Merging Into Life: Electric Vehicles 101

[00:01:51]
Ben Sullins: I’m Ben Sullins. I’m a former data scientist, worked at all the big tech companies you’ve heard of, became a fan of EVs around 2016 and started sharing my journey as an owner of an EV back then on YouTube. And I’ve sort of become an advocate for it, helping people understand the reality behind owning an electric vehicle and what it means for the climate, what it means for you personally, and helping people navigate those decisions.

[00:02:15]
Amanda Greene: What first got you interested in electric vehicles?

[00:02:18]
Ben Sullins: So, funny story, when you have a kid and you have an old beat up truck, your wife isn’t really keen on putting the kid in the old beat up truck. So she told me, ‘Hey, you better buy a real car. It’s time to grow up.’ And I was sad about that, but as a tech guy that grew up in what I consider the golden era of tech – pre internet, pre smartphones – I saw all this amazing tech, I got really fascinated with how technology can directly affect our lives. And cars for me were always the lamest pieces of tech that you’d own. If you remember back in the day, if you had a navigation system, it was revolutionary. You had to put DVDs to load maps in it. It was ridiculous. And then Tesla came out, and so I sort of fell into love with the tech side. That led me into really becoming more interested in all electric vehicles as more and more came out.

[00:03:09]
Amanda Greene: From all of your experience over the years and being a tech guy, what do you think the biggest misconception is when it comes to EVs?

[00:03:17]
Ben Sullins: The one I hear a lot of is that they’re expensive and that there’s nowhere to charge. And it maybe was the case certainly when it started. I bought my first Tesla Model S used, and it was very expensive for me at the time, but it was probably a lot cheaper than the new ones were, maybe about half price. And the price of the materials of EVs, batteries – and this goes for a lot of sustainable tech like solar panels and stuff –you can just look at the trends and see how dramatically the prices have fallen over the past decade or so. So nowadays, EVs are on par, not just from a total cost of ownership – meaning your fuel, your maintenance, all that kind of stuff – but just even the sticker price.

Nowadays with the Inflation Reduction Act and all the incentives that the government puts out there, you’re looking at a brand new EV in the low $30,000, which is actually just on par with gas cars in terms of the average price of a new car in the US. And if you look at used EVs, you can find plenty of really good ones all the way down to the 15 to $20,000 range. So that’s probably the biggest misconception is that you can’t afford it.

[00:04:27]
Amanda Greene: I told you that I really only know the headlines. I’m beginning my deep dive into electric vehicles. And one of the terms that I hear over and over again is range anxiety. Do you experience that? Is that something you’ve already worked through or is that just something that people who drive gas vehicles made up?

[00:04:45]
Ben Sullins: Well, no, I think it’s a real thing. It certainly was more of a thing years ago, maybe in the 2013, 2014 era, but nowadays it’s really sort of gone. It’s sort of a relic of the old original days of EVs. The average range for a new EV is over 300 miles. And if you look at the Department of Transportation studies on household trips, how far people drive, there’s less than 7% of people drive more than 30 miles a day. So at 300 miles average range less, than 30 miles per day, you’re going to be fine for several days.

Anecdotally, my wife and I both have electric vehicles and we drive a fair amount. We got to take kids to school and go do all those kinds of things and go to work and back. And so in that, with two electric vehicles and one place to charge, she charges maybe twice a week and I charge maybe twice a week.

So, it’s one of those things, you can even have multiple and still not even need to be charging every single day. And so range anxiety is only a really a thing if you go on extremely long road trips and you do that frequently. The data doesn’t really suggest that that’s what people do. Anecdotally, you and anyone listening can probably just think about the last time you drove 800 miles in a single day. It does happen. Depending on your situation, I would concede that there can be cases where EVs don’t fit the bill, but I think that’s a very small percentage of people.

[00:06:05]
Amanda Greene: Charging, where do we even begin? If you’re fortunate enough to own a home, how do you even know what to do when it comes to setting up home charging?

[00:06:13]
Ben Sullins: Well, if you own a home or even a townhome or anywhere where you have a garage or you can park your car next to your home, good news is that your home already has charging infrastructure because it has electricity, which means you have a place to charge. Because in fact, you can charge just from a regular outlet that you’d plug your phone into or anything else. It may not be the fastest charge, but depending on how much you drive, you’d be surprised actually how well it works. So day one I would say you’re good to go.

As you go down this path of driving nothing but electric, that’s where the question comes in, do I need a high-performance or high-power charger? If you own a home or a townhome or something with a garage, you might have a dryer in there, for example. That dryer probably has a higher power outlet than your regular 110, 120 volt outlet that you plug your stuff into. That right there could be sufficient, and there are even adapters and cool ways to make it switch between the dryer in your home. So that you could spend a couple hundred bucks on and you’re good to go.

Now, if you don’t have that and you need to wire up a new outlet, that’s when you start to talk to an electrician and your prices can vary from a couple hundred dollars, depending on where your electric panel is and where the outlet needs to go, or all the way up to maybe a couple thousand dollars if you have to actually redo your service panel, which is not generally required, but can happen if you have an older home or depending on your situation.

[00:07:31]
Amanda Greene: I bet it’s worth checking with your local energy company to see if there are any rebates to help cover the cost.

[00:07:37]
Ben Sullins: Yeah.

[00:07:37]
Amanda Greene: Would you think it would be realistic to own an electric vehicle without the capability to be able to charge it where you live?

[00:07:44]
Ben Sullins: Yeah, it becomes a bit more challenging, I would say. But I know plenty of people, if you look at New York City for example, where a lot of people don’t even have street parking, the population of people that own EVs is still very high. So certainly it’s working for a lot of folks. It does present some additional challenges.

The thing that I think that we can use here to our advantage is just a different perspective on what it means to charge an EV versus what it means to fuel a gas car. So, most people will go to work in the day or they’ll go to the grocery store, movie theater, the gym. They’ll go to lots of places where their car is going to be parked somewhere for a long period of time. And depending on where you live, you’re going to see public charging available in those locations.

And this is actually good news because it means that you don’t spend any additional time charging. You’re not having to go to a charger and sit there for 30 minutes or an hour. That is an option if you want to go fast charging and you need to charge up quickly. But finding a way to where you just weave charging into your existing schedule in your existing life is really how we can think of it to make it an easier thing than it is to go fill up gas. If you think about filling up your gas car, you’re going to have to drive to a gas station. You don’t have one at your house or at your work probably. So you’re going to have to go out of your way to go do that, maybe sit in line, maybe wait, and then spend all the time doing it.

If you do it right, I would say it is a bit more of a challenge if you don’t have charging at home, but it’s certainly not impossible, and we can see that in the data of how many people in these areas actually own these cars. There’s about a thousand new ones each week. We’re now at over 200,000 public chargers in the US. And the situation’s getting easier and easier, I would say.

[00:09:21]
Amanda Greene: The way you worded it about weaving it just into your life – anything that you do long enough becomes a habit, and sometimes you just need to think about making it a habit. Can you walk us through the process? How reliable are they? Have you ever pulled up to one and it wasn’t working? How easy are they to find?

[00:09:36]
Ben Sullins: The first thing to think about public charging. Well, first off, just charging in general, there’s sort of levels. And you can find a lot of this information at the Alternative Fuels Data Center or fueleconomy.gov. They have a lot of information. AAA has a lot of great information on their website as well. So there’s actual real classifications of this stuff that wasn’t just created by a blogger or something.

You have level one, which is what I mentioned, where you just plug into an outlet in your house in the room you’re in now. You can plug an EV into that and you’ll get level one amount of juice out of that. Then you have level two. That’s the high-powered one I mentioned before, like your dryer in your garage or a high powered EV charger that you install in your home. That’s level two. These are the majority of what you find for public chargers.

Now, on a day-to-day basis, if you’re driving 30, 40 miles, at level two public charger, you pop it in an hour or two hours, you’re going to get all that range back. So it’s really not a huge burden considering you’re going to be at work or wherever for that time anyways. So that’s level two. That’s the vast majority of them. Then you have level three chargers, which are known as DC fast chargers. On a level three charger, you can get a thousand miles of range added in an hour. Now, obviously it doesn’t go a thousand miles, which means that you can charge almost fully in about 15, 20 minutes.

DC fast chargers are going to be more expensive. They’re going to be less common because the infrastructure, as you could imagine, to put out that much kind of juice is pretty significant, and the maintenance is also higher. So, that’s where you may encounter issues. I will say though, the reliability overall of DC fast chargers is about 75% nationwide in the US. Now, that’s excluding Tesla, so depending on what you have. Not all cars can charge on Tesla’s network yet, but we now have GM, Ford and Rivian – three big ones out there. So that’s going to be expanding. That’s part of the whole Inflation Reduction Act that’s kind of making those more accessible.

So public charging, you have different levels. Mostly what you’re going to do is use a website like PlugShare or Chargemap, or even Google Maps now has this built in where if you go into Google Maps and just search for EV charging station. I haven’t tried it in Apple Maps, but that’s probably also there as well. Yu can actually find them. You can see the prices of them, you can see how busy they are, just like you would finding a coffee shop or something.

[00:11:47]
Amanda Greene: Thanks, Ben. We’ll come back to you shortly. Right now I want to dig a bit deeper into the issue of charging. Forget motors, at the heart of this conversation and these vehicles is the battery. So we’re bringing in someone who knows a whole lot about them.

[00:12:02]
Matt Ferrell: My name is Matt Ferrell. I have a podcast called ‘Still To Be Determined,’ and I also have a YouTube channel called Undecided With Matt Ferrell where I talk about renewable energy, sustainable technologies, things like electric vehicles and batteries and all that kind of stuff that goes into it.

[00:12:15]
Amanda Greene: How long does it take to charge a battery?

[00:12:18]
Matt Ferrell: The thing you have to think about when you have an EV, if you own your home and you have an electric charger in your garage, it’s like having a gas station in your garage. So, you no longer have to stop at a gas station. And every day when I get up to go drive somewhere, my car is fully topped off. Because I get home, I just plug my car in, go inside and forget about it.

But for a long road trip, one of the rules of thumb that you have to think about is your battery will charge the fastest when it’s low. So if you’re at 15% left in your battery and you go to charge and you go up to a supercharger, it’s going to charge really fast. Where if you try to pull up to a EV charger and it’s 70% full and you try to charge, it’s going to go much slower. Because they have to ramp the speed of the charge down as it gets closer to full. It has to do with how much energy the battery’s able to absorb as well as the lifespan of the battery. They’re trying to preserve the lifespan of the battery. They don’t want to hammer the battery too hard.

So one of the rules of thumb of when you’re driving on a long road trip is you want to kind of get your tank as close to empty as you can before you have to charge up, because then you stop and you can charge for 15 minutes, and then you go on the next leg of your journey, stop for a bathroom break, charge for 15 minutes, go on the next leg of your journey. So if you do it right, you’re not having to stop and charge for an hour or two. You might be stopping and charging for 15, 20 minutes at a time.

[00:13:30]
Amanda Greene: We are living in the future, Matt?

[00:13:33]
Matt Ferrell: Yes.

[00:13:33]
Amanda Greene: It’s happening. What is the lifespan of a battery?

[00:13:37]
Matt Ferrell: Okay, this is one where I hear a lot of misinformation on my YouTube channel and stuff like that about this. People talk about like, “Oh, well, my phone, the battery’s no good after two years and I have to replace the battery.” Because you associate lithium ion batteries as being the same thing. What you have in your phone is the same thing that’s in your car. And to a certain extent that’s true, it’s a lithium ion battery, but there are a lot of differences here.

There’s different battery chemistries that are used that make a difference between how long a battery will last or not. So where you might see two, three years before your battery starts to kind of feel a little old in your phone, you’re talking about a battery pack in a car that’s going to last you eight, 10 years or more. In many cases, it’s going to last longer than the frame of the car itself.

[00:14:16]
Amanda Greene: And when it does finally go, is it recyclable? How much are we paying to replace it? Is it like replacing an engine?

[00:14:24]
Matt Ferrell: It’s the most expensive part of an electric vehicle, so it would be akin to having to replace your engine in an internal combustion engine car. Right now, it can be very expensive. You’re talking sometimes tens of thousands of dollars to replace the battery pack. But that’s today, and battery prices are dropping like a rock, and that cost of a battery pack is dropping. So in five years, 10 years, when a car that you buy today might need a battery replacement down the road, it’s going to be way cheaper than it is today.

Second factor of that on the recycling angle is these batteries can absolutely be recycled. And I’ve actually visited battery recycling plants that are doing this. It’s one of those, as a new industry emerges, there’s kind of a lag between here’s millions of electric fuels on the road. Well, how do we recycle the batteries? Oh, well, there’s actually some companies that are just starting up now, so they’re kind of lagging behind, but they’re coming.

There’s companies like Li-Cycle, American Manganese, Redwood Materials. I’ve actually been in the Li-Cycle facility, I’ve been in the American Manganese facility. They can fully recycle these batteries and get like 90, 95, 98% of the materials back out to make brand new batteries. So it’s possible to make a closed loop battery system where the company that makes the batteries can recycle the batteries and then make brand new ones, and you can do that almost infinitely. Where a gas car, you burn the gas, the gas is gone, it’s not coming back. So there’s a definite lifespan there.

[00:15:43]
Amanda Greene: This is so fascinating. So what kind of maintenance can people expect to have to do?

[00:15:50]
Matt Ferrell: Virtually nothing. Like I said, I’ve been driving since 2018, electric vehicles. Obviously, windshield washer fluid, your tires might need to get replaced, things like brake pads, things like that are still part of the car that you have to keep an eye on. My last car I had for five years, the brake pads were almost like new when I got rid of the car, so I never had to deal with those. There’s no spark plugs, there’s no oil to change. Really, it’s just keep your car clean, make sure the tires are aligned, make sure they have good treads. It’s the normal kind of stuff like that. But beyond that, there is virtually no maintenance on an electric vehicle.

[00:16:24]
Amanda Greene: Until right now, it didn’t cross my mind that oil changes are not a thing now. Is there an emergency charge pack you can travel with in case you got stuck on the side of the road? Something just to give it a little juice?

[00:16:39]
Matt Ferrell: I wouldn’t recommend driving around with an extra battery pack in your trunk because those are big and they’re heavy, and adding weight to your car is going to make the efficiency go down. So it’s like it doesn’t make sense to do that.

[00:16:49]
Amanda Greene: And some areas, if you run out of charge, AAA will come to you and give you enough boost to get you to the nearest charging station or home. But you can check out the AAA website for details. Let’s get back to Ben. As someone who is considering dipping my toe into the electric vehicle market, I’m really curious, what do you wish more people knew about them?

[00:17:11]
Ben Sullins: Probably how fun it is to drive, is probably the biggest thing. I think people really don’t understand that. I was talking to someone the other day about this. When the smartphone came out, it was sort of a net new product. Smartphones didn’t exist and then they existed. It’s not like it really displaced your home phone. It maybe has now 20, 30 years later, but it didn’t at the time, it was a net new product. So the pushback was sort of not super strong. But electric vehicles coming out, they are disrupting something that is already existing.

The thing that I think everybody should think about is to not listen to any of the high-level talking points. You hear a lot of people say that electric cars are better for the climate, and every study and every data point out there you see, does show that. But I don’t think that that’s what people should think about. I think you should think about your own use case. Is it better for you? And if the answer is yes, that’s when you should really consider it.

These high ideas of, ‘do this because it’s better for someone else,’ I think it’s tough for people to swallow that. That’s where people get a really sour taste. They feel like they’re being forced into something. Let your own personal use case, is it better for you individually? And if so, then yeah, you should decide for yourself by going and taking a test drive. And I think most people, when they get behind the wheel and they start experiencing it, that feeling of not having the shifting and the instant torque, all of a sudden it’s just whatever those other thoughts were you had just melt away and you start to realize how awesome it is and the joy of really driving an electric vehicle.

[00:18:40]
Amanda Greene: Before you go, we like to do a little rapid fire, so if you could just give us quick little zippy answers.

[00:18:45]
Ben Sullins: Sure.

[00:18:46]
Amanda Greene: What is your favorite thing about driving an EV?

[00:18:49]
Ben Sullins: The speed, the torque. Pure bliss. It’s bliss on tap.

[00:18:52]
Amanda Greene: What’s the farthest you’ve ever made it on a charge?

[00:18:56]
Ben Sullins: On a single charge, 370 miles.

[00:18:59]
Amanda Greene: And were you getting range anxiety toward the end?

[00:19:01]
Ben Sullins: It was actually a test to see how far it would go, so I drove it until it died.

[00:19:05]
Amanda Greene: Oh, super. Do you even go to gas stations anymore?

[00:19:09]
Ben Sullins: I haven’t been to a gas station to get gas in eight years.

[00:19:13]
Amanda Greene: Right, but don’t you miss the drink cooler, like all the drink assortments?

[00:19:16]
Ben Sullins: No.

[00:19:18]
Amanda Greene: No, you don’t miss a gas station?

[00:19:20]
Ben Sullins: Zero percent.

[00:19:20]
Amanda Greene: Okay. And what’s the most popular video you’ve ever made about EVs?

[00:19:24]
Ben Sullins: Oh, wow. Probably the first video that really kicked off my channel where I looked at the monthly cost of owning a Tesla. And I did a video, it was a terrible video, please don’t look it up. And it was just me talking over a spreadsheet. And that’s when I learned, wow, there is something here. If you go past the headlines and you look at the facts, you can really see the true value of something like this.

[00:19:45]
Amanda Greene: I’m totally going to go look it up. I’m sorry, but I’m going to because I’m curious. Ben, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been very enlightening. And talking with you has made this feel like a more realistic option, because for a while it just seemed like something other people might consider. And after hearing the details and hearing how you’ve integrated driving an EV into your life and how it’s not some crazy undertaking to be able to charge it each night, it is just a mindset shift, it feels like a more realistic option for regular people. So thank you for sharing all of that and coming on here today.

[00:20:20]
Ben Sullins: Absolutely. Happy to help.

[00:20:22]
Amanda Greene: That was Ben Sullins, and before that, Matt Farrell. If you’d like to hear more from them, we have links to their work in our show notes as well as general information on EVs. Imagine no more gas tanks, oil changes, gas stations. Well, I’d still go for the drink cooler, but it’s a whole different mindset. It sounds like getting an EV is really a personal choice, and I hope that our guests today have made that an easier one for you.

You’ve been listening to Merging Into Life where we navigate life’s milestones one episode at a time. Brought to you by AAA Northeast with assistance from JAR Audio. I’m your host, Amanda Greene. If you’re learning as much as I am, follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. Email us at podcast@aaanortheast.com. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are not necessarily the views of AAA Northeast, AAA and/or its affiliates.