Electric Vehicles are having a real moment. People by and large prefer EVs because they’re greener, quieter, and often more fun to drive than gas cars. But one sticking point in the EV revolution is charging. There are more charging stations now than ever, but it’s still not enough. And how those stations are distributed can make driving long distances in an EV feel like a bit of a gamble.
This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED staff writer Aarian Marshall joins the show to talk about the state of EV charging, the feelings of “charging anxiety,” and whether people really need to worry all that much about those EV battery fires in the news.
Show Notes
Read Aarian’s story on the current state of EV charging prices. Aarian writes for WIRED about all things electric vehicle and transportation related.
Recommendations
Aarian recommends three different episodes of PJ Vogt’s Search Engine podcast featuring Ezra Klein as a guest. Mike recommends Agnes Varda’s 2000 film The Gleaners and I. Lauren is out this week.
Aarian Marshall can be found on social media @AarianMarshall. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Michael Calore: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore. I’m WIRED’s director of consumer tech and culture. Lauren Goode is off this week, so I am flying solo. However, I’m happy to say that this week I’m joined by the WIRED staff writer who covers all things transportation for us. Aarian Marshall. Welcome back to the show.
Aarian Marshall: Hello. So glad to be back.
Michael Calore: Yes, thanks for hanging out. Today, we’re going to talk about electric vehicle charging. People generally love their EVs because they’re greener and quieter and fun to drive, but there are still some unresolved issues. We all know about range anxiety, the fear that your electric car isn’t going to be able to go the whole distance you want to drive, because you’re going to have to stop and charge it along the way. But EV drivers are also dealing with charge anxiety, the fear that when you need to charge, it’s going to be a hassle. There are public chargers, but they are too often out of order. There’s also no set pricing for those, and so the cost of charging your car can be anywhere between free and $100.
So those are real problems. Aarian, you cover all of this for us and you have a story this week on WIRED about the cost of EV charging. So I want to start with a temperature-check here. These charging headaches that we’re talking about, are they getting better? Are they getting worse? Are they about the same as last year?
Aarian Marshall: Yeah, so it seems like the picture for US public charging is getting rosier. That’s great news. It’s definitely not perfect. The first thing I’ll say is that it’s not super easy to get good data on this stuff. Public EV charging companies report to the federal government about how much their chargers are online, which should be a good proxy for how often they’re working. But there was actually a report that came out last week from this company called Charger Help based on some data collected by folks at UC Davis that suggested that those reports from charging companies might be overstating how often they’re actually working. That report suggested that chargers might really only be online about three-quarters of the time. So that means one in four chargers could be having issues at any given time. That’s not great.
But that said, it seems like things are getting better. People have been complaining about broken chargers since charging went into the ground maybe even a decade ago for some of these EV chargers. And the reasons are a lot of the time, because this is first generation technology and it’s just buggy. That’s what happens for the first generation of technology. And it seems like slowly EV charging companies are replacing that technology with newer, shinier stuff, but there’s still some broken, cruddy things around. This week, there was a survey from JD Power, they send these out quarterly of EV drivers across the US, and overall drivers were happier this year with public charging experiences than they were last year. So that’s pretty cool.
Michael Calore: That’s good. Does that mean that they’re also happy about the prices? Because I understand that the prices can fluctuate wildly.
Aarian Marshall: Yeah, so the study found that drivers are much happier with the ease of payment for EV chargers. Historically, people have had a lot of problem connecting their credit card to an app. Sometimes the car will automatically do a technological handshake with the charger that will automatically charge your credit card for how much you top up. People have had problems with that. That seems to be getting a lot better. So that’s cool. Payment getting better, we’re really into. It was interesting. JD Power found that one of the big exceptions to this overall positive trend is that drivers are not happy with how much they’re paying to charge. And that’s interesting because the price to keep your car running is supposed to be one of the big advantages of switching to electric vehicles.
And there’s a little bit of data to suggest that drivers are justified for feeling a little frustrated about the pricing of public EV chargers. And we have this data that’s brand new from Stable Auto. They gave it to us first. Thank you, guys at that software company, which helps EV charger companies figure out what they should be charging customers. And that shows that there’s been a 1 percent increase nationwide per kilowatt-hour in EV charging prices. So it is getting a little bit more expensive, but, of course, it’s all very complicated because charging prices are determined by a bunch of different factors that are totally different, not only in different states and different cities, but even different municipalities because of really complex things that are going on at public utilities.
Michael Calore: One of those things is peak pricing, demand pricing. Can you tell us about how that affects charging?
Aarian Marshall: So demand charges, the way they work is that some utilities charge any customer, in this case we’re talking about EV charging companies, they’ll charge them higher fees based on how much energy they’re using. OK, that makes sense. Why is that more complicated here? Because it’s charged in intervals. So that means that if I have an EV charger that I’ve built in a community, the community is not super into EVs yet, but I know they’re going to be down the line so I know this is a good investment, and that charger only gets used maybe even once a week, maybe three times a week. But when it is used, the person who’s filling up their car needs a lot of electricity really quickly to go into their car’s battery.
The public utility is going to charge me, the electric vehicle charging company, a really high fee because that charger is used very intensely for a very short amount of time. These chargers make sense overall because it helps the public utility really build out and then maintain their wider electrical grid. But it makes it hard to run a business right now of providing charging to electric vehicles when the landscape of the use of electric vehicle chargers is so uneven and all over the place as we’re in this complicated electric transition.
Michael Calore: Right. So we’re talking about different kinds of chargers too. There’s fast chargers and super chargers and then there’s slower chargers, and the prices are different for all of them. Is that why, because some of them draw way more electricity over a short period of time?
Aarian Marshall: Yeah, so that’s a great reminder to clarify our terms. So when we’re talking about the variations in pricing, generally what we’re talking about are DC fast chargers, which are chargers that can fill an EV battery anywhere between 15 minutes and an hour. And those are expensive to run because they’re really energy intensive. It’s less expensive to host what’s called a Level Two EV charger, and those are much slower. You’ll actually see a lot of EV drivers put those in, in their homes, and those can charge up a car over many hours, but it’s also less expensive because it’s a consistent trickle of electricity versus let’s open the fire hose and get all the electricity into the car at once situation.
Michael Calore: Right. So how do most people charge?
Aarian Marshall: So this is a great question, and because we spend a lot of time talking about public EV chargers because they’re a really good analogy for gas stations, which is what we’re used to. But one of the great advantages of electric vehicles is that you can actually charge them anywhere. You don’t necessarily need to take them to a public charging station. Most people charge their electric vehicles at home. It’s something like 90 percent of people who own electric vehicles right now have access to a garage, a big parking garage, a driveway, somewhere where they can plug their car in overnight and get it energy that way. So, really, most people are only using those public charging stations when they’re on a big road trip.
Now, of course, there are important exceptions here. One is people who don’t live in those places. So people who live in an apartment building, maybe they have on street parking. There are a lot of people who live in this country and own a car and don’t have a garage, and a lot of those people right now are deciding that an EV just doesn’t make any sense for them because it is expensive and inconvenient to find a public electric vehicle charging station. The other big exception here are Uber drivers, people who drive for ride hail companies who are in a car all day. Uber, Lyft, and a number of cities are really providing a lot of incentives for people to switch over to electric for ride hail because those vehicles are so emissions intensive and they’re on the road all day, so wouldn’t it be amazing if they were being powered by electricity?
The issue is you need a more robust public charging infrastructure because, A, some of those drivers are lower income, so they’re less likely to live in a big mansion that has a garage, and also because they’re driving so much that they need to be able to take breaks in the middle of the day to charge.
Michael Calore: OK, we need to take a quick break and then we’ll come right back.
[Break]
Michael Calore: So when we talk about people who live in apartments versus people who live in houses where there’s a garage where they can park their car and charge it, and when we talk about people who live in cities and we talk about rural areas and the suburbs, it brings up the question of equity when it comes to charging. There’s a lot of people who maybe don’t live in a place where a charger is convenient and they’re not going to be incentivized to buy an electric vehicle because of that. They live in an apartment. Their town only has one charger. Sometimes it’s broken, sometimes it’s full. How are we getting around that problem?
Aarian Marshall: This is a great open question and something I know city governments are really thinking hard about. And you’re right, it’s a huge equity issue because the plan that the US government has and the plan that so many governments have all over the world is to meet their climate goals by getting everyone into EVs. But it’s so hard to get people into EVs when they don’t have anywhere to charge. One interesting fight that’s going on in cities right now is that some people say, “Hey, we need to put in EV charging right next to our on street parking spot.” So that means if you parallel park your car on the street that most likely you’ll be next to a charger so you can plug it in and walk away and then come back and unplug it, whatever. Now, there are some cities that are actually super opposed to that because they say, “Hey, we really value flexibility on our sidewalks.”
In a couple years, maybe we’ll want to pedestrianize that street. Maybe we’ll say, “Hey, we don’t want cars on this street anymore. We want it to be all bike lanes.” Or, “Hey, maybe we want some cars on the street, but we want a protected bike lane right next to the curb.” So it doesn’t make any sense. That means that the charger will have to stretch over the bike lane and try not to close line bikers while people plug in their cars. And that’s an interesting policy conversation to me because giving cities more infrastructure flexibility is a really important part of climate goals. We do want more people walking. We do want more people in bikes. We want people to maybe not drive around so often, even if it is an EVs. EVs still need energy, and that energy needs to be generated in some way.
This is less an answer to your question than more questions, but they’re still figuring it out and it’s really complicated. Something that people have told me is that, in the future, you can expect that anywhere you take your car, there’s going to be a charger. Maybe that’s church. Maybe that’s school. Maybe that’s city hall. That’s work. They basically need to be everywhere. So that’s maybe one solution down the line.
Michael Calore: Right. One stop gap that I see a lot here in San Francisco is extension cords running out of somebody’s window in the front of their apartment down onto the sidewalk and then to the car that’s parked in front of the house.
Aarian Marshall: And that’s a solution though, not necessarily a solution that cities are super happy with because that depends on the person running the extension cord to be super cognizant of their neighbors and not trip anyone. It’s a nice stop gap right now, but I don’t know if that’s a big solution for the future.
Michael Calore: Well, OK, so when we talk about planning to get chargers everywhere, the US government does have a plan. Last year they set aside $7.5 billion to invest in electric car charging stations nationwide over five years. It’s been about a year and a half since that money was earmarked. How is that build out going?
Aarian Marshall: So it really depends on who you talk to. There was a spate of coverage over the spring last year of how slowly it’s taking that money to actually turn into physical charging stations. So at some point I think last fall it turned out there may be only been eight of these stations built, which doesn’t sound like a lot. That said, I think no one said that this stuff was going to happen quickly. When you actually stop and think for a second about how much goes into building a charging station, first of all, the way the funding works is it has to get from the federal government to the states who are actually directing where the funding goes. So the states have to figure their stuff out, and sometimes that takes a really long time. But then from there you have to get permitting and you have to make sure the grid is able to support all this electricity that’s going into these public chargers, and it really just takes a long time.
There’s a lot of red tape in specific places, which is all to say this is not like you snap your finger and there’s an outlet for everyone to plug their car into, unfortunately. So I think it’s going as expected. I think another interesting thing when it comes to that national funding money, and this is something I wrote about last year, is that a lot of that money, actually all of that money, is going to putting public chargers next to highways, not to putting public chargers in people’s neighborhoods. And part of the reason the federal government is so focused on highways is because they’re so visible. Part of the reason they want to put in so many public chargers right now is because they want people to just be able to see them.
And once you start seeing public chargers, you can start to think, “Hey, this might be a possibility for me. I see public chargers all the time. Maybe I can have an electric vehicle. Maybe it will fit into my lifestyle.” So there’s this interesting psychological aspect of the public funding money where maybe for a little while it really doesn’t matter how often those things are being used or how many of them are being used at any given time. It’s really about the fact that we know that they’re coming and that people start to get comfortable with the idea of charging their cars versus filling them with gas.
Michael Calore: Right. Well, that’s how they distribute gas stations. They put them next to the highways. They put them in the on ramps and the off ramps. It helps if I’m going on a long trip, but it doesn’t necessarily help me if I’m driving around in the middle of the city and not going anywhere near the highway.
Aarian Marshall: Yeah, exactly. And there are other pots of federal money aside from that seven and a half billion that are focused on putting chargers anywhere. But yeah, that seven and a half billion is focused on that gas station analogy stuff.
Michael Calore: OK. How’s it going in other parts of the world? What is Europe doing? What is Asia doing?
Aarian Marshall: Yeah, so I really don’t know a ton about that other than to say that they are definitely ahead of us. And I know that the great paragon of electric vehicle charging is Norway where well more than half of new cars being registered there are EVs at this point. It’s a Tesla hotspot. They’re living the EV dream over there in Norway. And I know that the way some cities there deal with installing electric vehicle chargers is they have a very specific process for people getting together in a neighborhood and actually requesting funding to build them.
So they’ve figured out ways to get EV chargers there where people need them, and here in the US a lot of companies are offering very specific data products that you can use to predict where people will want them and build them out. That’s just where we are in the transition. But it’s interesting to me to see countries like Norway that are a bit ahead figuring out how to make citizens feel really involved in knowing and requesting where their car infrastructure will be.
Michael Calore: Of course, Norway is always ahead of us on just about everything. One last question for you. Anybody who has been following EV related news over the last few weeks can’t help but notice that a lot of electric vehicles are catching on fire. And since we’re talking about charging, and since this is in the news, I have to ask, are any of these fires related to anything involving charging?
Aarian Marshall: Not really. I’d say first I’m always a little, not nervous about talking about charging, but feel like sometimes it gets overblown with EVs because gas cars catch fire too, I’m sorry to say. Maybe you’ve been lucky enough to see that on the side of the highway. It does happen. The thing that’s tricky about EVs is that because of battery chemistry and the way electric vehicle batteries work, it takes a lot more effort to put out electric vehicle fires. And I’d say the big thing, of course, that’s related between charging and the fires is that it all comes down to the battery, which is the thing that makes the car go.
But generally, I don’t think they’re related and I don’t think if you’re a person who is thinking seriously about getting EVs, I’d say in general, you don’t really need to worry about fires. I wouldn’t lose sleep at night. Sometimes the federal government will put out recalls and have a park outside warning for a specific car. They also, again, do this for gas powered vehicles as well. You’ll get a park outside warning where they’ll say, “Hey, there’s something wrong with the car that’s making us a little nervous so park it outside until you get it serviced. But generally not a gigantic problem, is the good news.
Michael Calore: All right, well, thank you for that up.
Aarian Marshall: Of course.
Michael Calore: Let’s take another break and we’ll come back with our recommendations.
[Break]
Michael Calore: OK, Aarian, you have been on the show a number of times. You know how this works. This is our recommendation segment. We go around the room, in this case it’s just the two of us, and you tell our listeners about something that they might enjoy. It could be a thing, a book, a podcast, a food item, a sport. What’s your recommendation?
Aarian Marshall: My recommendation is very specific. It is a few specific episodes of a podcast. So there’s a podcast called Search Engine with PJ Vote, who I’ve always really admired how PJ talks about the internet. I think he does a really good job of relating his own humanity and the way he uses the internet, which seems like very normy to me. Side note, I think my colleague and friend Lauren Goode is also very good at this. And it just feels good the way he talks about the internet. Big fan. But specifically, he’s had three episodes of his podcast Search Engine where he interviews podcaster Ezra Klein about the internet. Ezra Klein, this is podcast inception. Ezra Klein has his own podcast for The New York Times.
Michael Calore: The Ezra Klein Show.
Aarian Marshall: I’ve listened to it. It’s great. The Ezra Klein Show, but specifically when PJ has Ezra Klein on to talk about the way the internet works, I just find it a very perceptive conversation. So there are three episodes. The first one was in October, end of October 2023, about the internet and attention and ethical consumption of the internet, which I thought was fascinating. I think about it all the time. And then there was another one at the end of March on the media and the internet. I am a member of the media, so I’m very interested in this stuff, but I also think as anyone who thinks critically about how the internet works, how information works should be interested in this conversation between PJ Vogt and Ezra Kline.
And then, finally, there was a new one this month where PJ Vogt talked to Ezra Klein about how to follow the election, the presidential election specifically, which has been so nutty and horrible but also wonderful. And they have a really smart conversation about how elections work, how media around the election works. I just found it calming and good brain food. So three episodes of the podcast Search Engine where podcaster PJ Vogt interviews podcaster Ezra Klein about things.
Michael Calore: Say podcast one more time. That’s good. That’s some good brain food. Thank you for that.
Aarian Marshall: Yeah. And Mike, what are you into these days?
Michael Calore: OK. I am going to recommend a movie that I saw when it was new when it came out in the year 2000. And I just rewatched it this week and found it ever more delightful for a technological reason. It’s called The Gleaners and I. And it’s a French film by the French Belgian director Agnès Varda. She’s well known for being a narrative filmmaker and for being a documentarian. She does short films. She does television sometimes. She’s sadly no longer with us. But this movie was done when she was around 70 years old in the year 1999, 2000. She opens the movie by telling you about her digital video camera. So she got a digital video camera and she’s just super excited about it because now she can go out into the world and shoot a bunch of things that she’s always wanted to shoot but she has not been able to because of traditional film equipment just being too bulky.
So this movie is about food waste. It’s called The Gleaners and I, because it’s about people who glean. And the dictionary definition of a gleaner is somebody who picks up things after a reaper has gone through a field. So if you imagine a traditional French farm with traditional French reaping machines, big tractors with machinery on the back that digs up, gets all the potatoes, gets all the carrots, whatever, and then all of those go to market. Well, there are these piles of potatoes or carrots or whatever left over, and in France it’s legal after the reaping has been done to go and forage and pull those things out of the ground, take them home, sell them, do whatever you want, feed your family. So there are a lot of people in France who live off of gleaning, and she interviews a lot of them, and she learns about their stories.
You get to go inside their homes and see how they use the produce that they pull out of the ground. She also talks to people who go and glean at the markets in Paris and other big cities. So the market is done at 4 pm, and then between 4 pm and about 6 pm there’s all these people going through all the food that’s left over on the ground through the market. So it’s about people who are choosing to do this for reasons of poverty and reasons of hunger. And then there are people who are doing it for philosophical reasons and ethical reasons. They just don’t like food waste. So it’s fascinating, and the whole thing is shot on digital video. It looks like 1999 digital video, but you very quickly forget that’s what you’re watching.
It’s super fun to watch your experiment with this new technology, watching it now in 2024, because the lens cap is a character in the movie. The lines that are across the screen, because of the standard definition shooting format, are characters in the movie. It’s amazing. So I highly recommend it. You can find it just about anywhere, because she’s a very famous director, and this is one of her most famous movies. It’s called The Gleaners and I. I watched it on Criterion, but you can rent it pretty much anywhere on the internet.
Aarian Marshall: The original Freegans.
Michael Calore: Yes. Yes, these people are the original Freegans. And they’re very French. There’s one family that goes to a vineyard that nobody takes care of anymore, and they sing songs and they clap as they trim the vines and put the grapes in their baskets.
Aarian Marshall: Wow. It sounds like they’re onto something.
Michael Calore: It’s possibly the most French film you’ll ever see. Anyway, Gleaners and I. Aarian, thank you for being on the show this week. Thanks for hanging out.
Aarian Marshall: Of course. Thanks for having me.
Michael Calore: And thank you all for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on social media. Just check the show notes. Our producer is the superlative Boone Ashworth. We will be back with a new show next week. And until then, goodbye.
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