First EV Road Trip

It’s been just over 72 hours since I’ve owned the Mach E, and I’m still really happy with my purchase.

Before I forget, I just wanted to take a pause and capture some of my initial thoughts regarding Charging and Range Anxiety.

One of my early and persistent concerns with buying an EV was range, and the logistics of charging: how does it even work? Will I need a charger at home? How much range is enough? Why don’t you charge to 100% every day? Do I even need to charge every day? So many questions, and so far, 3 days in, not many answers to the bigger questions.

However, one of my biggest worries about home charging has largely been much ado about nothing.

When I picked up the car from the dealer, it was charged to 91%, good for about 390km (give or take). My drive home was about 50km, but I was surprised to see about 360km remaining on the gauge. I had to take a slower road home as construction had clogged up the more direct – and obviously faster – highway route.

I am “limited” to standard 120v charging so far at my house with the Ford Mobile Charging Cord that I got as part of my order. I put limited in quotes, as the most basic of L1 chargers really hasn’t limited anything I’ve needed to do thus far. IF I go in to my office, my round-trip commute is only about 15km (and I don’t go in every day), so the 44km minimum that I’ve obtained overnight from my Charging Cord is more than enough to cover that. If my wife were to drive the Mach E to her job, the round-trip usage is about 60km, which still wouldn’t put too much of a dent into the battery.

Charging is easier than I thought – although I don’t know why I thought it would be difficult. Simply plug in one end to the wall, the other to the car, wait for the charging lights to spin around and that’s it. Status of everything you need to know is done through the FordPass app, and is simple enough for anyone to figure out. From the YouTube videos I’d watched, I knew I could set preferred charging times, in order to optimize charging times and costs due to ‘preferred time billing’ from your electric company. What I didn’t see in any video – and was very happy to see in the app – is that you can enter your postal code and it automatically detects your hydro/electricity provider. The app detected that my billing rate is lower weekdays from 7pm – 7am and 24-hours all weekend, so it suggested those as optimal charging times.

By having a full 12-hour window on weekdays to charge, I’ve been getting roughly 75km with the puny little 120v charge. Of course it would be nice to have a 240v outlet in my garage to give me 75km in about 2-3 hours, but so far, with the car sitting idle anyway, it’s no big deal to use the 120v. I did have someone come out to the house today to see if it’s possible to put in a 240 outlet, and I’m expecting an estimate next week.

If it’s too expensive or logistically too complicated, I think I can get by with the 120v charging for quite a while. We’ll see what winter brings, but even then, I have several L2 and L3 chargers within 10km of my house, and many of them are at local dealerships, meaning they are free. Or at least that’s what apps like ChargePoint and the BlueOval map is telling me. I still can’t believe that higher capacity chargers would be totally free, so I will have to check those out and see for myself.

Anyway, for anyone with a short commute thinking the logistics of charging are more complicated than they are, take it from me, you absolutely CAN get by with just the 120v charger (at least initially!).