Why I've decided not to buy an electric car

I love the idea of owning an electric car. While I think a lot of the "innovations" in the space are a step backwards or just obviously unsafe (giant touch screens, electrically operated door latches, smaller, brighter lights, etc., and thankfully regulations seem to be catching up with these), the idea that I can drive places while burning no gas, charge my car in my garage overnight and have it ready to go in the morning, potentially go months without visiting a gas or charging station... It's all very enticing.

I've given a lot of thought to how I'd install the charger while keeping my 100 amp electrical service (more on this below), and how great it would be if that charging were someday powered by my own solar panels.

But my wife helpfully nudged me into a very different viewpoint. We live in a place that has very good public transit access, and neither of us drives to work. We drive once a week or less, to support our hobbies or for larger grocery shopping trips. Meanwhile, most of the space in our garage is dedicated to a car we rarely use. It's difficult and nerve-wracking to get that car out through our narrow driveway, we spend quite a bit of money on insurance, gas and maintenance, and when we drive we spend a lot of that time sitting in Toronto traffic.

Not only that, but huge amounts of energy and materials (some very limited and hard to source) would be needed to build the new car we'd drive once a week or less.

I'm increasingly convinced that a focus on the needs of drivers has done a huge amount of damage to the livability and culture of cities around the world and especially in North America. I hate how car-centric Toronto sometimes feels, especially when I'm in the vicinity of the 401 or the Gardiner. When I think about this, I know that really the future I want to see isn't one in which drivers switch to electric cars, but one in which it's easier to get around cities without using cars, and cities are more pleasant to live in and more conducive to community building and public health.

So, I believe an electric car is better than a car with an internal combustion engine, but not driving is even better. I recognize this is a privilege I enjoy as a person with access to transit and the ability to work from home. But I suspect a lot of people could drive a lot less, and I think we subsidize driving a lot more than we should.

On Charging

Before we moved in, we hired electricians to significantly update our wiring. We had a combination of (uninsurable) knob and tube, aluminum and copper wiring, and we had rooms where outlet availability was far short of code requirements. The electricians discovered that power to the garage was carried by a buried extension cord not at all suitable for burial. They took this opportunity to install a hefty 100 amp connection to the garage and a new panel there, explaining that eventually we'd want to upgrade the main service to 200 amps and would need the 100 amps in the garage for electric vehicle charging.

The service upgrade would be expensive, but really I didn't like the idea because I just don't think my wife and I need to be consuming that much energy.

To figure out whether I would really need that upgrade, I had to consider three things:

My actual charging needs

It seems common for electric vehicle buyers to install 40+ amp level 2 chargers. These can add as much as 90 kilometers of range per hour of charging (here's a calculator with actual models, chargers, and charge rates). I don't need nearly this much charging capacity.

First, my car would sit in my garage for at least 12 hours per day. That would mean I could get almost 100 kilometers of charge from a standard household outlet at 15 amps. And since I don't need to drive to work, my car would generally sit for several days between trips.

Technology Connections explains this better than I can. Most people with home charging don't need 40 or 50 amp chargers, or really even need level 2 charging:

TL;DW: If you can charge at home, plan for your average trip. There are always level 3 fast chargers for that infrequent longer drive.

Load management

Even if I did need 30 or 40 amps of charging, there are now smart monitoring options which can ensure that your EV charger doesn't draw power while another large appliance, like an electric dryer, is drawing power. Electrical capacity planning assumes the worst case scenario in which everything that can possibly draw power will draw it at the same time (which is important for safety). But by interlocking your EV charger and dryer you can "reuse" those amps.

My actual energy consumption

On top of all this, the electrical code actually allows a different way of calculating your power needs: by looking at your actual recorded usage. While I'm theoretically close to the 80% of my 100 amp service I'm allowed to allocate, how much do I actually use?

Toronto Hydro has a very helpful page that shows your peak demand: your maximum energy draw in the previous 12 months, for exactly this purpose.

My peak demand: 39 amps.

I have never in the last 12 months reached even half the allowed 80 amps on my 100 amp service. If you're served by Toronto Hydro, or if your hydro provider can show your peak demand, look it up, as you may have more room for that new EV charger than you thought.