Reply to EV ownership - anything you wish you knew?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=jsteele][quote=Anonymous]Just got a new EV for a second car, and plan to use it mostly for driving locally. Just looking for tips from other EV owners/things you wish you’d know from the start. Any perks/benefits, or things to watch our for? Any good spots to shop and charge in MoCo? (Rockville/Bethesda area) I do have home charging but am a fairly low mileage driver and a quick top up at a public charger would last me a while.

For anyone considering EV, lease deals are great right now.[/quote]

I just got my third EV, this one on a two year one payment lease for $5,430 out the door. If you are going to do any amount of public charging, give extra thought to your strategy. You didn't mention what make or model your car is, but for most of them you will probably need a different app for almost every brand of charger. You can alleviate that by using apps that work with multiple brands. For instance, the Chargepoint app can work with EV Connect, EVgo and some others in addition to Chargepoint. Sometimes your car's app can charge with all of these brands so look into that as well. Get used to using an app like Plugshare to research chargers in advance so that you don't arrive and find a bunch of surprises. For instance, on a recent road trip we knew in advance that a station at which we normally stop had half of its chargers out of commission. Plugshare said there were long lines most of the time. So, we avoided that station and went to another one where there were available chargers.

The charger situation is a little complicated. If you have a non-Tesla, you probably have a combination J1772 and CSS1 charger. The J1772 is used for level 1 and level 2 AC charging. Both plugs are used for level 3 DC fast charging. Teslas use NACS connectors for both AC and DC. You can get an adapter to use Telsa AC chargers. There tend to be a lot of those at motels that you use free if you stay there. So one of those adapters is a good investment. My wife used a Tesla charger at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and got free charging while visiting the museum. So our adapter was handy for that.

Whether or not you can use Tesla DC fast charging depends on your car. If you can, another adapter will be necessary for that (unless you have a Tesla of course).

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Thanks, this is very helpful. It’s a Kia. Enjoy your new car. [/quote]

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