The Electrical Code

No, that’s the short answer. Lets start by saying the batteries in your EV will degrade as time goes on. As you discharge and recharge the battery. The magic is to try to reduce the amount of times the percentage of the battery gets charged to 100% and goes below 20%. On the daily charging should be set to 80%. If in a daily you drive far enough to drain it to below 20% then you need a vehicle with more range. Right now the EV with the most range is the 2026 Lucid Air Grand Touring. It comes with 512 miles of range. At 80% of that you get 410 miles. And at an average speed of 60 MPH even at 80% charged (410 miles range) that is 6.8 hours of driving. Car and Driver put out a real world test and they found real world numbers (click here to see that article). If you need this then you are a not using the truck for a daily commute but rather for transport. Doing that now and then no issue. But doing that on the daily commute your going to get battery degradation sooner then later. Even if you owned an internal combustion engine (ICE), this type of travel will not be normal and you need a commercial truck that has been engineered to those types of loads over that amount of time of travel.

Amperage from a residential level 2 home charge, will not put a strain on the batteries. Because all EV’s have a very sophisticated on board battery management system. Once the battery reaches a set percentage that is designated by the engineers they internally reduce the amperage before damaging the batteries. There are different chargers with amperage ranging from 30 amps-240 volts to 100 amps-240 volts when I wrote this blog. These are referred to as level 2 EV charges. Don’t think the level 1 15 amps-120 volt battery charger that some cars come with will give you the charging capacity to charge your car from 20% to 80% over night. I believe the last time I used this 15 amp-120 volt charger from 20% the cars computer estimated 36 hours of charging. That is not going to cut it. It will fall short and even a level 2 30 amp 240 volt EV charger will charge the typical EV from 20% to 80% over an 8 hour period.

Which brings use to the next conversation about charging your EV from a level 3 EV charger. These chargers are popping up all over the country. The transmission lines that bring power to owner cities in America will see high voltages ranging from 7,200 to 14,400 volts. Before the voltage gets to that point they can be from 35,000 to 500,000 volts. The reason for this high voltage is for another blog for now I mentioned these numbers because when we plug our vehicle’s into a level 3 charger with a 350 kW rating what is used to do this we see voltages of 800 volts with 80 amps! And this is why we see 150 to 240 miles of driving range within 20 minutes of charging. But when this happens we can see many vehicles with battery degradation because this causes an extreme amount of heat and heat is the enemy of any battery. Can we use these charges hell yes. But in my opinion, it should be reserved to be used only when absolutely necessary in travel and when the battery is between 20% and used to go up to 50% when ever possible.

Most EV’s precondition the batteries to bring the temp of the batteries to there optimum charging temperatures. The optimum temperature is from 68 degrees F to 86 degrees F. Now this is to accept this accelerated charging method a level 3 gives us.