Habits Die Hard

Refueling an electric vehicle (EV) is not like refueling an traditional vehicle (ICE). With the majority of Americans having grown up with a gasoline or diesel fueled vehicle, we have become reliant on “The Light”. Yes, that’s one that pops on and, without hesitation, my kids go “Dad we are going to run out of gas”. We have become conditioned to waiting until the light turns on to begin thinking about finding a gas station. We know we have X number of miles left and so we know we need to get gas between now and X.

Our habits with refueling, aka recharging, an EV is need to evolve just the vehicles themselves have evolved from having an internal combustion engine to having an electric motor. The number of chargers available is increasing daily just as the number of EVs on the road. There is a natural balance that occurs with having a sufficient quantity of chargers vs the number of EVs in a given market. For example, if there are only 15 EV’s in a town, we don’t need 200 public chargers. That said, we do need to become smarter with refueling / recharging.

With an ICE vehicle, you find a gas station to go from 10% to 100% fuel. Our habits need to evolve when recharging our EVs. Rather than waiting until we get to 10%, we need to take advantage of available chargers to consistently “top off”. If your battery is at 35%, you’re going to the mall and know you’ll be there for a couple of hours, why not take advantage of the open, convenient EV parking space with a Level 2 charger and get that battery back up to 80%? Going to dinner and you’re at 57%…hit the charger for an hour to “top off”.

If we use common sense and don’t continue to be lemmings doing the same things over and over, we can break our habits. If we do this, I strongly believe that the anxiety over where to charge will begin to dissipate quickly!

Let me know your thoughts.