No More Charging Stops? We Take a Road Trip in an Ultralong-Range EV
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Back in may, on memorial day weekend, I headed over to Chelsea on manhattan s west side. Okay, passing under the highlight now to meet up with my colleague. Wall street general .

tech column ist Christopher.

Christopher was there to pick up a car to test drive a lucid air grand tour department. It's electric vehicle that has all the homeworks .

of electronic car has feel like the best tuned Mercedes you've ever been in. And I have only driven twenty kids so far.

Displays and touch screens, wood and leather panel interiors and cameras that give the driver a live three hundred and sixty degree view of everything going on around the car.

Real, imagine to drive. This were completely room.

and IT has some serious pick up, Lucy says. In its fastest mode, the underground touring can go from zero to sixty miles per hour in under .

three seconds to. Really a mistake.

But what Christopher and I were really interested in wasn't how faster ago, but how far. According to company estimates reported to the environmental protection agency, lucid air grand touring can travel up to five hundred and sixteen miles on a single charge that's upwards of a hundred miles farther than the estimates for testers. Top of the line model s. Christopher says lucid car can do that because IT was designed to use every volte electricity as efficiently as possible.

Every part of the power train is engineer to within a millimetre of its life. And that's not even an exaggeration that I had of engineering at. Losted told me that they fought over millimeters in the tolerances of some of the internal parts.

And it's because the electric power train, when you engineer IT enough, can just be shunk down, down, down, down. You get smaller, more powerful motors. You get more power dance, more compact battery packs.

It's one way that Lucy is trying to combat what's often called range anxiety, the worry that an electric vehicle will run out of juice before you can find a charging station, that you are still a major issue facing the market even as roadside charges have become more common.

I've heard IT loud and clear from my readers. They still have tons of ranging ety when they think they are buying an electric vehicle. And a lot of them, you know, like to go on road drops in such. And the idea is, what if you could just eliminate charging from your day completely?

From the wall street journal, this is the future of everything. I'm danny Lewis today. We had arrived with Christopher mims as he takes an electric car on a multistate international road trip. Find out how putting that miles per charge estimates to the test gives us us a glimpse into how range could shape the future of electric vehicles back one.

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Christopher, when you set off on this road trip, what were you expecting from IT before you hit the highway?

So my plan was to have a full day of driving and never have to stop to charge because that's typically not something you can do with an electric vehicle. I wanted to say, hey, you know what? You really can do a full days drive.

And then I just charges what you sleep. You never have to charge this vehicle or gas set up or anything. And so I set out on from new york to boston trial, allow with with range despair. And of course, that's where the adventure began.

So tell me about the first line of the trip.

right? A way. I noticed that the car seem to be getting me know, between twenty and thirty percent less arrange than promised, like he just was.

The the range left to me was ticking down that much faster than I had expected. I have just exited the five birds of new york city. And when I got IT fully charged indicator on dash said I only had four hundred and sixty six miles of range.

I have traveled now twenty four miles, and I have lost, what? About ten more miles. Then this car estimated I was going to in the first place.

To be fair, this car was sitting for a while, running the air kanisha in the hat. May son would see how close we get. In some ways, I had anticipated that because I knew driving over fifty and harder and the rest would make a difference.

But I just kind of was like, huh okay, well, this isn't giving me quite the super fantastic range that I was promised. I have only one hundred and ninety nine miles to go until I get the cambridge mashups. So given that I have four hundred and thirty miles of range, in theory I could drive all the way to cambridge and back. Although don't know that I would wanted test that I wasn't nerve racking on that first day, but IT did feel notable and IT was sort of a harbinger of things come.

A ucd motor spokesman told us real world E V ranges are affected by a variety of factors, including whether the road itself using air conditioning and driving speeds. okay. So you make IT to massacres couple hours later that evening. Um both the I .

wanted to kind of have the experience that the average E D driver who's not driving a tesla would have, which is like just what infrastructure available. And I use an outcome plugged share to find the nearest thing to everything. And that happened to be at the cambridge public works building that, okay, well, free parking overnight seems like A A safe world traffic. Tera, and the next day the vehicle was completely recharged and was ready to go. Yeah.

how long did you leave IT parked for?

I left IT parked for close to twelve hours all in. And that was also an interesting lesson, because IT didn't impress me that the battery in this vehicle was so large that even though I only depleted IT by two thirds, IT took nearly twelve hours to completely recharge on one of these slow charges.

So you get back in the car, um what was the next destination? And, uh, what did you need to be able to make IT?

I was going all the way of montreal, and i've had calculated that I would get there with ranged to spare. But going up mountains in new hampshire mean, this is not the rockies, but it's still going to take energy to drag a five thousand pound car up, uh, several thousand foot high peak. That was the point where I thought to myself, um i'm gonna need to be careful and let's try to keep IT to sixty five because I want to make IT all the way so .

not so much joyriding there.

Definitely joyriding at that part of the trip, though, is tempting on those wind amount. So just pass sign that said, IT is one hundred and thirty six kilometers to montreal and the range indicator says we have one hundred and ninety one kilometers of range left.

So that means in theory, we we'll get to montreal and there will be about fifty kilometers arrange to spare, which seems like it's enough to drive around a little bit and find a place to church because, of course, I don't have a guarantee place to church tonight. Finding hotels with church is, in the stage age, still very hard. This is probably the first time in the trip that i'm feeling a little bit of arranging A Y, and I imagine that will only mount as we get closer to our destination.

I'll see a goes. So at this point, you've been driving for hours and hundreds of miles when you finally made IT to montreal, all how much did you have left in the tank.

so to speak? When I made IT to montreal, I had less than ten percent charge left. You know, I was driving into the city, and a little alert came up on the dash, like low charge and recharge your vehicle. And I wasn't too worried because I had been told at the border, oh, you know, are charged infrastructure here in quebec is excEllent. You're not a very good experience, which you just drink us.

What happened?

The chAllenges? There been so many incentives for E. V. Ownership in canada that these charges are really popular and people park at them overnight all the time.

The first cluster of charges that I went to, none more available. The second church I went to, uh, one was available. IT just wouldn't work, which sometimes happens with public church.

So now I had a kind of hunt and find one that was not too far from where I was staying. And I finally did find one and was able to charge the vehicle overnight at long last. But that was my third try. Unfortunate he was in out of the way in a spot that I got the plate stone off the vehicle. Yeah, that was annoying.

I mean, I did I did illustrate that one of the chAllenges of trying to just charge your vehicle overnight, even if you can, is it's going to dict where you can park IT, right? And maybe you can find a garage with charges, but then you're gna pay extra for the garage. And that gates, some of the savings on fuel cost that you would Normally get from A V all in IT took eighteen hours to fully recharge the vehicle. So IT was an object lesson in the fact that fast charging ends up being necessary on most road trips, even if you have an ultra long range vehicle, because you just cannot get you into a vehicle fast enough otherwise to .

be convenient just ahead. What a possible future for evs might look like when range anxiety turns into range frustration stay with us.

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Luckily.

there's a faster, easier, less messy choice. Amazon q can security understand your business data and use that knowledge to streamline task? Now you can summarize orderly results or do complex analysis in no time.

Q, got this. Learn what amazon q business can do for you at A W S dot com. Slash, learn more.

So you've just done this first like a the trip uh, couple days later, you do the whole thing in reverse. What was the drive back .

like generally a lot easier and more pleasant because I had confidence in the vehicle and this was the point which I think my ranging anxiety IT didn't evaporate completely. But I really understood, okay, this is what this particular E. V.

Can do. I feel comfortable with IT. I know how to plan around any issues that I might have, and I know that i'm going to make IT to my next destination.

Okay, you finally hit me what IT is that i'm experiencing in this vehicle. And IT is IT does represent progress. I'm not feeling anxiety in this vehicle, but I am irritated. You know, it's so it's it's a to pee in the mattress and I am the the princess complaining about this very, very first world problem. But it's still.

Anything we 明白 that for me.

range frustration is the fact that the average of electric vehicle is not going to perform at its E P A rated range generally. And that's affected by a lot of things. It's affected by the altitude that you're climbing over the trip, the outside temperature, the way that you're drive in the vehicle.

But it's also affected by things like if you want your e these battery to last as long possible, you don't want to be fully charging IT and fully discharging IT every time you use IT, right? In fact, rer say you want to keep that between like twenty and eighty percent or ten and ninety percent. And so that means, okay, well, that's an extra ten or twenty percent range that you're going to shave off the top. So even in an ultra long range E, V, the ultimate range doesn't match the kind of sticker range you might say. And you know, we all get frustrated when something doesn't deliver on its initial promise.

Speaking of charging, during a wall street journal live Q, N, A in june, lusted motor CEO Peter rowson said that slow overnight charging is Better for evy batteries and for the power grade overall, but he also noted that most people don't drive very far in the day. On average, under forty miles in the U. S.

We can achieve that with, say, five miles to kill one hour. That's only six kills one hours a vehicle person. And that's quite within the the capability of the great as IT stands. Christopher, if charging stations are becoming more common and accessible, especially these really hypogeum super charges, why should evs need to be able to make such a long trip anyway?

The answer is, Frankly, they don't. right? We are going to see future generations of vv with less range, but they're gona cost a lot less.

I mean, we are getting close to crossing, uh, a barrier where A E V cost less than a gasoline vehicle. Before you even calculate the total cost of otherness, the future is about a diverse range of VS. You know, low range city evs, plug in hybrid. There are so gonna relevant for many decades. And then, yeah, they are gonna be these really long range ees, which you're gonna stay more in the range of luxury on the foot.

But of all this, are we going to end up in a world where it's kind, you know, ranging society for thee, but not for me, because I can afford the luxury E. V, that you can go five hundred miles on a single charge.

I think we're definitely up in IT won't be as destroy an as that sounds because for lots of folks having a vehicle with less range that charges quickly is is more than adequate, especially if you live in a city as most of us do. But could you see people kind of bragging about the range of their logger evs on social media and elsworth finites, you're definitely .

see that Christopher s. Is a technology communist at the wall street journal.

Thanks for joining us. Thanks for me. The pleasure.

The future of everything is a production of the wall street journal. Stephanie organ fits is the editorial director of the future of everything. This episode was produced by me, danny Lewis, our fact checker, is a partner at Michael level and Jessica fenton, or our sound designers and road or the music catherin p is our supervising producer.

I shut all muslim is our development producer. Scott salary and Christian ani are the deputy editors, and philon to patterson is the head of news audio for the wall street journal. Like the show, tell you your friends and leave us a five star review on your favorite platform. Thanks .

for listening.

Amazon q business is the new generative A I assistant from A W S, because many tasks can make business slow, as if waiting through .

mud a help.

Luckily, there's a faster, easier, less messy choice. Amazon q can security understand your business data and use that knowledge to streamline tasks? Now you can summarize quarterly results or do complex analysis in no time.

Q, got this. Learn what amazon q business can do for you at A W S dot com flash. Learn more.