Motor Mouth: The (fantastical) numbers behind an all-electric future

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What did you do this past holiday weekend? Head out to the cottage for one last swim? Visit relatives/friends/parole officers in some distant ville? Whatever your chosen escape, you were probably behind the wheel, the first weekend of September being Canadians’ favourite for hitting the road.

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How about Labour Day Monday? Not nearly so bucolic, right? Probably stuck in all that traffic, desperately trying to get home from summer’s last fling, the sheer volume of cars made only worse by the fact you probably had a passel of screaming rug rats in the back seat.

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Fear not, yours was not the dreariest of holiday Mondays. You could have been counting all that traffic. Or, more specifically, you could have been enumerating how many vehicles were popping into roadside gas stations to refuel their long ride home. No matter how many are-we-there-yets you heard, it doesn’t compare with the tedium of standing — because, as a neophyte traffic analyst, I had forgotten the folding lawn chair — in the middle of an ONroute gas station on the 401 between Montreal and Toronto. With clipboard and stopwatch, I (im)patiently recorded the comings and goings from some pretty frenetic gas pumps. There was method to my bald-spot-burning madness (I had also forgot to bring a hat); I was trying to find out what the recharging infrastructure of the future might look like. This is what I recorded.

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Almost like clockwork, the average time per fill-up was four minutes. Oh, small hatchbacks took a few seconds less and SUVs a few more, but basically all the pumps were, uhm, pumping through about 15 cars an hour. Even the breakdown of those four minutes was almost metronomic — a minute-and-a-half for the interminable keying in of credit card information, two minutes to physically fill the tank, and another 30 seconds to fasten seatbelts, start the car, and tell the kids to shut up.

Four long hours later, the pace had not slackened. As soon as one car took off, another took its spot. In fact, in all the time I was there, the lineup for an available pump never dropped much below 15 or so cars, trucks, or motorcycles. At one point, the lineup become so unmanageable that ONroute personnel had to close the lane allowing direct access to the refueling station and, lest the line of cars block traffic on the highway’s off-ramp, divert traffic through the dining section’s vast parking lot.

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Do all the math and that means, with 16 kiosks all pumping without break, ONroute was servicing about 240 vehicles an hour. In the four hours I was there, that would mean 960 infernal-combustion-engine vehicles were refueled and sent on their merry way for a further 400 to 600 kilometres. And, if the station attendant I spoke with was at all reliable, the logjam had started at 6 a.m. Use your multiplication table yet again and, between early morning and when I left at 4 p.m., those 16 pumps might have serviced as many as 2,400 vehicles. Even allowing for some unnoticed diminishing of pace and the greater refueling time a spate of humongous F-350 duallies might have engendered, that’s a boatload of cars.

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Now to even pretend we could recharge that many electric vehicles during the same amount of time hardly bears discussing. I’ll save you all the unnecessary long division and just note that servicing 240 EVs an hour with current charging stations would require 100 or so 350-kilowatt stations for the quickest-charging EV currently in production, Porsche’s fire-breathing Taycan ; and almost 200 of the 150-kW charging points that are optimal for Ford’s Mustang Mach-E .

As EV proponents are fond of pointing out, the EV charging stations of the future may not have to deal with quite that volume of traffic, their contention being that more EVs leave home with a full charge than gas cars with a full tank. That said, the discrepancy is not nearly as broad as protagonists claim. For one thing it ignores the typical Canadian motorist’s ferocious preoccupation with pump prices. A litre of 87 octane was two-cents-a-litre more expensive at the highway pumps than in the big city, more than enough to send a fair few parsimonious motorists to their local gas station before hitting the open road.

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Nonetheless, let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that Labour Day recharging station traffic would be reduced by 50 per cent when all cars go electric. That would still, in the best-case scenario — that fast-charging Porsche — have us needing 50 350-kW portals per ONroute. That would mean each ONroute station would need, on Labour Day, at least, about the same amount of electricity as a small town of 10,000 to 12,000 inhabitants. Nor does the classic response of the diehard EV-er — that people will gladly spend the extra time recharging requires to grab a sandwich or pee — hold much credence. Almost two-thirds of the people I watched simply fueled up and left without a stop at the restaurant or toilet.

Nonetheless, let’s imagine the battery charging advancements of the next decade or so. Let’s assume — and, believe me, this is not a given — we can achieve a 10-minute charging time in the foreseeable future (and forget the predictions by StoreDot CEO Doron Myersdorf and others of a five-minute charge; that is based on a Nissan-Leaf-sized 40-kilowatt-hour battery that will barely get you around the block). Factoring in the two minutes to process Visa as well as buckle up, our mythological fast-charging ONroute would need at least 24 super-high-powered charging points.

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Each ONroute station would need the same amount of electricity as a small town of 10,000 to 12,000 inhabitants

How super-high-powered, you ask? Well, one of the idiosyncrasies of EV recharging is that, unlike filling up a gas tank — which happens at a constant rate — EVs charge at their peak capacity but a small fraction of the time they are plugged in. Take a look at the chart posted by InsideEVs and what you’ll find is that, despite being rated for a peak charging rate of 150 kW, the Mach-E averages about 90 kW for the first 80 per cent — in which charging is most efficient — of its recharge, and barely 32 kW if you were to charge the battery all the way to 100 per cent (a 100-per-cent recharge took two hours and 29 minutes, says Tom Moloughney). According to Car and Driver, the same average charging rates for Porsche’s Taycan were 76 kW; and 41 kW for a Tesla Model S, even though they are rated for a peak of 270 and 200 kW, respectively.

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In other words, the 500-or-more-kW average charging rate it would take to get a 100-kilowatt-hour EV to 80 per cent of its maximum charge might require a charging point with as much as one megawatt peak capacity to get on the road again in just 10 minutes. Suffice it to say that megawatt charging is some way off. Indeed, anyone thinking that 1.0-mW hand-held charging points are in our foreseeable future is also welcome to visit my Kijiji posting for the Brooklyn Bridge.

Of course, there are also five more ONroute stations between Toronto and the Quebec border — plus one more equivalent giant roadside stop on the Quebec side before hitting Montreal — that were all serving our Labour Day rush. How many were as overwhelmed as the one I visited is impossible to tell, but it beggars belief that mine was the only one feeling a surplus of traffic. Do the numbers one last time and even predicting a 50-per-cent reduction in refueling needs — the assumption that EVers always leave with a full charge — and hoping for more than a doubling of charging speeds still points to an extremely difficult transition to all-electric motoring, a makeover we are nowhere near to even beginning.

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Notice that this discussion hasn’t taken into account what may be needed to refuel the zero-emissions long-haul trucks of the future. Or what a reversal of the supply and demand equation for electric charging — little demand currently, a huge surge in demand in the future — will do for future recharging costs. EV owners religiously recite low cost of operation as a major factor for their conversion to battery power. To think that suppliers won’t take advantage of the huge spike in demand wrought by electric vehicle “fueling” is to believe in a complete suspension of market dynamics. (By the way, Europe’s Ionity chain has already seen an explosion in fast-charging costs.)

As to how all this will play out in 10 or 15 years, two scenarios jump off the page. The first would seem obvious, namely that, despite incentives and promotion, electric vehicles simply won’t become as popular as predicted, and everyone — including the spate of automakers who’ve recently pledged to end production of ICE-powered vehicles by 2030 — will have to rejig their market predictions.

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The other possibility is lineups that will make the angst of 1973’s oil crisis seem like a proverbial walk in the park. Indeed, I suspect that more than a few of those advocating for a car-free future would welcome such a disruption, hoping that it would discourage people out of their cars. Call me a conspiracy theorist all you like, but anyone thinking that the anti-car hatred of some of our plutocrats will end with the demise of internal combustion just hasn’t been paying attention.

Finally, the biggest red herring in the EV propaganda machine is that we only “average” so many kilometres a day, the implication that whatever figure they cite is well within the range of a single battery charge. The fact is, however, there is not such a thing as an average day. Rather, we drive a whole bunch of (occasionally extreme) days that add up to an average. Sometimes those extreme days are long and occasionally, as on Labour Day Monday, we all do them simultaneously. Canadian Tire doesn’t build 16 pumps into each of its roadside stations because that’s how many fuel dispensers are needed on an “average” day. They’re there because, on occasion, that’s how many they need to get everyone home in a (semi-)timely manner. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough how the EV industry meets those same demands.