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Roberto Baldwin:
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Hello, I'm Roberto Baldwin and this is Tomorrow Today's Sustainable Mobility Brief.
The transportation world is evolving at a rate not seen in decades. The transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy has brought with it some truly exciting opportunities, but also some confusion. I'll sift through the noise and share quick updates on the latest news. Trends and advancements that will impact our world for years to come this week on the tomorrow today briefs podcast, we have Guidehouse Insights principal research analyst into e mobility Sam Abuelsamid.
Thank you so much for being on the show today I really appreciate it. Sam and I have been like we're on another podcast. Yeah.
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Sam Abuelsamid:
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Yeah, we do the wheel bearings podcast every week.
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Roberto Baldwin:
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Yeah, so this is nepotism really to be, but no Sam is he's an analyst. He's very well versed in the world of sustainability. And so when I was thinking about this topic I was like, Oh, I should reach out to Sam. And part of the topic is, and Sam just saved, shared this information with me. So far in the year 2024, 19 percent of vehicles sold in the United States were electrified in some way.
That means plug-in hybrids, hybrids, and battery electric vehicles. It's interesting is that the hybrids account for 10%, the battery electric vehicles, 8%, and then the PHEVs 2%. And it's weird because, we've been hearing a lot about PHEVs sort of taking over the market and surpassing BEVs, but that the numbers don't quite add up so far. I think maybe it's a lack of PHEVs on the market. It's really mostly the Toyota RAV4.
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Sam Abuelsamid:
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Yeah it's a combination of things. There's actually not that many plug-in hybrids available to buy. And many of them are still available in very limited quantities.
Like you mentioned the, the RAV4 Prime and the Toyota Prius Prime, Toyota doesn't actually buy them, build very many of them. So it's just, if you want one, they're actually pretty hard to find. Ford builds a couple of, or actually I think they're down to just one now because they are two, they have the plug-in hybrid versions of the escape and the Lincoln Corsair.
They've discontinued the plug-in hybrid aviator due to apparent lack of interest because they, I think they sold fewer than a thousand of those a year for the last a couple of years. And there's some plug-in hybrids from some of the German premium brands but overall not at, Oh, and also from Hyundai and Kia also sell some plug in hybrids.
And that's about it. There's not a lot, not actually as many options as people think.
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Roberto Baldwin:
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And anybody in that leads into today's topic. And we're going to talk about level two charging and let's just. Let's stop calling it level two. Let's just call it AC charging because when you charge at home or you charge, the sort of, low speed charging or low energy charging, it's AC.
That's the system that, that's the, how we're delivering that energy into the battery versus DC, which we all, we all think of with fast charging. So for this podcast today, we're going to just call it AC charging, as opposed to using level two, which gets confusing with, cause there's so many level twos out in the automotive world at this point. So let's talk about the infrastructure, the charging infrastructure. We talk a lot about DC fast charging. We need lots and lots of DC fast chargers.
We need to have them along major corridors. We need to have them in, in, in towns. We need them, have them out in the middle of nowhere.
And we need to have them for people who are, who maybe can't charge at home. But the reality is that AC charging. Especially for most driving, that's that infrastructure really needs to be built up. And do you see that? And when you're looking at the world and we're looking at charging, do you feel like AC sort of being forgotten about?
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Sam Abuelsamid:
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Yeah, certainly in the public discussion, it is definitely, it doesn't get the attention that DC does, a lot of people have this feeling that they want to replace Basically, just replace the gas station infrastructure with DC fast charging, and they want the same kind of user experience we've had with gas stations for 100 plus years.
And while DC can get you a lot of the way there, DC charging can get you a lot of the way there. It's not necessary. It's not actually probably the best solution. If you know what we're talking about is sustainability and accessibility and equity of charging. For one thing, DC charging is quite a bit more expensive.
One of the one of the things that a lot of people have talked about in promoting EVs is that you're operating costs go way down because the cost of electricity is way less than the cost of gasoline. And that is true. The cost Electricity costs are generally a lot cheaper than gasoline, but if you are DC fast charging, that's not the case. It's actually in many cases it can cost you roughly about the same to DC fast charge an EV as it would cost to put gas in an equivalent vehicle. And so the economics are not great. And there's a number of reasons. The chargers themselves are very expensive. The cost of DC chargers depending on the power levels, can range from anywhere from $75,000 to $250,000 per charger, which is, a couple of orders of magnitude more than AC chargers. And then You know, to charge a vehicle to have chargers that can pump out up to 350 or 400 kilowatts. That also requires a lot of power coming into that location where the chargers are.
If you want to put, 8, 4, 8, 10, 20 DC chargers at a location you need a lot of power, 10, 10, 350 kilowatt chargers. If you want them all to be able to run at maximums, at peak speeds simultaneously, you need three and a half megawatts of power going into that site. And the number of sites that have that kind of power level available.
It's pretty limited, actually. And you've got the cost of doing the infrastructure upgrade to the charging site and the time it takes for that. For AC charging, it's way simpler, way cheaper to do.
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Roberto Baldwin:
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And one of the things we talk about is, you can charge at home. I charge at home.
But I'm a homeowner. If you don't own your home, if maybe you're in a rental house or you live in an apartment building, it's not really an option to have like just a level two charger, like smacked onto the side of your building. Unless of course, you have underground parking or you have a garage, but for a lot of people, that's just never going to happen.
So how does AC charging feel? fit into the, to these sort of scenarios for these people. How does AC charging make their lives a bit easier?
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Sam Abuelsamid:
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Certainly from a cost standpoint, if you can get access to AC charging, it's going to be a lot better for drivers. One of the things that again, doesn't get thought about a lot because we talk about, having incentives to get people to buy EVs, but the reality is most people don't actually buy new cars.
Only a very tiny minority of. Overall car buyers or drivers ever actually buy new cars. In our best years in the United States, we've sold a little over 17 million vehicles. I think this year we're probably on track for about 15 and a half million vehicles and we've got 290 million registered vehicles on the road.
Every year we sell about three times as many used cars as new cars. So when you look at the demographics of new car buyers, yeah, they are going to be a little more affluent. They're going to be much more likely to be homeowners and, live somewhere where they have access to off street parking and ability to charge at home.
But when you look at the demographics of those that buy used cars, Because, most people can't afford a new car, then they are much more likely, they're nearly somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the rest of the population is living in a situation where they're in an apartment or a condo or, or even older urban neighborhoods where it may be a single family home, but they don't have a driveway.
You go in a lot of cities and older neighborhoods, people don't have driveways. They park curbside. And so we have to come up with solutions for those people to get access to charging. And, we have power going everywhere. The amount of power you need for AC charging is so much less than for DC charging that The capacity of our grid to support that would actually be, it would be a lot easier to do that, to roll out a lot more curbside charging and, fortunately there are things happening that will hopefully make that a little bit easier to do in the coming years, especially with the new J 3400 standard.
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Roberto Baldwin:
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And let's talk a little bit about retail charging, because I think, right now, if I go to some of these DC fast chargers, they might be near a retail area, but as cars charge quicker and quicker you're only there for 10 minutes, that's the deal, 10 to 15 minutes, that's not enough time to go into the store, do some shopping.
And if you're going to the mall, or if you're doing grocery shopping, or you're doing all these other things that sometimes take 30 to a few hours, or you're going to see a movie. Let's talk about how AC charging actually makes way more sense for those locations.
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Sam Abuelsamid:
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Yeah. About 80 percent of daily driving is less than 40 miles a day, which means that people don't need to do a full charge every day. And with AC charging, if you are parked somewhere, plugged into an AC charger or an outlet for, one, two, three you will easily have. A full battery, and if you're doing that on a daily basis or even just a couple of times a week, you will probably have a full battery most of the time.
So again, if we make a lot more AC charging available to people, then they can just wherever, our cars are sitting idle 90 to 95 percent of the time anyway. And if we just have a plug everywhere we go. Then you just, you get out of the car, you plug it in, you go do whatever you're going to do, whether you're going to go and buy some groceries for 20 or 30 minutes, or you're going to go sit down for dinner for a couple of hours or watch a movie.
With that kind of with that ability to charge, we could easily accommodate far more people, and have everybody be able to charge at a much lower cost and not have to worry so much about range anxiety because battery's almost always full.
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Roberto Baldwin:
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It's interesting because we're talking about, when you get gas, that is an action. You are getting gas. When you're charging, especially in an AC charger, or you're charging at home, in these like low-speed charging scenarios, you're doing something else.
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Sam Abuelsamid:
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Yeah.
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Roberto Baldwin:
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That's just a byproduct.
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Sam Abuelsamid:
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You're not sitting there waiting for it.
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Roberto Baldwin:
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Yeah you're like I have to go to, Sephora, or I have to go to a sporting goods store, or I have to go to Walmart, and you just plug your car in and you don't feel like, oh God, I have to get outside because my car is charging so quickly.
You're just like, okay, I'll come back in a few hours because this thing is only charging at seven kilowatts or 11 kilowatts versus, 350 kilowatts . And it's also better for the battery.
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Sam Abuelsamid:
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Yeah. No, absolutely. It puts a lot less strain on the battery, charging it, a couple of hundred kilowatts does put, it, it generates a lot more heat in the battery that has to be dissipated.
So it's not as efficient, so your vehicle is Going to the battery thermal management system is going to be running to dissipate some of that heat that you're building up. You've also got the heat from the chargers themselves, because the DC charger is taking AC alternating current from the grid.
It's got to convert that to DC, pump that into your battery. And so there's a lot of hardware running in the background. If you go to a DC charger, you'll, And just stand there and listen, you will hear the, where the boxes are, that with all the transformers, you'll hear that buzzing. And, and if you stand by, you can feel the heat coming off of it. So it's not the most efficient process for putting energy into a vehicle.
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Roberto Baldwin:
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So I talked a little bit about curbside charging. I was just in Europe last week and one of the things that I really enjoy about how they're doing their curbside charging is their bring the own, bring your own cable system.
Do you want to talk a little bit about, a little bit about what are the pros and cons of either having a cable attached to an AC charger on the curbside versus not You bring in your own cable?
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Sam Abuelsamid:
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Yeah if you've got curbside, anywhere you go today in the U. S. Pretty much anywhere you go where there's AC charging, there is going to be a cable hanging off of that charger. And if it's curbside, now you've got the problem of people, you got to get people to actually hang the cable back up, it's usually going to be, loose, it's typically got to be long enough to reach the charging port on the vehicle because they're, the charging ports are all over the place.
And they're, the cable itself is going to be, going to tend to be fairly long. You got to loop it up, hang it on the on a hook or something. And. If you don't, people end up running over the cables, or if it's on the edge of the sidewalk, people might be tripping over the cables, so it's a tripping hazard, or, if there's a bike lane and it's hanging into the bike lane, then there's, problems with that.
And there's also the challenge of, in some places we're starting to see cables getting stolen, thieves going and snipping the cables off of chargers to salvage the copper, and just to sell the copper from the cables. It's a, it's not an ideal situation to have all of these, all these pedestals with cables hanging off of them.
But if we have a system like what they're doing in Europe, where there's just a standard port on there, just like the port on your car, and you just have the cable in the trunk of your car, you have your own charging cable. There will always, you'll always have a cable with you. You never have to worry about pulling up to a charger and having either a cable that's been clipped off or somebody has run over the charging connector and shattered the charging connector.
So there's a cable, but it's nothing you can't plug it in. So bringing your own cable gives drivers a little more security that, all they have to do is plug in and, there's no worries about not being able to find one with a working cable. It reduces the cost of the charger itself. Yeah, there's less, less copper required overall. If everybody's just got a cable in their car you don't have all these idle cables sitting out there. So I think it's a better solution. And, with the J3400 standard now supporting 277 volt charging instead of 240 volts charging, that's of course a single phase of a 480 volt, three, four, three phase circuit.
And so now that's going to make it easier, the charger, the charging pedestals themselves can be lower cost because you don't have to do that voltage conversion in there from 277 to 240. You can just tap right into the circuits that we already have for utility poles and everything else. There have been some experiments with some pilots with doing curbside charging in various places here in the US where you use your own cable.
I think it's, there's, there was one in Brooklyn that Hyundai was doing with It's electric, I think was the company where people could sign up and have a pedestal installed in front of their home or business. And it would just require a small trench through the sidewalk and then tap into the power panel in their home.
And then they could the users would get charged for the electricity. They'd get a cut of that, get an affiliate fee for that. That's one potential solution. And again, with the shift to 277 volts, that could become even easier.
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Roberto Baldwin:
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What's interesting is that the part that actually plugs into the pedestal, that's a universal plug, like they're using it in Asia, they're using it in Europe and they're going to use it here.
The only thing that the other end is where the difference will be in each region. And so that's a pretty for OEMs, for people who are making these cables, that's a big deal because one less thing they have to worry about as they're making these cables.
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Sam Abuelsamid:
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Yeah. They can have, you can use the same connectors globally on, at least on the one end of the cable.
And then, in Europe, it'll be CCS2 on the other end. Here it'll be C or J 1772 or NACS and then GBT in China. So yeah, it will definitely simplify things from a supply perspective.
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Roberto Baldwin:
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And one thing I learned is that if you, if, we talked, you talked about the cut cable if you cut a cable on a, let's say an installed machine and the cable is part of that machine is just down, it's just unavailable.
You can't use it. And it costs a lot of money to replace that cable because you have to bring, you have to get someone out.
You have to, bring the whole machine down. You got to do all these things in order to do it. Whereas, and this would be unfortunate, but it might happen is someone might cut a cable that's attached to a car, which seems a lot less safe.
I think if people would be a lot less likely to do but the only time that cable is going to be out is when it's connected to a vehicle, producing current to, to charge that vehicle. If that, for whatever insane reason, someone decides to cut it, that's horrible for that owner, but everyone else who's going to use that charger going forward, we'll still be able to use the charger, right?
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Sam Abuelsamid:
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Exactly. And, I think hopefully, in the, in the case of, if we have people, bring your own cable instead of cutting the cables, hopefully if someone is, please don't do this, if you're, don't do this sort of thing, but if you're going to do it, just, maybe break the latch and just take the whole cable without cutting the cable.
Cause then, you might be a little less likely to electrocute yourself. You probably still have some arcing in general, just don't do it. But if, if they do, it's replacing a cable like that is a lot cheaper than replacing one that is actually hardwired to the pedestal.
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Roberto Baldwin:
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eah. Yeah, definitely. And so what do you think needs to happen? Does it need to be for us? For folks to understand what that the importance of widespread AC charging, because I don't think people really, I think we are still. Stuck in that I go to the gas station, I get gas in five to 10 minutes, and then I leave.
And that's a part of, that's how we've been trained for decades. How do we change that? How is it from the people who are charging at home realizing that, and then telling everyone? Is it government? Is it you and me? Do we just go around on a road show and we talk to everybody?
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Sam Abuelsamid:
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What I think it's some of all of that. We need, as we make this transition to electrified vehicles, to plug in vehicles, we do need to educate the public, consumers need to have a little better understanding of, How battery charging works, how EV charging works, and especially with DC, because I think if people actually understood better how DC charging works and the fact that it's not a constant flow rate over, as you're charging the vehicle and I think a lot more people would be willing to go that route, cause I think, when, when you stick the gas nozzle from the pump in the, in your car, it doesn't matter if your tank is bone dry or seven, eights full.
The gas is going to flow at the same rate into the tank until it clicks, and it's done. And the car's not talking to the charger at all, or to the gas pump at all. It's a very simple thing for people to understand with DC charging or AC charging, but particularly with DC charging, there's this constant communication between the car and the charger negotiating, how much power the car can, the battery can absorb based on its state of charge and temperature and all these other factors and what the charger is capable of and if the charger is sharing load with other chargers all this nonsense.
And so it's way more complicated than just plugging it in. And I think. If we could do something to educate people a little bit about, at least at a high level of how charging works, that you've got a charging curve that when your state of charge is low, it starts fairly high and then it tapers off as the battery gets full, then I, I think people would, think, Oh, okay If I plug into an AC charger, it's a lot simpler, it's going to go at more of a constant flow rate throughout the charge cycle.
And, I just, I know my car is going to be sitting around for many hours a day and if I can park somewhere where there's a charger available. And if we make chargers available everywhere and we can make a lot more chargers available, In a lot more places with A. C. Charging because of the cost differential and the lack of, the reduced need to upgrade the grid infrastructure then I think people will understand that and make, start to make that transition.
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Roberto Baldwin:
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One of the arguments against EVs is that it's going to bring the grid down. And it's, there's this like weird scenario where everyone's DC fast charging at four in the afternoon or six in the afternoon, everyone gets off work and they all rush to a DC fast charger to charge at 350 kilowatts.
And the reality is that if you charge at home you're probably, if you, especially if you have a metered. system, you're, are tiered, you're charging in the middle of the night at midnight. No one's awake. Most people aren't awake. So most people are, you're like, cause your electricity is cheaper. You're paying for, if you're, if you can charge and get it cheaper, why wouldn't you?
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Sam Abuelsamid:
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Exactly. It's, and it's, it's pretty easy in the background to set up systems on the vehicle or on your charger at home, to know, when are the times when you get the lowest rates and to schedule your charging and because again, you're not typically, in 90 plus percent of cases, you are not doing a full charge on the vehicle, even at home on an AC charger. Usually within an hour or two, your battery is going to be fully charged. So it's so much easier, you don't even really have to think about it at all in most cases.
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Roberto Baldwin:
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Yeah. Yeah. That's our experience now is that with our EV is that we rarely go to DC fast charging stations because there's really no need because you just wake up in the morning. Because we plugged the car in at night and it's got a, a full tank of gas, it's the battery is full. Like your phone, you get up in the morning your phone is full and you go on and you do whatever you do that day.
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Sam Abuelsamid:
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And in fact, if you're a typical driver. You don't even have to do that every day. It's probably a good habit to get into, to do it every day.
So you're all, so you're never going to hit one of those days where, Oh, I need to go somewhere and I've only got 20 percent charge in the battery, so it's probably a good habit, but if you're like most people, if you have a pretty regular routine, you could get by with only charging every two or three days, a couple of times a week.
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Roberto Baldwin:
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And, thank you so much, Sam. I really appreciate you being on the podcast today.
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Sam Abuelsamid:
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Oh, my pleasure, Robbie. It's great. Always great to talk to you.
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Roberto Baldwin:
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For more information about the evolution of sustainability, head on over to sustainablecareers.sae.org. And if you're not quite ready to add an EV to your household, you can check out our other videos, plug-in hybrid explainer video to help bring you up to speed on the hybrid technology and the vehicles. Be sure to subscribe and listen every week on your favorite podcast platform.
SAE international makes no representations as to the accuracy of the information presented in this podcast. The information and opinions are for general information only. SAE international does not endorse, approve, recommend, or certify any information, product process, service, or organization presented or mentioned in this podcast.
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