Driving an electric vehicle on Long Island: The highs and lows of powering up

Gary Kabol couldn’t be happier with his all-electric Jaguar for driving around Long Island, including day trips to Montauk and even New York City. But Kabol, of East Quogue, wouldn’t dream of trying to take it on a 300-mile trip to Ithaca, despite a vehicle range of more than 200 miles.

“We couldn’t take it because I said we’re going to be stopping and I’m afraid I won’t find a charging station,” said Kabol, a real estate broker in Westhampton Beach who has driven with the heat or AC off to conserve battery life. “A lot of the time you find a place and it’s not working and then you have to have it towed.” 

Long Island leads the state in electric vehicle ownership, with just about 50,000 EVs and plug-in hybrids registered — and the percentage of EV car sales nationally continues to grow, with a projected 4 million expected on U.S. roads by this summer, according to research firm J.D. Power. 

But bumps in the road that have dragged on the EV market for more than a decade continue to worry potential buyers and nag many current owners, chief among them the lack and inconsistency of publicly available EV chargers.

In a recent J.D. Power survey, 29% of 2,000 potential new-car buyers said they were “very likely” to consider buying an electric vehicle, but in the end only about 9% made such a purchase. Another finding looms large over their hesitance: One out of every five times an EV owner pulls up to charge their car at a public station, the attempt fails — because the station is being used, it’s not working or they can’t get their payment to work, J.D. Power found.

“The biggest reason why people are not interested is because of supporting [charger] infrastructure” challenges, said Elizabeth Krear, vice president of the electric vehicle practice at J.D. Power. That’s especially critical as EV sales outpace the rate of new charger installations. “EVs on the road are growing at a 2.5-times-faster pace than charger growth,” she added.

This month, the Biden administration announced it is awarding $623 million in grants to help build an electric vehicle charging network across the nation, part of a larger federal effort to fund upward of $7.5 billion to build a national network of 500,000 stations across the nation. 

Even as drivers wait for that build-out, the outlook for EVs nevertheless remains bright, and developments among vehicle manufacturers to standardize around the vast and widely praised Tesla charging network is bound to help this year and next, experts said.

EVs as a percentage of vehicle sales grew to a 9.8% share during the first three weeks of December, a jump from 8.9% in November, J.D. Power found. A year ago, the share was 7%. “Basically, we saw a 2% share growth for the year,” Krear said.

For the year through November, EVs as a percentage of sales were 8.4% compared with 5.8% for the period in 2022, said J.D. Power, which projects EVs to grow to a 13% share of U.S. car sales this year, then to 19% for 2025.

But inventories of EVs began to accumulate at last year’s end, when EVs composed around 6% of the total unsold vehicle inventory across the U.S. compared with 1% in the prior year. Krear noted that EVs were hard to come by in 2022, and that higher inventories by the end of 2023 could help greater EV adoption because of greater availability.

Charging up in Riverhead

A recent charging trip to Riverhead shows the issues an EV user might contend with on a typical day in quest of battery capacity. At the Suffolk County Community College Eastern Campus in Riverhead, three of four ChargePoint chargers were available (during winter break), and the price for a charge couldn’t be better: free. Only one was in use.

But not everyone would be able to wait the four to eight hours necessary for the midlevel L2 chargers to bring a vehicle up to 80% to 90% capacity (the chargers generally add around 10% capacity each hour). And users must log into the ChargePoint network on a phone app to unlock the chargers for use. Tesla users need an adapter.

Several miles up the road, in downtown Riverhead, a set of eight superfast chargers installed last year as part of a program by the New York State Power Authority, working with Electrify America, were running and available.

A typical user could recharge most of a car battery in an hour or less, but the cost was higher: 40 cents a kilowatt-hour, a premium over the approximately 25 cents a kilowatt-hour typical users pay for energy from PSEG Long Island.

For example, charging a Newsday reporter's Nissan Leaf from empty can range from free at Nissan dealerships, to $15 at home, to $27 at NYPA stations and up to $35 at higher-cost charging stations such as EVgo’s (for nonsubscribers during peak hours). Some stations also charge a fee to park, or if the car is left in place after it's finished charging.

Kabol noted that after initially telling him his charge time would be over 1,000 minutes, he noticed his Jaguar was charging at around 1% a minute, enough for him to get his battery up to more than 50% from the initial 8% in well under an hour. Price wasn’t an issue for him.

But it might be for users at a bank of superfast chargers at a Costco shopping center to the west, where charging company EVgo offers four stations in the most common non-Tesla formats, CCS and CHAdeMO. Prices ranged between 29 cents a kilowatt-hour to 69 cents, depending on whether users had paid to subscribe to the EVgo network at $6.99 to $12.99 a month. Chargers also ranged by time of day, with the highest cost between the peak of noon and 9 p.m.

Across Old Country Road, a Tesla-operated facility in the parking lot of a shopping center had nine superfast chargers working and only one in use. But any non-Tesla users looking for a quick superfast charge were out of luck. The single ChargePoint fast charger had a smashed display, and a lighted sign saying it was unavailable.

Experts say the industry is dealing with its charging challenges, but that it could take several years to fix them.

“This is a big transition,” said Neal Lewis, executive director of the Sustainability Institute of Molloy University at its Amityville campus. “There’s an ongoing effort to uniform the system.”

One big part of that effort is the car industry’s coalescing around a single charging format: the Tesla standard, and its network of some 35,000 well-maintained charging stations across the county. Some 23 carmakers have indicated plans to switch to the format, market watchers say, and most of those with existing formats will have access to adapters.

Lewis said increasing access for a greater range of potential customers is critical because the wide use of home chargers in suburbs like Long Island can exclude a potentially large market of people like himself who are renters. Not all rental or condo building owners are willing to install chargers for tenant use, despite generous PSEG rebates to do so.

“The number is admittedly a big number of [additional] chargers we need to see,” for widespread access and a fuller conversion to EVs, Lewis said.

Planning ahead

For those willing to work with the current system’s limits, the gains are large: EVs require little maintenance (they have no transmissions, need no oil changes or spark plugs), get generally 30% to 50% better mileage than gas engines, and are widely considered more fun to drive (faster and quieter).

Depending on the availability of rebates for equipment and the complexity of installation, it can cost upward of $2,000 to install an EV charger at home.

For Andrew Manitt, research coordinator at Molloy’s Sustainability Institute, driving long distances off Long Island simply requires more planning and time. He’s made trips as far away as Tennessee, with planned stops at known charging stations and more time set aside for charging stops.

“You have to change your mindset from a gas station on any corner to a need to be aware of where chargers are and which are more expensive,” said Manitt, who noted that “even the cheapest gas station is going to be more expensive than your electric car.”

Manitt’s 1,000-mile distance to Tennessee was covered in two days instead of one, at 500 miles a day. “I don’t like long trips. I don’t mind stretching my legs to hit the charger” for an hour or more, he said. “I know there are other people who would hate that.”

Plug-in hybrids fill the gap

“It’s the charging infrastructure and range anxiety that are still holding people back,” said Paul DeCotis, a senior partner with the East Coast energy and utilities practice of consulting firm West Monroe. DeCotis, former deputy secretary of energy for New York State, said he believes it will take from three to eight years for EVs to gain “significant penetration as a percentage of vehicles on the road.”

Meanwhile, he said, the EV market’s growing pains appear to be paving the way for a new class of plug-in hybrid vehicles that deliver the best of gas and electric cars. DeCotis, also a former vice president and managing director at LIPA, drives an Audi Q5 with a 30-mile battery range for the bulk of his local driving, and a highly efficient gas engine for traveling longer distances. “I can go 30 days without putting gas in the tank,” he said.

“I think we’re starting a transition point here [with plug-in hybrids] until the industry is able to support the infrastructure for charging,” DeCotis said.

Long Island has seen strong steady growth of EVs. With fewer than 100 EVs sold in 2011, the total number on the road reached 11,000 in 2017, and approached 50,000 last year, according to New York State. Charging infrastructure has lagged. LIPA in 2017 was found to have around 50 charging stations for every 1 million people, or 40 chargers per every 1,000 electric vehicles.

It has grown steadily since. According to research firm Atlas Public Policy, Long Island had 327 publicly available superfast chargers publicly available on Long Island last year, and 581 midrange, or so-called Level-2 chargers. That's a jump from the 53 superfast and 76 Level-2 chargers on Long Island in 2018, Atlast reported.

The goal is to add 54 more fast chargers this year, and steadily increase the number to 498 by 2028. Meanwhile, Level 2 chargers will jump by hundreds per year to reach a total of more than 4,000 by 2028, according to the utility. PSEG said its EV Make Ready program offers incentives for multiple-unit dwellings to help address a dearth of chargers at apartment and condo complexes.

LIPA chief Tom Falcone acknowledges the utility is “going to have to take it up a notch” to hit state and local EV objectives, particularly with Level 2 midrange chargers. This year, PSEG Long Island is restarting a customer rebate starting at $200 off home chargers, and has rolled out new rates that make overnight charging for EVs cheaper.

Falcone, a Tesla driver, said as the industry shifts to the Tesla standard for chargers, the charging infrastructure challenges will begin to settle out. “I’ve driven from Long Island to Rochester in a Tesla and it was good,” he said.

Falcone stressed that most charging by Long Island EV drivers and fleet owners is done at home or at a business- or government-operated chargers. And given that Tesla dominates the market with roughly two-thirds of vehicle sales, Tesla owners have access to a vast network of more than 35,000 chargers across the county where charging success and satisfaction rates are high, J.D. Power noted. 

New York State promotes fast charging

NYPA, meanwhile, is leading the effort to increase fast chargers on a statewide basis as part of its EVolve New York initiative. The agency’s goal is to have 400 fast charges installed as part of its program by the end of 2025, a big jump from the 150 chargers at 40 locations currently in place. The state’s goal is to have a combined 6,000 fast chargers, from both the public and private sector, including the dominant Tesla chargers, by the end of 2025, said John Markowitz, senior director for e-Mobility at NYPA.

“Our vision is to be a first mover on this,” Markowitz said, with a goal of the transportation sector being mostly electric by 2030. In addition to the chargers in Riverhead, NYPA has sponsored fast chargers in Bridgehampton, Commack and Copiague, and plans up to four more for Long Island by next year’s end. Federal infrastructure money from the Inflation Reduction Act and other programs could help facilitate the build-out.

One goal is “making it possible to drive from Long Island to Buffalo with any [electric] car,” he said.

NYPA also wants to see charging made simpler at the stations, favoring a Tesla model where all payment information is built into the car, and users simply need to plug in, charge and drive off. NYPA stations have the capability to do so with Ford and Mercedes EVs, but most cars aren’t compatible. “That’s where we’re hoping all the automakers go,” Markowitz said.

For customers such as Kabol, who was using a NYPA station in Riverhead recently, EVs are clearly the wave of the future, but with caveats.

“When we’re going out to Montauk, it’s a beautiful ride in this car,” he said of his Jaguar EV-400. “It’s quiet, it’s fun to drive. And there’s more than enough power to come home and charge it at home at night.”

CORRECTION: The listing of electric vehicle registrations by ZIP codes that was in a previous version of this story was incorrect.

By Mark Harrington

mark.harrington@newsday.comMHarringtonNews

Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.