Rather than give you the ‘boring’ answer, which you can look up for any electric car in existence, I’m going to try to convey a sense of the POWER used by an electric car when charging and driving. In case you came here looking for that, here’s a link to a Wikipedia article with the details of energy consumption for many electric cars.
Let’s look at car charging. Consider a Level 2 home car charger. (Wikipedia article on car chargers.) These are the type that wire into your home’s breaker box using a 240V line (in the USA). These charge your car at up to ~7.2 kilo-Watts (7,200 Watts), drawing ~32-40 Amperes of current.
(note: for the rest of the article, I’ll use the shorthand notation – ‘V’ for Volts; ‘W’ for Watts; ‘kW’ for kilo-Watts, and ‘A’ for Amperes.)
This sounds like a lot, but how does it compare to other things in your house?
Continue reading