Range Anxiety

NOTE TO READERS – GOD WILLING, I AM IN THE PROCESS OF CROSSING THE INTERNATIONAL DATE LINE HEADING TO SINGAPORE, SO BEFORE YOU START GETTING MY MUSINGS FROM THE ASIAN CONTINENT, I AM POSTING THIS APPROPRIATELY TITLED STORY ABOUT MY EV TRUCK, WHICH I AM LEAVING BEHIND TO REST FOR THREE WEEKS. BRACE YOURSELVES FOR MY IMPENDING TRAVELOGUE.

Range Anxiety

I’m confused about my EV truck and probably other things. I got into EVs seven years ago because of my brother-in-law, Jeff, who was jazzed about them like a kid who wanted to buy an EV kit from the back cover of Popular Mechanics. In fact, he had plans to build his own EV car out of his old Porsche and an EV motorcycle out of a 2000 BMW RT1200 that I gave him. At the time, I had no particular curiosity about EVs and I also suspected that his DIY EV projects might never get off the ground, but I needed a new car for California as I expected to be moving out here sometime soon. That was in 2016, so I was three years ahead of myself, but Kim and I went to the Fashion Valley Mall and found the Tesla showroom and ordered a Tesla X with the gull-wing doors. It didn’t bother me that the Tesla would mostly sit in my garage until I was ready to move out here for real as I knew Jeff would get a kick out of driving it and exploring the wonders of EVs, perhaps also spurring his kit-building program on. It didn’t do that, but it did get him to take over my deposit on a new Tesla 3 to get a jump on the purchaser line that was starting to form around the “Everyman EV”, as Elon Musk was touting the Tesla 3 to be.

I only took two small same-day road trips with my Tesla X over seven years of ownership and that was enough range anxiety to convince me that however much I enjoyed driving my Tesla (and I did enjoy it quite a bit), it was a car that I would only drive locally for errands from our hilltop. I would use Kim’s Mercedes for any distance travel. In fact, once Jeff got his Tesla 3, it became his family’s only active car and when he needed to travel longer distances from home, he would use the Tesla and thereby becoming more confident with EV roadtrips than I ever was.

It’s been three months now since I traded my Tesla X for my Ford F-150 Lightning. I’ve driven the truck more in those three months than I ever drove my Tesla X in any three month period. I’ve put about 3,000 miles of the truck and I have now taken more roadtrips with it than I took in seven years with the Tesla X. During my last trip, which was up to Newport Beach, the truck battery hiccuped and dropped from 140 miles of remaining range to 95 for no reason I could explain. I had 75 miles to get home and I made a game out of trying to make it home without a charge. It worked and I actually arrived home with about 30 miles on the meter (which is uncomfortably low by my standards), so I had managed to cheat 5 miles from the system. Today, I had to go to Irvine for a deposition, a distance of the same 75 miles from my hilltop. I knew I would have no problem getting to my meeting, but wondered whether the truck would play the range-grab game with me again. I knew I would not finish until about 5pm and that I would be anxious to get home after a long day on the hot seat, so the last thing I wanted to do was spend an hour sitting at a charge station in the evening on the way home. When I arrived at the Marriott, where I was meeting my client this morning, I found an empty charge station staring at me in the parking lot and I made a command decision that I was not curious enough about my previous range glitch to risk running on empty in the evening, so, I plugged in for the hour while I was at breakfast and managed to add 28 miles of range for $2.83, a price that is about half the price per mile that I would have paid with my gas-guzzler.

I chose to drive home at a leisurely pace (meaning at the speed limit) and take a shortcut to avoid the 78/15 interchange, so as to only rack up 70 miles home. Even accounting for the added 28 miles of range, I used 10 miles of range less than I did the last time I made the trip, so I completely avoided range anxiety this time, but for reasons completely unknown to me. But let’s get serious. In over fifty years of driving internal combustion cars, I cannot once recall thinking or writing about range and anxiety associated with getting from here to there. So, any way you slice it, EVs = range anxiety because if you run dry, you cannot easily carry a gas can or the EV equivalent to the disabled vehicle in order to get on your way. In fact, I don’t really know what you do if you run out of juice on the road somewhere, other than call Tesla or get towed to a charger. That sort of gap in mindset for someone reasonably astute who has owned an EV for seven years is altogether pretty telling. All that said, there are more and more chargers available at every imaginable location provided by an expanding array of private for-profit providers, so running out of juice should be a pretty remote situation compared to even a few years ago.

I did recently read that in California, the motherload state of EV existence, at any given time, 26% of the chargers are disabled and there are certainly enough EVs around to assume that during normal hours, many of the functional ones are probably occupied. That translates into what seems like lots of potential waiting time. From my Marriott charging experience this morning, it seems I would have had to have waited patiently for three hours at least to cover my charging for my one hour trip to Irvine. That time utilization program doesn’t seem to be adding up too well.

Every day there are articles about how the bloom is coming off the EV rose. Almost anyone can recite that battery technology, while being heavily invested in and certainly improving, is also using up more and more energy to manufacture and mine, as to the rare earth minerals needed to make them most efficient. EV cynics are having a field day about all of this even while falling price points of EVs are causing people to continue to convert over from gas-powered vehicles at an ongoing pace. Two weeks ago I sent around to my cynic friends (Mike is a cynic in general about EVs and lots of things that involve our changing world, and Jeff is a cynic about my F-150 Lightning, which may be caused by Tesla pride or just anything-Rich-does cynicism) an article declaring the Ford F-150 Lightning the EV truck of the year for 2023. The competition is not too plentiful yet with Rivian winning the award in 2021 and 2022, my Lighting winning 2023 and now the Chevrolet Colorado winning the accolade for 2024. That all means there must be an adoption trend, right? But I also read an article that the Lightning production is being severely curtailed due to lagging sales.

The stated cause of concern is none other than range anxiety. Trucks are expected to persevere in harsh weather conditions and yet battery technology suffers greatly in adverse conditions, especially cold. Those boys with EVs in places like the upper Midwest are finding their range severely curtailed in the cold winter months or if the terrain is too rough, or if they drive too fast with their Let’s Go Brandon signs flying from their truck beds. Its all coming down to range anxiety.

On my first Tesla road trip in 2017, I drove to Las Vegas with Kim and my sister Kathy and her husband Bennett. We were making a one-day turnaround trip to commemorate my mother’s memorial service. That 300 mile trip, according to my Tesla’s charging computer, would need two charging stops on the way and two on the way back. We has a full car and I drive a bit faster on the slab, so I expected that I would burn range miles pretty quickly. The whole exercise was an eye-opening experience for me about EVs on the open range. At my first charging stop in Barstow I met an older couple charging their Tesla X. I got talking about their range experience and the man told me tales of driving his S 50,000 miles across the country and NEVER having an episode of range anxiety. I was impressed. When he walked away his wife took me aside and said that whenever she noticed her husband slowing down, she knew he was running low on juice and that range anxiety was setting in and that it was a daily occurrence. I really do love my EV truck, but I guess range anxiety is like death and taxes, none of us can avoid it, but few of us want to admit it.