sort of range? By and large, poorer people that have to drive for a living.
Next up we have lithium production capacity. Like you said, ~7 million EVs sold worldwide last year. Know how many EVs the world can make each year? Between 11.4 and 14 million.
How many does the world need by 2050? 2 Billion
How many years does it take to make 2 billion cars even if we managed to magically and immediately double global lithium output? 71-87 years
Do PHEVs suck right now? Yep, because the flagship EVs steal the spotlight and attention as happens with the halo cars across the world.
Does that mean that reality isn't going to slap car makers and politicians in the face when even the most basic pure EV doubles in price because of the battery costs? Nope.
Even with PHEVs sucking and EVs taking the spotlight, they still sold ~3 million of them last year. Simple math shows the facts are a 200 mile battery in one EV will make two 100 mile PHEVs or four with 50 mile PHEVs, the latter being all that most commuters actually need.
Reality is that it takes a lot of energy to move around all that battery. The smallest battery that I can find in a 200 mile EV is 60kWh, a 50 mile PHEV only needs a 10kWh battery, so the actual ratio of our ability to manufacture cars that the world needs is 6:1.
11.4 million batteries for EVs, turns into 68.4 million batteries for PHEVs, 2 billion divided by 68.4 million is 29 years or right on time for that 2-billion-battery-powered-cars-by-2050 number.
And there simply isn't enough real estate on top of a car to make even an efficient solar array worth it, they make no meaningful contribution to the charging needs of the battery.
I think the first article you linked is unnecessarily pessimistic, and a little misleading. It's talking about "lithium reserves" as if that's a static number that will only be depleted, but in fact reserves refers to the proportion of known lithium deposits that are relatively easy to extract, and that number has doubled in the last 10 years. In fact it's talking about 22 million tons of reserves in 2021, but there were actually 26 million tons in 2022. The amount of total known lithium deposits has far more than doubled in 10 years. Obvious it isn't infinite, but we have not reached peak lithium and we're going to keep discovering new deposits and improving technology to make known deposits mineable for at least a few more years. I mean look at the trend, why would we expect this to suddenly plateau this year: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-25-years-of-lithium-production-by-country/
Also, lithium is not renewable but it is recyclable. This isn't a huge industry right now, but there are a number of companies working on it and if mining becomes a bottleneck I think you'll see an enormous investment in ramping up battery recycling to reclaim the lithium we already have sitting around in old batteries. If all else fails, there is an incredible amount of lithium in the ocean that we have the technology to extract. Yes, it's very expensive right now, but that's because it's not necessary and there's not much attention given to it. This element is so incredibly important for human society now that I simply cannot believe there's a future where we say "well it's getting a little expensive to extract, let's go back to gas cars". I'm not saying I'll be shocked if Volvo is still selling some gas cars in 2030, but I will be shocked if the EV trend reverses and PHEVs take over.
You're right that the 500+ mile EV is an expensive toy for rich people. But recall that 15 years ago, the Tesla Roadster was a expensive toy for rich people with ~225 miles of range. This year you can buy a new Chevy Bolt with more range than that for $25,000. I'm not saying there will necessarily be a cheap 500 mile range EV in 10 years, but these prices are going to keep declining for now, this market and some of the relevant technology is still very new.
Finally, I disagree with your solar panels point. There isn't enough space for meaningful solar charging for normal usage, but we're talking about a multi-week overlanding expedition. A few panels on the roof with a few more that can be folded out when you're stopped, and there's absolutely enough charging capacity to be equivalent to a couple jerry cans in the trunk.
It's only pessimistic if you disagree with its findings, it's the World Economic Forum, it's a realist based on current production and tech. It does state that new development is needed, but it doesn't count eggs before they hatch. And while it begins discussing total reserves, its focus and my comments are about production capacity. 25 years ago the need for lithium was near zero, trying to say the line will keep going up because it has so far is like saying we'll all have record players soon because the trend for vinyl looks the same as lithium, it doesn't work that way.
Simply put, your bet is we'll all be driving EVs because of undiscovered advances in battery tech, undiscovered lithium reserves, undiscovered mining technology, lithium recycling that doesn't exist yet, lithium production that doesn't exist yet, and cost reductions that aren't realized yet. All of which take decades to obtain and is decades we don't have. You're an optimist and that's fine, the data and reality just doesn't back up optimism.
My solar panel comment was about those built into the car, not extras/gear for overlanding as my original comment was about PHEV being the norm as EV overlanding simply isn't going to be a thing for decades.
Maximum EV range will continue to increase for some time: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/evolution-of-average-range-of-electric-vehicles-by-powertrain-2010-2021. It won't be the average car, but I wouldn't be surprised if you can buy an EV with more than 600 miles of range in a few years. On a long trip in good conditions a solar array could also add a couple hundred miles of additional range, and solar panels will continue to decrease in price as well (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices).
This is a really interesting idea. I don't think there are any portable land turbines, but there is such a thing as airborne wind power. Here's a kite-based system that fits in a backpack and allegedly provides up to 400W in high winds: https://kitewinder.fr/
With a few of those and some good wind, maybe you could actually charge a noticeable amount overnight? And this one is quite small, a number of other companies are working on utility-scale solutions, like this 100kW kite: https://thekitepower.com/. Maybe there's something in the middle that could fit in the back of a truck and still give you like 1kW or something.
There are definitely portable wind turbines... my uncle has one for his motorhome to supplement his solar panels. The one he has would probably be a bit too big for a land rover or similar offroad vehicle, but there are also slightly smaller ones out there too. It would probably take a long time to recharge an EV even with my uncle's though, since it only produces 400W at the absolute most (IIRC).
cc: @hungariantoast
Could you rephrase that question? I honestly can't parse what you mean, unless you're asking about how to charge an EV.
You can charge an EV fairly quickly now. Here's an informative video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZOuz_laH9I
Also FYI there are longer range EVs on the market. A Tesla Model S can get 400 miles and the Lucid Air can get more than 500.
Is this a regional term? Searching for overland gave me nothing close to this definition.
Wikipedia says it has Australian origins.
See edit. Does rhat clarify?
I see.
Rent an ICE vehicle or a hybrid.
Batteries will probably continue to get better, as will solar panels. So perhaps there will be an EV suitable for this kind of situation eventually. But for the time being I wouldn’t attempt this.
Typical overlanding vehicles are built out significantly to support their intended purpose. They're not the kind of vehicle you can rent.
Capitalism says otherwise.