Charging a BEV vs fueling an ICE vehicle

A forewarning; none of this applies if you have nowhere to charge or if your daily driving needs exceed your recharging capabilities. In those cases, it is hard to recommend a BEV unless you have close, affordable fast charging infrastructure.

For anyone else... I don't get it. I just read a Reddit response which stated that driving an EV "requires you to be more intentional than with a gas car" and I smacked my head. This isn't a review or opinion company, just another BEV owner and they aren't trying to talk anyone out of buying a BEV. As such I don't believe that they are biased against EVs and it also makes me believe that this mentality is more pervasive than the drivel some articles pump out.

To start, I consider a thing to require "intention" when it is not easily made into a habit. This can be because it is difficult, or more commonly because it is a thing which is not required frequently or at set intervals. The more often a things needs to happen the more easily it becomes ingrained in us.

I'll also point out that the poster in this Reddit thread was assuming that the OP had access to at least an L1 charger at home. 

Now, what I find interesting about this claim is that putting gas into an ICE vehicle is (at least by my definition) a thing which requires much more intentionality. I can't speak for everyone else, but my wife and I had built up rules around when to fill our last car. And they had margin for error baked in because we didn't always remember or stick religiously to it. 

For us, when the car reached 2 bars (less than or equal to a quarter tank) we fill up. At this point the car would still have well over 100km so we could easily make it to a gas station even if we didn't notice or forgot. And, when we would forget or ignore our own rules, we would then need to be even more intentional.

By contrast, our last car was a plug-in hybrid or PHEV. It had 41kms of EV range. MUCH lower range than our ICE vehicle. It did have a gas engine as well, but most of our driving fit in our all electric range so we tried to drive on battery as much as possible. How did that go? Great, actually. In 5+ years I think we found ourselves having forgotten to charge when we would have wanted to just once or twice. The biggest reason the number is so low is quite simple... if we forgot, the car was already less than 2 feet away from the charger, if we remembered later we didn't need to go out our way to drive it anywhere. We just walked to the garage and plugged it in.

Those 1 or 2 trips? Typically we did a lot of driving the day before, pulled in late and forgot until it was "too late". I put that in quotes for a couple of reasons. The biggest being we always remembered immediately or once we got in the car. At which point, if the range would ever have been a problem we could just... plug the car in rather than risk being stranded. An option not available to an ICE driver.

Now, all of this is with a PHEV. And we weren't charging it daily. In hindsight, we should have. I thought our charging habits were preserving the battery. {side rant, the car didn't support stopping the charge at 80% so it would have always been charging to 100% and the car could sometimes sit in the garage for days without being driven, hence our decision}. Point is, even with all of this stacked against us the benefit of parking the car right next to its fuel source automatically eliminated some amount of need for intentionality. 

Having moved up to an all electric we now have the ability to configure the car stop charging at a preset limit. So now we just plug it in whenever we're at home. This is good pattern form behavior. In short... no intentionality required.

It IS different from the habits and patterns you would have learned while driving an ICE vehicle and I think that is what the perception here is all about. If you treat it like a gas powered vehicle and don't plug in until you're getting close to empty, then remembering to charge becomes a risk. Especially if you're using a L1 speeds. If you're doing that, you're impacting your battery life and setting yourself up for a multi-day recharge session (or charging up enough to get to a faster charger to save your sanity). 

My recommendation would be... find a level of charge you're happy with for daily use and set the max recharge level to something close to that. Then, simply make a habit of "always be charging".