8 Drivers of electric vehicles who wish to take them on road trips need to plan ahead carefully. Here, a fast charging station in the parking lot of a Whole Foods Market in Austin, Texas. REUTERS
Bradley Wilkinson is the owner of a 2017 Chevrolet Bolt, and the kind of electric-vehicle diehard who knows how to squeeze every last mile of range out of his vehicle.
Even so, during his most recent road trip, from Tampa, Florida, back home to Fort Carson, Colorado, he spent about 58 hours on the road. In a gasoline-powered vehicle, on average, the 1,900-mile journey would take about 30. His relatively sluggish pace was due to his need to regularly power up the Bolt s battery at a fast charger so called because they re many times faster than typical home chargers.
Study: Electric vehicles cannot succeed without nationwide fast-charging networks
Special to The Enterprise
Electric vehicles cannot succeed without developing a nationwide network of fast-charging networks in parallel with the cars. Current EV business models are doomed unless manufacturers that have bet their futures on them, like General Motors and VW, invest in or coordinate on a robust supercharger network. These are the observations in an in-depth study of the industry by management professors at UC Davis and Dartmouth College.
The researchers explain that big and traditional automakers have made exciting EVs but have essentially ignored the charging-station side of the equation. Meanwhile, Tesla worked both sides of the market by building a sufficiently wide network of high-speed charging stations before they sold too many cars. There are about 4,000 high-voltage super-fast charging stations in the U.S., and the majority of them are available only to Tesla vehicles.
Study: EVs cannot succeed without developing parallel supercharging networks
Electric vehicles cannot succeed without developing a nationwide network of fast-charging networks in parallel with the cars. Current EV business models are doomed unless manufacturers that have bet their futures on them, such as General Motors and VW, invest in or coordinate on a robust supercharger network. These are the observations in an in-depth study of the industry by management professors at the University of California, Davis, and Dartmouth College.
The researchers say that that while large, traditional automakers have developed some exciting EVs, they have essentially ignored the charging station side of the equation. Meanwhile, Tesla worked both sides of the market by building a sufficiently wide network of high-speed charging stations before they sold too many cars. There are about 4,000 high-voltage super-fast charging stations in the US, and the majority of them are available only to Tesla ve