Buc-ee’s May Be The Ultimate Gas Station. That Doesn’t Mean It’s Best For EV Charging

I recently reported how Texas issued grants for EV charging, but the winners were almost entirely gas stations, while Tesla
TSLA
, which offered far more stations per money did not receive grants because they were offered first-come, first served. Readers had questions over why gas stations were not great places to put EV charging, in particular because many of the Texas grants went to a popular chain there named Buc-ee’s. Buc-ee’s stations are truly massive, with tons of pumps, car washes, food, clean bathrooms, restaurants and a mega convenience store. It is designed to be a very good place to fill up, and based on reader comments, does it very well.

By today’s standards, these stations might be reasonable places for road trip EV fast-charging, which typically takes around 40 minutes. One could stop there and eat fast food if it’s a mealtime, and possibly pick up some road-trip supplies. It can compare with many other charging locations, though is probably inferior to locations at malls which are equipped with a variety of restaurants and larger, more market-price grocery and goods stores. However, even those outlets are not the ideal. The ideal is not yet understood by many, especially those who have never driven an EV. Understanding requires considering certain points that do not become clear until one does long road-trips in an EV.

Destination vs. Service

For gasoline car drivers, a gas station is a place they go to fill-up with gasoline. That is its purpose. Amenities, like shopping or food, and secondary. Very few would take a trip to a gas station just to shop or eat without buying gas. Buc-ee’s has tried to make a great place to get gas and offer things you can do conveniently after filling up.

While today, many EV charging stations are also built as destinations you go to charge, that’s the wrong thinking for the future, and it is based on the idea of the gas station. What EV drivers want is that the destinations they stop at for other reasons happen to have charging, so they can charge while visiting a place they wanted to visit. With a gas station, the gas is the goal and the shopping and food are amenities. For EV charging you want the food or shopping or attraction to be the goal, and the EV charging to be the amenity.

We aren’t there yet, except of course in the case of the most popular EV charging stations, namely the ones in people’s homes. There, it’s clear that the home is the destination, and charging is the amenity. This lets you charge when you sleep, which is the best time to charge because it’s cheap and takes zero time from your day.

Making EVs the best cars ever

Governments, car companies and others are working to switch the world from petroleum to EVs, and for good reason. To do this, though, laws are not enough. This really happens when EVs are clearly the better choice of vehicle. For many car buyers, they already are, but there are still many skeptics and even opponents — it’s surprising the anti-EV propaganda which often comes up in the debate. (More on that in another article.)

When you drive around your own town, EVs have already become the best vehicle.

1. They are much more powerful, faster and fun to drive than any comparable gasoline cars
2. They are quieter, for both those inside and those outside
3. They are vastly cheaper to run per mile. So much cheaper that while people think of them as more expensive due to high sticker prices, the total cost of ownership over the life of the vehicle will be cheaper than comparable gasoline cars, even without subsidy.
4. Maintenance is almost non-existent, saving both time and money.
5. They emit no bad smells, use and drip no oil, can can run heat/AC without being “on.”
6. For people who have charging at home or work, charging takes no time out of the day and no diversion from your route — it’s easier and less time consuming than gasoline fill-ups.
7. They tend to have much better high-tech features and driver assist.
8. And oh, yes, they don’t burn fossil fuel and pollute far less in almost all locations. Even if you don’t care about that.

They are not, however, fully superior when you go on a long distance road trip, or if you don’t have charging at home or work. Then drivers must use “fast” charging which is much slower and harder to find than gas pumps. Some areas without charging infrastructure are still off-limits for easy road trips. An EV road trip does require some compromises, and we want to remove those compromises if everybody is to embrace EVs.

Most EV drivers still use their EV on road trips in spite of the compromises. They love the super low cost and the zippy performance, and while they could rent a gasoline car, they feel that this has its own compromises. (The cost difference is strongest here. I did a 5,000 mile road trip last summer and paid under $100 for electricity. Compare that to the cost of gasoline, especially today, and you might be willing to accept certain compromises.)

Some hope to fix the problem by creating batteries that can charge in 10 minutes. While these still need to get into production and out of the lab, this will always be a more costly proposition, and there is another solution, namely a better understanding of where to put charging — and of course the will to put it there.

Every road trip, other than the crazy “hard slog” trip where drivers take shifts while the other one sleeps, includes many hours of pausing during the day. People pause to sleep, to eat, to take bathroom breaks and of course to do road trip activities — seeing attractions, doing activities or on sadder trips, working.

The answer is to, as much as practical, get charging in place where people already want to stop. Motels, restaurants, shopping and attractions. In an ideal world, you stop where you want to stop and would have stopped if driving with gasoline, and while you are parked, you charge. It’s ideally “plug and play” charging that involves only 20 seconds of extra time after parking — and some day it’s automated and not even that is required. The charging stall is reserved ahead, and it just becomes part of the regular act of parking.

This returns the EV to being superior to the gasoline car. The charging takes just seconds from your day, compared to gasoline fill-ups which tend to take several minutes (and cost 4 times as much, of course.) This type of charging infrastructure makes the EV superior in every way both at home, and on a road trip. While there will still be a few compromises — most notably towing, driving in areas without this infrastructure and the mealtime rush — they will be minor compared to the negatives of gasoline.

We aren’t there yet

Today, in the early EV era, we’ve mostly worked by the old model — EV charging stations which are scarce, and you must treat as recharging destinations. That’s how the world had to begin. A world that wants to move to an EV takeover has to do better. It needs to both spread charging out to the remote locations, and put charging where people already stop. This will take some time, and until the ideal infrastructure is laid out, people will continue to rely on fast charging stops that remind us of gas stations, and they will try to make them nice places to stop, as Buc-ee’s tries to do.

The first target is actually slow charging at most hotels. Many road trippers don’t drive more than their car’s range in a day. They are on the road to see and do, not just get places. For them, fast charging may not be needed at all most days, and charging will happen while they sleep. The fast charging will be only for those doing long slogs, though few do more than 500 miles/day, which means they typically need only one fast charge, some time mid-day, to get to the next hotel. Those putting in more time behind the wheel could call for 2 charges.

Charging should slowly be increased anywhere road trippers stop. You won’t get absolutely everywhere, but soon having charging will be a must for any business that wants the tourists. You won’t see it at a remote trailhead (unless there’s convenient power) but you should see it near most restaurant clusters, parks (state, national and amusement) and most things that show up in guidebooks. In the ideal world you can eat and charge at almost every restaurant, but until then, restaurants will get more business if they offer the service. The big problem is that today, it’s much too expensive to do this. This should and can change as stations are made in the millions rather than tens of thousands.

Until this happens (and even after) there will be “destination” EV charging locations, which you go to because there isn’t a location you wanted with charging. Those might resemble the Buc-ee’s but ideally will have a wider choice of restaurants and shopping, tables for eating take-out or picnic food not bought there, fast wifi to spend time online, and things to entertain the kids for 45 minutes. It may be that the internet is sufficient entertainment, though most road-trippers today don’t really seek out 45 minute online breaks in their travels as a first choice.

Stations like Buc-ee’s are open 24 hours, which most other destinations are not. If you have to charge at 2am, or even 10pm, it’s definitely nicer to do it at an active place, but for most people that would be an unusual thing to want to do. Those who are commonly awake and driving at this time (shift workers) have places they go, which could get their charging. Or they may still find an EV a compromise. Charging at these times is highly unusual on a road trip — one is normally charging at a hotel.

Some readers report they even stop at Buc-ee’s to not buy gasoline. In this situation it makes the cut — a destination you already would stop at with the amenity of charging.

Bathroom Breaks

The average person visits the bathroom every 2-3 hours. Many gasoline stops are also used at bathroom breaks. Buc-ee’s famously puts a lot of effort into their bathrooms. The usual bathroom break, though, only takes a couple of minutes in the bathroom, not enough time for significant charging.

On the other hand, there is a charging strategy that not too many follow but which minimizes the charging time, and that is to run your battery between 20% full and 50% full — getting just 30% of your total range between stops. In a car with a 300 mile range that’s only 90 miles between charges, which is very low. Most cars only charge at their full rate under 50% charge. Cars that can charge at 250kw can fill up those 90 miles in just 6 minutes. 150kw cars it’s more like 9 minutes.

You can drain down to 10% but it puts slightly more stress on the battery. And of course you can charge more than 50% but charging slows down quite a bit, getting to a relative crawl over 85% on most cars. People don’t follow this “least time charging” strategy because it takes time to get off the highway and to a charging station and back. If the charger is not in a highway rest-stop type location, you could spend 5 minutes getting to/from the charger to spend 6 minutes charging, and you are better off charging a little longer, a bit less often.

Nonetheless, there is a strategy involving frequent charging every 2 hours of driving with a bathroom break and internet break and 10-15 minutes of charging, depending on the car. Those few cars that can take 350kw can do it even better. This is not ideal, but it can work if the stations are right on the road (having their own off-ramps, the way on-highway stations do.) Like all charging, this would be facilitated by automated reservations where a stall is allocated to you and you go directly to it, and you go to a different station if the first choice is too busy. The car would handle all the logistics of that.

In an ideal day, you might fully charge at your hotel, and drive a long way (even with a non-charging bathroom break) until down to 15%. Lunch would also involve a full charge, so you might do only a couple of bathroom break charges until getting to your hotel.

The problem with meals

One flaw in the logic above is that while meals are something everybody does and thus a great time to charge, it’s an issue if everybody wants to charge at the same time. A restaurant’s charger would be very busy at lunch (though lunch would range from 11am to 2:30pm to get more use) but have few takers from 3:30 to 5 when early supper charging would begin. This means you have to build more chargers than at locations where the demand is even most of the day. In addition, power is much more expensive at dinner time, so those who care about cost would prefer to avoid it. Because electric driving is so much cheaper than gasoline, many drivers actually don’t care about much about cost, paying literally double for dinner charging than lunch charging. It’s hard to imagine a town where there were two gas stations, one at $3/gallon and the other at $6/gallon.

Non road-trip

I have left out chargers for people who can’t charge at home/work. These tend to be in cities, rather than along rural routes for road trippers. These are never the ideal — the best plan is to work to get more slow charging at apartments, offices and curbs, the places these cars naturally park for long periods. Before that, these people use urban fast chargers. Fortunately it’s easier to find urban locations with many good destinations that most urban dwellers visit regularly. Grocery shopping is the obvious winner, as it takes about the right amount of time, and people do it at all hours. Any other activity people do 1-2 times a week is the right place to look. But for people in this situation, they must for some time accept some compromise in their EV — and weigh it against the costs and compromises of gasoline.

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