S4 E42 - Electric Vehicles Part 2: Bridging the Gap Between Makers and Buyers

Electric vehicles promise convenience, clean energy, and a futuristic driving experience — but the engineers and regulators pushing the transition still don’t understand the lifestyle they’re demanding from real drivers.

In Part Two of this series, The Tenth Man takes an EV on the road: across the state, through a blizzard, and into the baffling maze of buried touchscreen controls and charging confusion. Why can’t remote start work while the car is plugged into unlimited power? Why is pre-heating the battery hidden behind one specific navigation app? Why does every tech designer think eliminating buttons is “progress”?

EVs are fast, quiet, and fun.
 But the human-factors engineering? A disaster.
 The infrastructure? Still lagging behind.
 The policies? Written by people who don’t drive the technology they’re forcing others to adopt.

EVs aren’t the problem.
 The system around them is.

Electric Vehicles: Part Two — on The Tenth Man.

Commentary on trending issues brought to you with a moderate perspective.

Transcript

The Tenth Man: 0:12

Electric vehicles represent the latest technology, but they're still operated by people. How the mines of the makers fail to match with the hands of the buyers. Today on the 10th Man, last time we talked about buying an electric vehicle, learning the quirks, the hidden costs, the charger scams, and of course about the deer that totaled the thing after we got it. And electric vehicles have plenty of strengths. But they also come with growing pains, and what surprises me most is how many of those growing pains might be completely avoided if the people designing and regulating EVs just understood the paradigm they're forcing on everyone else. I take regular trips across the state, as I said before. Okay. Not far, but far enough that I can't do it on one charge. And you don't wanna arrange surprise because with an ev mistakes, minor mistakes will cut into your charge and cost you time and nobody will refund your time at the charging station. So one example of what we're talking about as far as the design is that most EVs. Or most EV owners that is, will protect their battery by defaulting to an 80% charge. That's a setting you can make, and that's smart because it preserves the battery, and you'll do that unless you're taking a trip and then you want to have a hundred percent, so you just change the setting. The problem, well, that 100% setting is buried three menus deep in the touch screen. They love touch screens, and if you forget to change it the night before, or if you make a mistake because there's one setting for the fast DC chargers and there's a different setting for the charger at home, the level two charger, that's a mistake I made. So you wake up to go on your trip and you don't have a fully charged battery. Now a simple switch. Would solve this, or maybe two switches, one on each side of the steering wheel, but the automakers seem to think that a sleek screen is more important than functionality. Another setting is the drive mode. Now you have normal eco and sport. I am not sure why you couldn't just press the gas pedal down harder, but, and uh, sport can be fun at the red lights'cause the car is fast. But unless you remember to switch back, you might go on a long trip as I've done and find that you meant to be in eco mode and it was in sport Now that's partly operator error because there is an indicator for that and there is a switch. But don't you wonder, with all the things that the computers anticipate for you, why don't they anticipate the things that they should, like when you get up and you plug in a destination across the state 150 miles away, it might then ask you, well, do you want to be in eco mode for that? Because I would've said yes, and another one to remember is the seat cooler. You know, you can cool the seat and then you don't have to run the ac. Now, this is just something you do have to remember, but again, it's buried down in the menus. You have to swipe and press and swipe again, and press again, and then you'll, and then decipher it. On our particular car, I think many cars have the touch screen problem, but on our particular car, the indicator would light up blue for on or white for off. I don't even remember which, instead of having an on and an off, and the one that's actually. Active, the off or the on, and that lights up, but you have to go in there and turn, turn the seat cooler on instead of running the air conditioner. Another thing you can do, and it's easy to forget is switch off the air on the passenger side when you're driving by yourself. Well, you know, the car already has a sensor in the seat to tell you if somebody's sitting in it. Why doesn't it suggest turning off the passenger side air conditioning? Because there's nobody in that seat. And then for you to do it, you gotta, again, dive into the touch screen. And after owning it for a year and a half, I still could not tell you where the screen is. I have to hunt for it every time. Now, can you work around these problems by forming new habits? Yes, but the thing is, human factors engineering. Uh, we used to call it ergonomics that's been around since the moon landing, and it's a science. You set up a dash panel and you put some test subjects in a chair, and you test how long it takes them to do a task with setting A or arrangement B, and whichever one is the best, that's the one you use. But the auto industry acts like. They've never discovered buttons as if they've never existed, and most operators really prefer buttons. Of course, that's not just an EV problem. Now let's talk about charging plugs. Most American EVs use a, a connector. It's called a J 1772, and you can forget that because it's gonna be phased out because what happened? Well, it's just like. Hmm. What? VHS and beta, it's just like other standards where there were two of them. Because Tesla uses their own, what used to be called the Tesla plug is now called the N Plug because it's now gonna be the North American standard. Now Tesla, it's kind of like Apple computer where they have their own system and. If they told everyone else, you can't use this, but they had more Teslas than anything else. So now everybody else is switching to Tesla. So now it's gonna be called the North American Standard. So you hear what we're saying here? A few years ago, you were not allowed to use a Tesla plug because it was Tesla proprietary, and now you're going to be required to use a Tesla plug. So our car, it was the J 1772 and we knew that these things were in the mill. So we asked and they said, um, they said in 2025, you'll be able to start using Tesla chargers. Well, one would hope that meant we were gonna take the car back to the dealer and he was going to disconnect. All they had to do is manufacture a bunch of, uh, switchover receptacles, right? Same form factor. Uh, unfastened, four bolts. Pull it out, unplug it, put in the new one. Well, I can't tell you what they're gonna do because 2025 came and it's almost gone, and we never got anything. So don't know whether it's gonna be an inline adapter plug or a connector on the car. No idea. But meanwhile, after we'd had our car about, oh. Seven or eight months or so, Thanksgiving came and we are gonna drive to see family, and that family happens to have Teslas. So we said, we don't, we don't have our adapter yet, so let's buy one. So we bought a, an inexpensive adapter from Amazon, I think it was. There were several of'em. They all had good ratings from people. It was 20 or$30, I don't remember, which. And the plan was we'd drive to their house, then we'd plug in, and the car could be plugged in for, oh, at least, you know, three or four hours, and that'd be enough to fully charge it for the trip back. And we didn't even need a full charge. So we plugged it in first thing and nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. Now, this would be a good segment for our series on. There ought to be a law regulating the stuff that's sold on Amazon, because this was just another example of Amazon Junk. And by the way, I can't swear to it, but as far as I know, the difference between the two is just the form, the shape. It's like traveling through Europe where the voltage is all the same, but the plugs look different. That's the only difference. But it didn't work well. It wasn't a disaster. We could still drive home. We'd just have to charge on the way. Well, there was a blizzard and of course one reason we have EVs is so we don't have to stand outside next to a gas pump during a snow storm. But we hit the road and uh, it occurred to me this was the first time this had happened. Ever. It occurred to me that I had to use the battery heater, so we're driving down the road and looking through the controls and trying to find out, find where the battery heater is, because you have to preheat the battery so it will charge faster. Well, we couldn't find anything and it turns out, it turns out the only way you can turn on the battery heater. Is to set the charger as your destination using the built-in navigation. Oh, and CarPlay and Google Maps. Those should be integrated. It's talking to the car after all, and there's no reason it shouldn't know that. But in this case, I knew where the charger was. I was just driving to it, and I figured I'd push a button, say. To, to, to, to start conditioning the battery 20 minutes before I got got there, but you couldn't do it. So that charging stop took forever. But we managed to get home. A few months later. Another long trip. This is actually the longest one ever took. Um, it was a couple hundred miles and out and back, and this time it was in hot weather. And I said, well, I've learned my lesson. I'll use the Hyundai navigation. And it didn't warm the battery'cause it didn't need to, but it did calculate the stops. So it, it scheduled us to stop unexpectedly, presumably because it anticipated when the next stop would be. Now the one stop that it got right was one of the free ones. So that was nice. And then, uh, we continued on our way. It started back and it had programmed another stop for us where we ended up driving, getting off the highway, driving into a small town through the town, starting to drive outta town, and it says, charger ahead. You've just passed it. And we looked and we just saw a car dealer with a chain link fence around it. And the gate was padlocked shut, so there may have been a charger there. There may, there may not have been a charger there, but we just ignored the navigation turned around, and fortunately I found a charger. It ended up being the same one that I found myself on the outbound leg, and if I had not had a phone and or a map. I would've been in trouble. Now, let's see if you're smarter than a car engineer, because I'm gonna give you a little exercise in critical thinking. think about a podcast as people can't shout out. Ill informed answer. So I'm, I'm gonna warn you, please think before you, before you shout back at the radio or whatever you're listening to. So here's your challenge now, everybody. He likes to use remote start in order to warm up the car or cool the car down before you leave on a trip. So try that with an ev and I've done it a couple times. But here's the thing. I hit the remote start. There's no indication whether it worked or not.'cause it just works that way. Then you go out and check and remote start does not work if the car is plugged in. So if you've been charging, you have to put on whatever garb you would've put on when you leave, whether that's slippers to run out into the garage, or shoes, hat, coat, and an umbrella. If it's in the driveway and I've done both, and you have to go outside and unplug the cable and hang it back up, and then you can come back inside and then you can remote start the car. Now, this is obviously one of their ill thought out safety features, right? So just take a moment and think about it. Why do they have that? So if you're saying this, I'm glad I don't have to listen to it because a lot of people say, well, that's to keep you from driving away with it. Plugged in really. The car knows it's plugged in and it's stopping you from starting it. It already will stop you from driving away with it plugged in. In fact, you can get in the car and start it, and it won't let you drive away. So it just won't let you start it remotely with it plugged in. S So again, it could stop you from driving away because it, well, actually it does stop you from driving away'cause you'd have to be in it to drive away. So that cannot be the reason, not logically. So we agree that it makes no sense, but if you thought about the larger truth, this is where the engineers forget that they themselves have designed something that's completely different paradigm. The car does not have an engine. When you hit remote start, you're not starting anything. Now, if it's a internal combustion engine, you're starting the engine in order in order to spin the AC compressor in order to warm up the coolant so the heater will work. Remote start in an EV does nothing of that. All it does is turn on the heat pump. They should not call it remote start. They should call it climate control start. It's not using any fuel. There's no sparks, no exhaust, no fumes. You could run it inside your garage and use it to heat your garage and it wouldn't hurt anything thing. And if you thought of the final insult, you have to unplug it. And that means now you're running the AC off the battery that you're trying to preserve for your trip instead of off the grid. Why would you not require it to be plugged in for the remote start to work? That actually would be a more logical requirement. Do you suppose somewhere in the requirement section of the programming. They just got it backwards and nobody ever caught it. Well. I don't think, I wanna give them that excuse. I wanna say people just like things that cause a problem, especially in our feminist run world. People think that anything that makes it makes life harder from you must be good in some way. Or maybe somehow they copied the rules from the gas cars. I don't know. The real problem we have with electric vehicles is just that it's a, a lag in the infrastructure and thinking because they're, they're fine machines. They're fast, they're quiet, they're smooth, and on the quiet, they have to make a little chiming noise as the car runs so people can hear it coming. They're cheap to fuel, at least at home. They ought to be cheap everywhere. In fact, let's talk about another paradigm that nobody's picked up on. We said last week that electric cars run on DC and that's important. Well, it's very important because when you're charging at home, you're delivering AC to the building to your house, and that AC has to be converted back into dc That is exactly what a charger does. And if you remember the electric wars, your history back when Tesla and Edison, it wasn't Tesla. Back when Westinghouse and Edison were sparring over what was the best electrical power system to use, Westinghouse wanted ac, Edison wanted DC and with DC you would have to have neighborhood power plants. Which could work if we think about it in some ways, especially as we continue with this, this conversation. But AC let you transmit it a long distance. You can transmit power over long distances by using alternating current, and that's why we have it, but it's not inherent to the system. So where does that bring us all across America, you see wind turbines. Love em or hate em. And you see solar panels. Solar farms love em or hate em, and they're taking DC power and converting it into AC with losses so they can dump it into the grid and transmit it with more losses. And then convert it back into DC so that it can charge an electric vehicle. You see the obvious advantage here, the thing that no one's talked about and what they could be doing. I, when you're driving across the Arizona Desert and you see that sign that says, last gas station for 50 miles. It doesn't have to be that way. You could easily put a bank of solar panels every 10 miles, charge a battery, and then any solar car, any electric car could pull in and get an instant charge. None of the costs of the grid, all you'd have would be the one-time cost of setting up the station. Well, you'd have some maintenance, but no grid costs. You can do the same thing with windmills. The wind turbines, which currently are producing ac, I believe, set them up instead to produce dc, put a battery at the bottom and you could have EV charging stations all over the place. You could localize them. You might even put in smaller wind turbines that are just enough to run a small charging station. And who knows? This might also apply to the many. Small hydroelectric dams in the country, no longer competitive with other sources of power, but they might be competitive if they were charging electric vehicles. And again, with none of the burden of the grid maintenance, because it's just doing it all locally. But it seems the only problem that they're actually working on is the electric propulsion system itself. They're not looking at the human interface. They're not looking at the charging technologies, and they're not looking at the other problems that are in front of us that could be solved harmoniously with the. Personal transportation issue in many ways, this moment in history is just like the early days of automobiles. Though a friend pointed this out to me that, uh, a hundred or more years ago, you could go out on your horse and the horse could graze anywhere. You could always find forage for your beast of burden, whereas gasoline on the other hand, was available, but it wasn't common. And the quality wasn't consistent and using it was not convenient. But today, gasoline is everywhere and EV charging is just catching up. It's wherever someone remembered to put it. And we built a lot of infrastructure before we adopted the gasoline car en masse. But this time the government has written checks. Figuratively speaking, which the infrastructure can't cash yet, even if it is catching up pretty quick. So electric vehicles aren't the issue. The real issue is regulators who love to regulate everything except what actually helps people, because many of these problems could be easily regulated away by a powerful government. We mentioned going to Walmart to get fuel, to recharge, but if you pull into a Walmart, and we're glad they're doing this, but you'll find four different brands of EV chargers. Now how is that good You, then you go find the one that you're in their club and you gas up well. Think about how that looks statistically, it's like saying on this stretch of road, there's four gas stations for every a hundred miles. Well, it's not that handy if that means there's four gas stations a hundred miles apart instead of 25 miles between each gas station. But automakers just ignore decades of human factors of search because they think a glowing screen looks modern. Then they force a new paradigm on us without understanding that paradigm themselves. People are going to adopt EVs when this whole system is fixed, not when we're forced to just put up with it flaws and learn how to work around it. Build a system that works first, then we'll gladly buy the cars because technology should serve the people and not the ideology and not the other way around. This is the 10th, man. Thank you for listening.