I took a 360 mile trip (one way) a couple weekends ago in my 2015 Tesla Model S 70D—a somewhat reasonable stand-in for a Bolt in this scenario—and charged exclusively via CCS/CHAdeMO stations during the trip (video below). Why? Because I was curious. Because I wanted to put aside my EV optimism and assess the current state of DC fast charging infrastructure for non-Tesla EVs. Keep in mind that I’m in California, so this should be like the best case for EV travel in the US, right?


The trip caused me to realize that I’ve been entirely too charitable toward the non-Tesla DC charging infrastructure.

The entire existing CCS/CHAdeMO network is fundamentally incompatible with reasonable long distance travel and any car released in the near-term that relies on said network is dead on arrival when it comes to long distance travel.


There. I said it.

While standards like CCS can support fairly high charge rates, even at the current 400V standard, nearly all of the stations being put in output 50kW or less on the DC side... even on “long distance charging corridors.” Heck, some of the CCS stations installed along highway 101 (not the route I took) are only 24kW! For things to even start approaching the realm of reasonable, network operators need to toss everything they’ve installed along travel corridors and replace the stations with 100-150kW stations. That’s step one. I lost about two hours here.


Step two involves filling out network to include one of the most frequented travel corridors in the state, like Tesla did right from the beginning. Seriously, I lost an hour just to this. It’s as though the network operators are simply extending their city-focused short range infrastructure to a few towns that happen to be along some highways that can be longer alternates to the main highway that people use for traveling between the LA area and the SF Bay Area. I understand why they would take this approach, though, since it would result in some revenue through local charging at the locations and that could be viewed as a necessary thing given the chicken-or-egg situation that the network builders are faced with right now.

Step three is increasing the number of plugs at each charging location (again, chicken-or-egg problem) and, more importantly in the short term, actually performing the maintenance necessary to keep the stations working. At my first charging stop, one of the cabinets was occupied by an i3 and the other cabinet was malfunctioning. I called customer support, who validated that the station was experiencing an error (gee, thanks) and then proceeded to keep me on the phone long enough for the i3 owner to arrive and inform me that the cabinet I was having trouble with almost never works and the network operator in question hasn’t done anything about it. I lost about 20 minutes here.


Did I mention that the trip probably cost me about $49 in charging fees?

All in all, this little experiment of mine took what’s normally about a 6 hour [free] trip via the Supercharger network (probably ~$13 with new vehicle Supercharger pricing, ignoring the free charging allocation granted) and turned it into a 9.25 hour trip that cost around $49. So, driving an EV on this particular trip is about 15% slower than a conventional gasoline powered vehicle in the best case and nearly 70% slower in the almost worst case (take the trip in a current Leaf or something if you’re looking for a real worst case).


Can all of this get better? Yes. Will all of this get better? Yes, but it’s going to require someone to put up a lot of cash to make it happen. The charging infrastructure that VW will be building as a result of their settlement with the EPA and CARB should go a long way toward improving access to charging and could very well cause the long distance CCS travel experience to match or exceed the current experience offered by Tesla... by 2019. The changes that the next few years will bring to the EV market are going to be pretty exciting, but we’re still a long way from parity with gasoline cars.