‘Pain at the Plug’ Is Coming for Big EV Owners

As the cost to charge the Rivian R1S ticked up over $50, then $60, I couldn’t help but recall those “Pain at the Pump” segments from the local news. Perhaps you’ve seen the familiar clips where reporters camp out at the local filling station to interview locals fed up with high gas prices. I watched the Rivian charger’s touchscreen as the cost to refuel my weekend test-driver ballooned and imagined the chemically dewrinkled TV anchors doing their first story on “Pain at the Plug.”

I should have been ready for this. Back in the 90s, I remember the shock of filling my parents’ gas-guzzling Ford Explorer, which cost two or three times as much as it took to fill my dinky Escort hatchback. The story isn’t the same in the age of electric vehicles, but it rhymes. It rarely costs more than $20 to top off the small battery in my Tesla Model 3, so my eyes popped a little at the price of refueling a massive EV.

This isn’t a one-to-one comparison, of course: the R1S also goes farther on a charge because of how much energy its huge battery can store, so it’s a bit like comparing a compact car to a Ford F-150 and its 36-gallon gas tank — you’re spending much, much, more, but you’re going a little farther, too. Still, it is a reminder that size matters, whether you’re talking about gas or electric. Under a Trump administration where electricity prices are forecasted to spike, EV shoppers might find themselves thinking the way Americans often have during oil crises and gas price hikes: taking a long look at smaller and lighter vehicles to save money.

The EV weight problem is well-known. To summarize: EVs tend to be weighty because of their massive battery packs. Making electrified versions of the big trucks and SUVs Americans love amplifies the problem. You need very big batteries to store enough energy to give them a decent range, and adding a large lithium-ion unit along the bottom adds even more girth.

Weighty EVs have raised concerns over public safety, since they could be more dangerous to pedestrians, cyclists, and other cars during collisions. Their bulk leads to prematurely worn-out tires, which potentially creates more tire dust and forces drivers to replace their rubber sooner. Bigger batteries need larger amounts of rare metals to make them. And now, in a world of expensive electricity, a heavy EV could hammer a driver’s wallet.

Those of us raised on miles per gallon must learn a new statistical vocabulary to think about the efficiency of EVs. The simplest stat is the number of miles traveled per kilowatt-hour of energy. Lucid, the luxury EV-only startup, has been gunning for the efficiency title with its streamlined Air sedan and has bragged about making 5 miles per kilowatt-hour. By comparison, the current Tesla Model 3 makes around 4 miles per kilowatt-hour, while a big, heavy Rivian gets somewhere in the 2s. (Using a conversion formula from the Environmental Protection Agency to calculate the energy present in a gallon of gas shows that a relatively efficient sedan like the Honda Civic scores around 1, by Lucid’s math, and a big pickup truck even worse.)

These numbers are context-dependent, of course. Just as a gas car or hybrid is judged by its city, highway, and combined mileage, an electric car goes much farther at slow speeds than it does on the highway. A big three-row Hyundai Ioniq 9 EV that can deliver 3 miles or more per kilowatt-hour at slower speeds made right around 2.0 when I sped down Interstate 5, the AC blasting to keep the baby comfortable on a hot California day. The Supercharger bill was enough to make me miss my little Tesla.

The dollars-and-cents calculation is a little different with all-electric vehicles than it was in the all-gasoline era. Drive a gas car and you pay whatever the gas station charges; there is little recourse beyond knowing which service station in your city is the cheapest. With EVs, however, most drivers do their charging primarily at home, where the cost per kilowatt-hour for residential energy is much lower than the inflated cost to refill the battery at a public fast-charger. (Even California’s high cost for home electricity amounts to just half of what some EV fast-chargers cost during afternoon and evening times of peak demand.) But there’s no way to beat the system entirely. Drive a giant, electron-guzzling EV and you’ll be much more vulnerable to a spike in electricity prices.

And it’s not just the cost of recharging a battery — size also matters a lot for the up-front cost of the EV. Americans have become accustomed to paying a premium for larger vehicles, but for combustion cars, this is simply a market phenomenon. It doesn’t cost that much more to build a crossover instead of a sedan, or to give a vehicle a bigger gas tank. The car companies know you’ll pay thousands more for a Toyota RAV4 than for a Corolla. With electric vehicles, however, you’re paying for size in a much more direct fashion. That huge battery needed to move a Rivian is simply much more expensive to build than the one in a Chevy Bolt.

Carmakers are now confronting this problem as they try to crack the affordable EV problem. A subtle detail in Ford’s big announcement last week that it would build a $30,000 mid-size electric pickup is that the vehicle would have a battery perhaps half as big as the one in the F-150 Lightning EV and four times smaller than the biggest one you can get with Chevy’s Silverado EV.

Building a truck with a relatively small battery will undoubtedly slash costs compared to the monster units we’ve seen in full-size electric pickups. It also means that Ford will have to be especially conscious of the vehicle’s weight to maximize the range that can be squeezed out of those few kilowatt-hours. Until battery production costs tumble, that is the way to the more-affordable EV — do more with less.