This video was made possible by CuriosityStream. Watch an exclusive companion video to this
on Nebula, which you can access by signing up for the CuriosityStream/Nebula bundle deal
for $15 a year at CuriosityStream.com/Wendover. With any disruptive technology, there’s
a tipping point—there is a point in time when its path towards market dominance is
a certainty. Now, electric vehicles are almost certainly
a disruptive technology—they’re almost certainly a technology that will, with time,
become dominant over their predecessor. In this case, the predecessor is the internal
combustion car that you, yourself almost certainly use. Chances are, though, when asked, you’d say
that your next car will not be electric, and you’re right—the average consumer, according
to surveys, would not even consider purchasing an electric vehicle, demonstrating that the
technology is not yet at that tipping point where its on a certain path towards market
dominance. But again, that path is almost certain. EVs are not there yet—right now, they’re
too expensive, too short range, and too slow to charge—but they’re close. In fact, research can quantify just how close
they are. It’s been shown that the “tipping point
price” for EVs, the price that will lead to mainstream adoption and eventual disruption,
is $36,000. Taking a look at the prices of the base-models
of three of the world’s best selling electric vehicles, they’re already roughly there,
so we know that that’s not what’s holding mass-market consumers back. What also matters is range. Consumers say they need 291 miles or 469 kilometers
of it before the cars can go mass-market. Two of those best-selling EVs, the Tesla Model
3 and Chevy Volt EV, are not far from that, while the Nissan LEAF lags behind. Range and cost are closely linked, and you
can essentially trade one off for the other, as the battery is the single largest cost
of an EV. That’s why the industry is so focused on
innovating and scaling to lower the component cost of EV batteries, and it’s working. In 2013, the average price per kWh of an EV
battery was $668, meaning the base-model Tesla Model 3’s 50 kWh battery would cost $22,400—2/3rds
of what the vehicle sells for. Nowadays, the average price per kWh is all
the way down to $137, meaning that same battery pack would cost just $6,850, and this price
per kWh is expected to lower to $100 by 2023. It’s getting more and more possible for
manufacturers to sell an EV for the magic $36,000 price with the magic 291 mile range. While EVs are not quite there yet, they’re
really not far, and will be there in the next few years. So, range is not what’s significantly holding
mass-market consumers back, and it won’t be at all within a few years. What is, though, is charging. The research shows that consumers want to
be able to charge their cars from empty to full in 31 minutes, and that’s the magic
number for mass-market adoption. With this, current $36,000 EVs just aren’t
yet there. The base model Chevy Volt EV can’t even
fast-charge, it doesn’t have the technology for it, and even the upgraded, more expensive
model that does allow for fast-charging can only get to 39% state of charge in 31 minutes. The Nissan LEAF does a little better, attaining
62% state of charge in 31 minutes, while the base-model Tesla Model 3 does the best, with
its ability to fill its battery to 83% in the most ideal conditions using the fastest
models of Tesla Superchargers, but that would only give it 196 miles or 315 kilometers of
range, again in the most ideal conditions. In colder weather, both that charging time
would be greater and that range would be less. So, it’s currently possible to get an EV
with just about what the mass-market requires for cost and range, but reaching that charging
time—that’s just a lot tougher. What this research can lead us to conclude
is that the largest barrier right now to mass-market EV adoption is, in fact, the charging problem. The tipping-point just will not happen without
widespread fast charging, but widespread fast charging is just difficult because of the
very way our electric grid works. You see, back in the 1880s, Thomas Edison,
with his direct current electric system, battled it out with George Westinghouse, and his alternating
current system. As the names suggest, direct current electricity
flows consistently and unidirectionally, while alternating current oscillates in magnitude
and rapidly changes direction. The exact details of how each works isn’t
that important in this context, but what is is to know that, for a variety of reasons,
AC power won, it’s now the standard for power grids, but there are certain technologies
that still need DC power. The most widespread example of that is batteries—you
cannot charge a battery using AC power. That’s why you don’t plug your smartphone
directly into an outlet—you plug it into a power brick that plugs into an outlet, and
that power brick is an AC to DC inverter. A standard iPhone charging inverter outputs
5 watts of electricity, which is plenty enough to charge the phone’s 11 watt hour battery
in a few hours. A base-model Tesla Model 3, meanwhile, has
a 50 kilowatt hour battery—4,500 times larger. Therefore, it needs a much higher wattage
power inverter to charge with any speed. It solves this in two ways. Onboard that Model 3, there’s a 7.7 kW inverter
that can take AC power from common sources, like a standard wall outlet, and convert it
into DC power to charge the battery. At its max rate, this can charge the car fully
in under ten hours, and has the advantage of allowing consumers to charge using regular
wall plugs or by installing relatively inexpensive chargers on existing domestic AC electric
circuits. The disadvantage, though, is that, while 7.7
kW is plenty fast enough for regular, overnight, at-home charging, it’s not fast enough to
compete with the convenience of filling up an internal combustion car at the gas station. It’s not fast enough if you’re on a long-distance
trip and need to be able to gain hundreds of miles of range in a matter of minutes. So, if you need more electricity faster, you
need a higher wattage inverter. To be able to take a Tesla Model 3 from almost
empty to almost full in thirty minutes, you want between 120 and 250 kW. The problem, though, is that a 250 kW inverter
costs, at least in this case, $57,600 and is about the size of a very large fridge—it’s
not exactly practical to have this as an internal component of the car. So, for faster charging, one needs to offboard
the inversion process. That’s exactly what a DC-fast charger does—it
supplies a huge quantity of DC power to the car, which bypasses the onboard inverter and
charges the battery directly. Between the inverter, the charger, and all
the other equipment needed for a fast-charging station, the cost and size is not insignificant. One of the more popular models, the Chargepoint
Express 250, which can charge a single car at a somewhat slow 62.5 kW, sells for $40,800,
and that’s before installation. Meanwhile, while it’s tough to get an exact
figure, industry experts estimate it costs Tesla about $250,000 to build an average Supercharging
station with 6-8 stalls delivering 120 to 150 kW each, while its closest equivalent,
the stations by Volkswagen’s Electrify America, are estimated to cost $350,000. But here’s something counterintuitive: using
a 250 kW charger versus a 150 kW one doesn’t really impact how fast you charge. Batteries charge slower the more full they
are, so the first 20% will pass far faster than the last 20%. In the context of EV charging, this means
that quite quickly into the charge, the speed is impacted not by how much power the station
is putting out, but by how much electricity the battery can accept. So, it’s actually faster to charge to 50%,
drive until empty, charge to 50%, and drive until empty again than charging to 100% and
driving to empty. A Tesla Model 3 can go from zero to 50% charge
in 15 minutes on a 250 kW charger, and 17 minutes on a 150 kW charger—giving it enough
range to drive at least 100 miles or 160 kilometers—while charging from 50% to 90% would take an additional
27 minutes in both cases. So, combining two charges from empty to 50%,
in two stops, you could effectively reach the tipping point speed of 100% charge in
31 minutes with existing 250 kW chargers. Therefore, what the industry needs is not
faster chargers, but more chargers, which is hugely difficult given the enormous cost
of fast chargers. The average American lives four minutes away
from a gas station. Meanwhile, the same average American lives
31 minutes away from their nearest Tesla Supercharger. Currently, there are 976 supercharging stations
in the US—each of which have anywhere between two and 56 individual chargers. In order to match the four-minute average
of gas stations, Tesla would need to build an additional 31,251 Supercharging stations. At their $250,000 per station cost, that would
cost the company some $7.8 billion, or roughly ten times their total annual profits from
2020. In addition, only some 750,000 Teslas ever
have been sold in the US, meaning, to have fast charging stations as accessible as gas
stations, the company would need to install a $250,000 Supercharging station for every
23 cars it had on the road. Quite obviously, that’s not feasible, as
the stations would never break-even with such infrequent use, and that’s the exact problem. You need the infrastructure to sell the cars
but you can’t build the infrastructure until you sell the cars. It is the classic chicken and the egg problem. There might, however, be a solution. According to federal government data, there
are some 3,845 non-Tesla DC fast-chargers in the US—the vast majority of which could
charge a Model 3 within an hour… assuming it could connect. Just as there was a format war in the 1880s
between DC and AC power, there is now a war of charging standards. Take the example of Salina, Kansas—a small
city off of Interstate 70 which most people only visit to refuel or, in this case, recharge. This Supercharger uses Tesla’s proprietary
plug, this Electrify America station uses CCS and CHAdeMO plugs, and this hotel’s
charger uses a J-1772 plug. There are four different plug types in one
small city. Now, a Tesla could use the Tesla charger and
the J-1772 charger with an included adapter, but it could only use the CHAdeMO charger
with a speed-limited $540 adapter, and it couldn’t use the CCS charger at all—as
there’s no adapter for that plug-type. Meanwhile, a Chevy Volt EV wouldn’t be able
to use the Tesla or CHAdeMO chargers at all as there are no adapters available for either
to its CCS plug. This means that, to accommodate every vehicle
type, DC fast chargers need to have three different plug types, which, overwhelmingly,
they just don’t. Especially along Interstate highways, there
are the Tesla stations, and there are combo CHAdeMO and CCS stations. Just like Edison and Westinghouse delayed
more widespread adoption of electric power by competing against each other in the same
areas with their different, incompatible AC and DC standards, different stakeholders in
the electric vehicle market are competing against each other in the US to create redundant,
largely incompatible networks. But that’s not happening everywhere. You see, in Europe, CCS is the standard. The European Union has a directive which means
that many member states, by law, require that public DC fast chargers include a CCS plug. Therefore, in the EU and neighboring countries
like the UK, Norway, and Switzerland, CCS is now the de facto or de jure charging standard. That forced Tesla’s hand to the point that
in 2018, it retrofitted all its existing Superchargers with CCS plugs, switched its Model 3’s to
CCS, and released an adapter allowing its other models to use CCS chargers. All told, this means that pretty much any
car in Europe can use pretty much any DC fast charger. That, combined with Europe’s higher population
density, has helped ensure that the density and coverage of DC fast chargers is much greater
than in the US, despite the fact that EV ownership per capita is actually higher in the US than
Europe as a whole—although certain European countries far eclipse the US’ rate. Europe is almost identical in size to the
US, it has a very similar number of electric cars overall, but it has double the number
of DC-fast charging stations. In Germany, the furthest you can seemingly
get from a DC-fast charger is here, in Winterberg. From this small ski-town, the nearest fast
charger is about 30 miles or 50 kilometers away in Marburg. Meanwhile, in the US, if you wanted to drive
directly from Dallas to Denver, two major cities, using a base-model Tesla Model 3,
you just couldn’t. There’s a 226 mile or 363 kilometer stretch
with no DC fast charger between Amarillo, Texas and Trinidad, Colorado which, given
the elevation gain, the car would not make. While Tesla is plugging this gap soon with
a new charger in Clayton, New Mexico, that won’t solve the problem for every single
other EV on the market, since the charging systems are not compatible. Simply put, mass market consumers are not
going to buy cars that can’t drive from Dallas to Denver. What Europe has that the US does not is coordinated
government plans. Germany's federal government, for example,
builds its own charging stations, in addition to offering strong incentives for private
companies to do so as well. Meanwhile, the federal government in the US
has done very little to incentivize fast-charger construction, and certainly does not have
a network of its own. Certain states, such as Oklahoma or Colorado,
do have strong, coordinated government programs to build fast charging infrastructure, meaning
even shorter-range EVs can drive essentially anywhere in each state without encountering
a fast-charger gap, but the problem is that EV drivers from Colorado or Oklahoma will
eventually want to drive through Kansas, or Nebraska, or Wyoming, or other states that
do not have a coordinated plan. The US Federal Government clearly wants people
to buy EVs, because it offers hefty tax credits to those who do so, but people are not going
to buy EVs without the charging infrastructure to support it. EVs are comparable in cost to internal combustion
cars, their range is about what consumers demand, but what’s lagging behind is that
charging infrastructure. This isn’t even an exclusively American
problem. In Australia, one can’t drive from Perth
to Sydney—the country’s forth and first most populous cities—in an EV, due to a
massive charging gap, while in Russia, despite similar incentives for EV purchases, there
are a total of 24 DC-fast chargers in the entire country. Of course some will always debate whether
governments should be incentivizing electric vehicles at all, but regardless of that, they
are—it’s tough to find a developed country that does not have some tax or other monetary
incentive for EV ownership. The point is that they’re incentivizing
the wrong way. EVs are very, very close to reaching the tipping-point
criteria for everything but charging. Cost is not standing in the way, technology
is not standing in the way, infrastructure is, so governments are putting the cart before
the horse. Individual companies cannot reach the required
scale, and even if they did, as the format war in the US proves, it probably wouldn’t
be the kind of scale that the mass-market consumer demands. Individual car companies can deal with making
individual electric vehicles attractive to consumers, the government doesn’t need to
worry about that, but infrastructure—that’s the government’s job. Governments run or regulate roads, and bridges,
and tunnels, and sidewalks, railways, airports, electric grids, dams, sewers, water supply
networks, and even fuel supply systems, because they are infrastructure, and infrastructure
is essential, so the only question is: why not charging? So, as you might have guessed by now, I own
an electric vehicle, so I took it to my local Tesla Supercharger to make a companion video
to this where I give a super detailed, super nerdy explanation of exactly how a Supercharger
works from a technical perspective. You can find that companion video exclusively
on Nebula which, as you probably know by now, is home to tons of exclusive, ad-free content
from tons of your favorite educational creators. The reason we can put companion videos like
this there is because of the way Nebula works—it doesn’t have an algorithm to punish us when
we make something different from our normal stuff, and the direct subscriptions from users
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exclusive content, plus supporting loads of independent, educational creators, you can
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sign up for any subscription—but I suggest the yearly one since it’s on sale for less
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early, and ad-free videos from the educational creators you already know and love. CuriosityStream and Nebula together is greater
than great, though, because it’s only $15 a year with the current sale at CuriosityStream.com/Wendover.
To add to the EV advantages of europe, Germany will mandate the installation of EV chargers at gas stations.
Very poor from Sam here. EV charging is a hugely complicated problem, but I was surprised to see the mention at the end that he's an EV driver himself.
The philosophy around charging here is simply wrong - DC Rapid Charging doesn't need to be in major cities. Stats like "The nearest charger is 30 minutes away" are incredibly misleading when actually most charging is done at home - and it's incredibly rare that you'll set of on a journey and immediately need to charge.
Sure, there are gaps in rapid charging networks. The lack of compatibility is a pain in the butt. But the real problem with charging is closer to home. People who rent apartments, workplaces installing chargers, local authorities adding chargers (or just plugs!) in places where cars are already parked.
Sam, you might have to make a video of all the things you got wrong for this channel after this video.
Not really getting the hate this video got. I really enjoyed it, thanks Sam!! I was a little "omg Mustang Mach E" and this grounded those expectations a little. It also finally got me to go for the nebula/Combo.
Good video overall. I'm not sure I fully buy that rational consideration of the availability of fast charging is the main reason US adoption of electric cars isn't extremely high.
This limits people's abilities to make long roadtrips with the car, but not so much around town. Most American households have multiple cars, so this concern is heavily mitigated. It's true that ICE cars are generally regarded as higher-utility, but I'm not sure how much of that is rooted by how hard it is to find a charging station on the highway. Since Americans are more likely to have a garage or driveway than Europeans, I suspect a lot of the need for fast chargers by commuters is relieved.
As another criticism, I'd note that I think the remark about the trip from Perth to Sydney being impossible isn't a very good point of interest. The trip by road from Perth back to the main part of Australia is long, barren, and considered to be dangerous. It's not like a road trip from LA to Houston, it's a whole step above...people not seeking adventure just fly.
I have some disagreements about the points made in this video, so much so I spent a few hours to write up a blog post about them (sorry for the clickbait headline). I welcome all criticism, let me know if any of you have pointers (I'll probably record and upload a video response of my blog post with any extra considerations this weekend)
Damn, he keeps making longer and longer videos.
You mixed up the Chevy Volt and Chevy Bolt.
Volt = hybrid BOLT = EV
I've had discussions as to why there hasn't been a bigger roll out with people in the industry and a lot of it revolves around automated driving. There is a legitimate worry that by the time to get the ROI for installing one of these fast charging stations, the model of car ownership will switch to rentals where a company maintains the cars instead.