How much electricity does an electric car use?

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?

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