5 On Your Side tests electric vehicles: Can an EV make it to Wilmington and back?

There's a big push to get you to switch to an electric vehicle. The government is offering incentives, car companies are expanding their EV lineups and all that's led to a record sales pace for electric vehicles in 2023.

Posted 10:00 p.m. May 15 — Updated 10:53 a.m. May 19

Keely Arthur WRAL consumer reporter

There’s a big push to get you to switch to an electric vehicle. The government is offering incentives, car companies are expanding their EV lineups and all that’s led to a record sales pace for electric vehicles in 2023.

So we wanted to know – what does going electric look like?

What does going electric look like?

The 5 On Your Side team spent weeks researching electric vehicles. We took three different fully electric vehicles on three different road trips across North Carolina – looking at whether an EV makes sense as your family’s primary car.

The rest of the vehicles will be reviewed Tuesday and Wednesday.

If you’ve driven one gas car you can pretty much drive them all. But sit in some of the newer EVs for the first time and it feels like you need a training course.

Huge screens, lots of cameras and the futuristic feel inside an EV are obvious differences; but even details down to letting your foot off the brake are different.

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The engine idle in a gas car rolls you forward when you release the brake. EVs don’t have an idle, so take your foot off the brake and some of them hold in place.

Some stop more quickly than you’d be used to in a gas car, in part because regenerative braking is drawing energy back to the battery from the wheels and brakes.

Traits like those in the Rivian R1T we test drove first took some getting used to.

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Refueling is also significantly different.

EV charging

There are three different levels of charging speed – 1, 2 and 3.

Level 1 is essentially plugging your car into your outlet at home. It’s the slowest option, taking anywhere from 40-50 hours to charge from empty. This is the entry level option for charging at home with minimal cost to setup. Electricity is also typically cheapest this way. You’re paying residential electric rates which usually are going to be cheaper than finding a commercial/public charging plug.

Level 2 is quicker, typically taking between 4-10 hours to charge. This is the most common type of public charger you’ll find. It can also be installed in your home with a cost varying from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.

Level 3 is also known as DC Fast Charging and it can get you charged in 20-60 minutes. These chargers are typically located in cities and along major highways.

Once you leave Raleigh, there are only 3 DC Fast Charger stations between here and Wilmington. When the 5 On Your Side team left Raleigh, we didn’t have enough range to make the round-trip, so we had to stop at one.

There are three different levels of charging speed – 1, 2 and 3.

We tried the fast charger in downtown Wilmington at the Market Street Parking Deck. To be considered a DC Fast Charger, power has to be delivered between 50kW and 350kW.

The charger at the Wilmington parking deck had a max output of 62.5kW, which is slow for a fast charger. And when we plugged in, we got an alert on our app saying the City of Wilmington was slowing down energy speeds due to high demand. So, our charging speed was slowed to about 48kW and our estimated charge time was more than 2 hours and 30 minutes.

While we waited, we spoke the driver charging next to us who happened to be traveling back to Durham.

"This is super-fast, this can fill like half a tank in 45 minutes or a half hour," said Karl Whitney, who was headed home to Durham from Oak Island.

"Love it, love it, love it," Whitney told us about his Chevy Bolt. "It just does everything I need, and it’s clean."

He estimated his cost per mile driven is about half that of a gas car, but he would like to see the infrastructure improve.

"It’s definitely growing, but I’m seeing many more cars on the road faster than I’m seeing more charging spots," Whitney said.

We saw exactly what he was talking about when a third EV pulled up looking for a fast charger, but both were occupied. The third driver had to settle for a Level 2 charger feeding electricity only about 1/7 the speed of our fast charger.

Lack of availability, inconsistent charging speeds and chargers that are out of order are three big knocks against the infrastructure right now.

We did not charge all the way up but did gain 179 miles of range after charging for an hour and 40 minutes, which was enough to get us home. It only cost us a $3 fee to park in the deck and nothing to charge because that public charger put up by the city of Wilmington was free.

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