INEL Report: Plugged In: How Americans Charge Their Electric Vehicles

Plugged In: How Americans Charge Their Electric Vehicles
Findings from the largest plug-in electric vehicle
infrastructure demonstration in the world

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http://avt.inel.gov/pdf/arra/SummaryReport.pdf

For all the early adopters who got an EVSE through the EV Project, here's a summary of the data you were responsible for generating.

I'm just going to go ahead and guess that they "Plug them in." ;-)

Very interesting!!!

Thanks for posting.

The thing that stuck me was that Volts only go 6% less miles on electric than Leaf's. I guess that means most Volt owners do plug in, which is good. I know my cousin doesn't always plug his in, so I thought that was more the norm, but apparently not.

Thanks for posting!

BrockWI said:

The thing that stuck me was that Volts only go 6% less miles on electric than Leaf's. I guess that means most Volt owners do plug in, which is good. I know my cousin doesn't always plug his in, so I thought that was more the norm, but apparently not.

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So, does that mean that Volt owners only need the rX 6% of the time . I saw no mention of wether study participants had only one, or more than one vehicles. Perhaps LEAF owners use a second vehicle 6% of the time? Would guess that a one car household is more likely to have a Volt in this study.

That is sort of my thinking, that we Leafers use an ICE about 6% of the time? Could be. I know we are about 40% Leaf and 60% ICE but that is because we drive two different directions at the same time and often drive 200+ miles for swim meets. I know my cousin that comes up here with his Volt drives 160 miles one way so he has to use the ice, but he only has one car and we have 3.

BrockWI said:

That is sort of my thinking, that we Leafers use an ICE about 6% of the time? Could be. I know we are about 40% Leaf and 60% ICE but that is because we drive two different directions at the same time and often drive 200+ miles for swim meets. I know my cousin that comes up here with his Volt drives 160 miles one way so he has to use the ice, but he only has one car and we have 3.

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Its not 94% EV for the Volt owner's. Its more like Volt owners drive 94% of the EV miles that Leaf owner's drive. The chart shows Volt owners with an L2 at work average 11,448 eVMT annually, and 13,759 VMT annually; so that's 83.2% electric, with 2311 annual ICE miles on the Volts. The Leaf's with work place L2 charging available average 11882 eVMT.

The study also shows the same numbers for those cars without access to an L2 charger at work. Again the Volt and Leaf are roughly comparable, but the Volt has a lot more ICE miles when they don't have access to an L2 charger at work, so these Volt owners drop to 74.4% ev, with 9112 eVMT and 12238 VMT, with the Leafs at 9697 eVMT.

So the jist of the chart is that work place charging really helps. My assumption is that Leaf owner's are more likely to use a 2nd ICE automobile if they don't have access to workplace charging.

Ditto on the ICE usage absent workplace charging.

I'm a bit torn on this personally. My final choice in 2013 for Leaf over Volt was that my commute was well within the Leaf range. But my commute changed so now the Leaf is my wife's primary driver. Had I gone with the Volt, I would still be commuting a chunk of electric miles. But as she drives as much or more as I do, but broken up throughout the day and can charge multiple times, we now do more electric miles as a family than when I used it as my commuter. :lol:

I do really want to replace my commute ICE with a zero emission option or close thereto. So I am keenly watching for the gen 2 Leaf, considering the i3 with REX and the Mirai. What I really want is a B but with at least 120 mile range. So the 2016 Leaf with 30kwh still falls a bit short.

Interesting report.

DC fast chargers were used much more frequently than most public Level 2 stations, with a median use frequency of 7.2 events per week, based on averaging each fast charger’s use over the course of the entire project. A quarter of the fast chargers averaged over 15 events per week, and one unit averaged 70 events per week. The most highly utilized DC fast chargers tended to be located close to interstate highway exits. Interestingly, these units were used by local vehicles as much or more than they were used to recharge vehicles traveling on the interstate.

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Bit out of date data through 2013.

Totally fails to address reliability or maintenance cost.

When ALL the DCQC in a region are broken and most will not be repaired due to maintenance cost, DCQC utilization quickly falls to ZERO.

TimLee said:

Interesting report.

DC fast chargers were used much more frequently than most public Level 2 stations, with a median use frequency of 7.2 events per week, based on averaging each fast charger’s use over the course of the entire project. A quarter of the fast chargers averaged over 15 events per week, and one unit averaged 70 events per week. The most highly utilized DC fast chargers tended to be located close to interstate highway exits. Interestingly, these units were used by local vehicles as much or more than they were used to recharge vehicles traveling on the interstate.

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Bit out of date data through 2013.

Totally fails to address reliability or maintenance cost.

When ALL the DCQCin a region are broken and most will not be repaired due to maintenance cost, DCQC utilization quickly falls to ZERO.

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I find the DCQC data the most interesting. Not sure how to overlay the results with the technology trend. My experience with the Tesla vs the LEAF is that once you get to a decent range BEV, you no longer care about workplace charging or any regional charging. Charge at home or Supercharger if on long trip. Some L2 hotel charging still useful.
Apt dwellers wouldn't need home charging if convenient quick charging (>100kW) was available.
In 10 years, city dwellers may not need to own cars anyway with autonomous EVs and Uber-type options.

Despite the useful nuggets of data, defining the future EV charging infrastructure from this study, which spans such an inflection point of transportation evolution, seems tricky IMO.

TimLee said:

Interesting report.... Bit out of date data through 2013.

Totally fails to address reliability or maintenance cost.

When ALL the DCQC in a region are broken and most will not be repaired due to maintenance cost, DCQC utilization quickly falls to ZERO.

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The study includes 3 years of data, all of 2012, 2013, and 2014; see Figure 9.

All of the Leaf's in the study included a Chademo DC fast charge connector. All of the study participants had an L2 charger at home. The Leaf's charged 84% at home. "For Leafs, 8% of away-from home charging events was performed using DC fast chargers. The rest was AC Level 1 or AC Level 2 charging.

The most interesting data is on folks with access to workplace charging. "Figure 7. Volt (left) and Leaf (right) drivers with access to home and workplace charging performed nearly all of their charging at those locations" with only 3-4% of charging done at other locations.

The study didn't talk about DCFC maintenance issues, or project DCFC infrastructure requirements to support the Bolt, and Leaf gen2 automobiles. You can get a window into these future DCFC requirements by looking at the chart concerning Volt drivers with L2 charging both at home and at work, that I mentioned earlier. These Volts had only 17% gasoline miles that would probably require an extensive DCFC network along with 200-300 mile batteries, to have those ICE miles replaced with electric miles.