Electric Vehicles are here: But the 2-5 minute charger is what drivers really want.

EV chargers in Kailua, Hawaii

For the past ten years there has been a steady growth of EV vehicles in Hawaii. From being curiosities twenty years ago, as of last August they are increasingly becoming the norm. There were an estimated 14,000 electrical vehicles in Hawaii according to Hawaiian Electric. According to the numbers put forth by HECO’s Aki Marceau that is 1.4% of the 1.4 million electric cars on the road.

Demand is such that 7 x more chargers are needed than in 2019.However, growth in electric vehicles has been limited by the number of public chargers available. They are too few and too slow. The average wait time to fill a gasoline car at a pump is 2 minutes. To charge an electric car even the fastest chargers take between 15 and 40 minutes. One can only imagine how long it will take to go to a large public charging station like Cost co where there are hundreds of cars waiting to charge up at one time.

 According to federal estimates there are presently only 361 EV charging stations state wide with a total a total of 739 charging outlets or ports in private homes or condos. Only some 25 are said to be fast chargers. The fewer the fast chargers the less the appetite for electric vehicles.

If the state plans to reach its goal of 500,000 EV by 2045 –It will need to be able to install faster chargers or face nearly continuous grid-lock at charging stations.

This grid lock on electric chargers at public gas stations is already predicted on the Mainland later in 2022 when the first electric Ford F-150 arrive in March. The F-150 is the largest selling truck in America.  In 2023 this will be followed by the electric GM Silverado. These trucks will have to be charged as needed and there will not be enough chargers in place to accommodate everyone.

In Hawaii, this grid lock will likely come later because the top selling truck in Hawaii is not the F-150 but the Nissan Frontier. When the Nissan Frontiers and Toyota Tacomas arrive the problems of servicing all the EVs in Hawaii will become acute.

According to an article in the Detroit Free Press the principle limitation to the time it takes to charge electric vehicles is that their electric charger cables tend to overheat as electricity flows through them; the greater the amount of power, the faster the charge, the greater the heat and the greater the threat of fire.Typically because of the heat transfer problem most home charger cables can deliver fewer than 150 Amperes and fast chargers are 1,400 Amps. However the Purdue project, with a self cooling electric cable is still under going testing . The researched hope it will be the game changer that can deliver a charger with 2,400 Amps and a full vehicle charge in only 5 minutes.

            They better hurry up because demand for electric vehicles are growing but the chargers are still too slow.