As most are well aware by now, one of the biggest obstacles to widespread EV adoption is the state of charging infrastructure, which is by all accounts lacking at the moment, and in spite of plans to expand that network in the future, may still not be sufficient years from now. Recently, Electrify America debuted a new charger-naming scheme designed to make it easier for Ford EV owners and those that drive all-electric vehicles from other brands to distinguish between the types of chargers. Regardless, Ford Pro CEO Ted Cannis recently stated that he believes EV chargers still need more visible branding moving forward.
“Because fleet customers, like retail customers who have not had an electric vehicle before, they think they’re going to go out and charge in the wild,” the Ford Pro CEO said while speaking at the recent Evercore Utility Conference. “I’m going to go to a public charger. That’s what they all think. We all know that 85 percent of charging is at home. But that’s what they think because for some reason, the charging industry decided to go away from branding and signage. Everything else, Applebee’s, McDonald’s, Shell stations, where are the chargers? Where’s the big signs? You don’t see them. And until you put them in the software to go find them, they’re kind of invisible. It’s kind of like Pokémon Go, you can’t find them anywhere.”
Currently, EV charging stations indeed do not have large signs or massive billboards marking their respective locations, even though brands like Electrify America – and Ford Pro’s own commercial EV charger lineup – already exist, though the automaker plans to continue selling ICE-powered models to fleet customers for the foreseeable future.
Regardless, this may change in the future as Ford dealers that opted into the automaker’s new Model e Certified program will be required to install public fast chargers at their respective locations, perhaps making it easier for customers to spot possible charging locations.
We’ll have more on the state of EV charging infrastructure soon, so be sure and subscribe to Ford Authority for 24/7 Ford news coverage.
Comments
What we need is RELIABLE facilities… Not dumb signs.
People need something to do while they wait, and wait, and wait. They need more than signage. They need to integrate the entire charging “experience.” Look at the photos above. What are people going to do while they sit there out in the middle of nowhere? Figuring out public charging has a looooooooong way to go.
Chargers don’t need branding.
They need to be:
– ubiquitous.
– easy to use.
– safe location.
– not broken.
– fair kWh rates.
– preferably at a store, mall, restaurant, etc. (not stand-alone like gas stations.)
Robert, think about the cost of what you are asking for. The price to install “ubiquitous” fail-safe chargers that are well maintained is astronomical. How much pavement will you have to tear up to accomplish that? How many millions of miles of conduit will you have to run? The size of your “ask” boggles the mind. And, if you charge the costs back to the customer then you won’t be anywhere near “fair.” The logistics behind accomplishing a charging network for the masses will take decades to install. And, in the meantime, you will find out some things are better left burning carbon.
What are you even talking about?
You make it sound like I’m suggesting the USA bury its low voltage overhead electrical lines to protect them from ice and wind.
Or mean a charger at every mile marker.
Eventually the kinds of facilities I’ve outlined will have chargers and will use their presence to draw customers or use cheaper rates as a loss leader to drive traffic.
The bigger the meal ticket or grocery bill the cheaper the kWh. (Costco already does this with membership exclusivity and low $/g pricing and Kroger does this with discount points.)
Decades? Seriously?
(As a former sales manager, you don’t even know the avg age of the commercial fleet, so I’m not convinced you are the right reference for projecting charger saturation horizons.)
As for some applications being better suited for ICE PT, I’ve never doubted that, it’s just that it’s not most of them.
Make all the upgrades you want, me and my colleagues are all in lock step not to go EV, costs a hell of a lot more. We all re-upped with ICE fleets. Even analysts are now saying EVs aren’t being adopted.
Bad faith K-street Travis outed himself yesterday as such when he was slamming ford’s light and medium duty commercial offerings by a) talking about his fleet buy and how he convinced everybody to do the same (he’s done this in many threads), then b) revealed that he was using Class 8 rebuild metrics to BEV.
Although K-street Travis’ Big Oil scripted FUD was more consistent than his coordinated troll team colleagues (didn’t take much really), he went to far trying to back up his nonsense and outed his bad faith.
What fools don’t realize is the more that something costs us then people like rwfa get to pay more for whatever they’re buying at the store, the cost will always be passed along. Transportation companies will always be their own boss thankfully. The whole industry is united against EVs.
Yes, the Big Oil is definitely united against BEV’s because their 40 year run of sociopathic Denial, Doubt and Delay for profit (and all the damage it had wrought across the globe) is drawing to a close.
And if bad faith armchair economist JMD, popping in to amp up Big Oil’s bad faith K-street Travis, was really worth his analytical salt, he would ask himself why the sharpest pencils in the business like Amazon, FedEx, DHL are increasingly and acceleratingly all in on BEV powertrains.
But he can’t do that, because, well, that’s not what the paid script allows for.
We told the EV sales reps to go pound sand at our over the road transport. I kinda felt sorry for them seeing how defeated they looked. Freightliner for the win. We good for at least another 15 years now.
Our purchasing guy cussed them clean out of the building
Of all the things in this thread that are unlikely to have happened, this ranks #1.
Here JMD after posting above to amp up Travis’ comments, posts as Carrier, then amps up his own comment.
Obvious Big Oil bad faith circle-jerk trolling is pretty obvious.
Tell me you’ve never been around carriers without telling me you’ve never been around carriers. Mostly family owned generational and the environment of a blue collar shipping dock. Rough crowd. Lucky they didn’t physically throw him out.
LoL yeah sure. All could be played in the movie by Scott Brady.
My great uncle drove his entire career for E&L was the salt of the earth.
A school buddy’s family owned E&L’s competitor. His dad was 2nd Gen, he could have played Scott Brady in the movie. Dad was a rough edged dick.
Worked a warehouse & shipping gig for two summers in high school.
Those that earn a rep for not listening are the ones that close themselves off to possibilities. Good business folks don’t do that.
Oh and it was on rough edged dad’s watch that the business shrank and died.
But none of this has anything to do with fact that, again, we are talking about how Travis is trying to conflate OTR fleet conditions with light duty commercial conditions in order to reach a non existent point.
The 15 year comment above is tied to the last of Big Oil’s K-street psychological manipulation tools:
1st is Deny,
2nd is Doubt, and
3rd is Delay.
We’ve seen a heavy reliance on FUDsterism in heavy support of Doubt.
We’ve see a bit of point 3 in a few earlier threads, usually pushing buying F-series diesels or Hydrogen fuels (a lousy way to fuel the vast majority vehicles but one that allows Big Oil to preserve their points of sale.)
But here, we see a whole new phase where Travis/Carrier/JDM is pushing Freightliner, but I don’t think he’s promoting Freightliner (which already debuted a Class 8 BEV in 2020), he’s clearly pushing making a 15 year investment in a vehicle that consumes Big Oil’s main profit maker.
He trying to conflate OTR with light commercial, and by extension passenger vehicles, by pushing his OTR nonsense on a site dealing with Ford, a company that sold its OTR Class-8 business in 1997 (to Daimler, Freightliner’s parent company.)
K-street Carrier and his buddies (K-street Travis and K-street JDM) are Bad Faith trolls writ large in the service of Big Oil.
There’s no need to push doubt, that’s all that’s real. Acting or lying about how easy charging is or will be anytime in the next decade or 2 is a joke. It’s so easy to doubt because everything about this great or easy charging is speculation or worse. When someone like James May, who’s pro ev, can’t find a place to charge or a charging station that worked, it’s not a good sign. Commercial truck charging is even more of a joke than personal car charging, and that’s horrible without a house and a charging station. Imagine an apartment complex with 100 apartments. Do you think an owner would install chargers for 100 apartments? Not a chance unless they can raise rents by $500 or more. It’s just stupid
Just an aside, it’s going to be a popcorn festival when as demand for liquid carbon fuels falls, the coordinated rhetorical and lobbying activities of Big Oil will get really crazy just before that collisional cohesion dissolves as the industry turns on itself in a series of price wars and corporate consolidation.
You think Big Oil’s manipulations and machinations have been bad in the past? We’ve seen nothing yet. We are only seeing the tip of their iceberg of desperation.
You are completely clueless. I work in LP futures. The demand will never “fall.” It is actually increasing due to consumers controlling the market. Diesel fuel consumption is increasing in both the commercial and residential markets. Many people now own two diesels, more than any point in history.
A similar occurrence happened with buggy whips, residential coal, b&w TV’s, incandescent bulbs, but look where they are all now.
I’ve not only got a clue, I’ve got historical perspective, critical thinking and analytical ability on my side.
Hi RWFA,
Stu here again,
It is pretty clear to me that big oil is somehow and somewhat involved in the opinions I keep seeing here, time after time. In a forum that is supposed to discuss and enlighten on Ford products and issues, it becomes another avenue of misinformation and poorly thought out rhetoric by many posters.
EVs are an evolution out of necessity and just like the first gasoline engined vehicles, will improve and develop as the industry learns and grows too.
The necessary infrastructure for mass EV adoption does need work, investment and time just like gasoline refuelling networks did 100 years ago, but those bellowing that it is not reasonable or possible remind me of the folks in the late 1800’s who said the horse would never be replaced by the automobile. Final comment, Clara Ford drove an electric car, it was her favourite.
Stu, the customers will decide, not the Government. And the customers aren’t chosing EVs. Free Markets don’t need forcing…hence the word Free. Customers decide what succeeds or fails.
LoL K-street BShane, pushing the idea that Free Markets are free.
Fact: we live in a regulated free market (and that’s a good thing.)
Hello my Canadian friend!
It’s amazing how hard the Big Oil (and short seller) FUDsters are going at it here. But then again given the stakes and the resources, paying some ethically challenged dupes or a troll farm, it’s an expense far behind the decimal point.
They’re pretty obvious but I think they think they can tilt public opinion by attacking ford and slowing it down on its move to BEV (that the most popular vehicle 40+ years running is moving to BEV would, if they sat in a lump of coal, turn it into a diamond); so we get to witness the jabberwocky and lashing out of a soon to contract industry.
Ps we are in the depths of winter, how about a Mach-E interim report from the Great White North?!
My cousin does it best in the shipping tanker industry…burning over 2,500 gallons of diesel fuel every hour. Another reason diesels will never die.
Current necessary evil but nothing to really be proud of.
Fortunately, over time, as more of the world gets off carbon fuels, the amount of this polluting sea traffic will reduce too.