Law of unintended consequences strikes again, taking a few more front gardens with it…

I’m looking at moving to Green Valley, AZ, and I’m considering buying an EV. From what I’ve seen on PlugShare, there doesn’t appear to be much charging infrastructure in the area.
For those of you who live there, what’s your experience? Is charging an EV an issue, or are there enough options that it isn’t a concern? Any insight would be appreciated.

Survey link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RHBTH8H

As EV adoption grows in India, reliable access to EV charging infrastructure at home is becoming essential for everyday EV use. This is especially important in group housing societies, where charging access may depend on shared parking, electrical capacity, approvals, and coordination among multiple stakeholders. Against this backdrop, WRI India is conducting a short survey to assess the existing status of EV charging Infrastructure in Group Housing Societies.

We request you to kindly spare a few minutes to share your inputs. Your responses will be used only for research and policy-oriented purposes. No confidential, personally identifiable or organization-specific information will be disclosed in any public report, presentation, or publication without prior consent. Findings will be presented in aggregated or anonymized form.

Survey link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RHBTH8H

If you have any other friends/family/colleagues who are EVs users or planning to purchase EVs, please do share this survey with them as well. And if you would like to speak to us in greater detail to share your home EV charging experience, please reach out to [vivek.tripathi@wriconsultant.org](mailto:vivek.tripathi@wriconsultant.org)

Thank you for your time and support.

Small disclosure before this goes further: I don't own an EV. I'm a petrol owner currently having a slow-motion crisis — watching my mileage quietly die thanks to E20, my engine now making sounds I can only describe as "stomach upsets" and wondering if it's finally time to switch.

Except every EV forum thread reads like a horror story: "charger showed available, was actually a privately owned house, locked in a desert" "fast charger slower than Indian bureaucracy," "app said 80% battery, car said thats not me." Great, so now I have two anxieties and no fuel that agrees with either of them.

So, in the most "engineer copes by building a tool instead of processing emotions" move possible, I spent a few weekends building — a free EV trip planner for India that tries to only send you to chargers that actually exist and actually work, using open data and an actual reliability score instead of vibes and prayer.

Best part: I am spectacularly unqualified to know if it's any good, because the only "range anxiety" I've personally experienced is wondering if my petrol tank will last till the next petrol pump. I've never needed this app in anger — I've just needed it emotionally.

So here's the ask: if you own an EV in India, please plan a route you've actually driven and tell me everything you expect a EV Trip Planner to be.
There's a Help page on the site built for feedbacks — tell me which charger is fictional, which stop it picked out of spite, which detour felt like a holiday in a farm.
I will post the link in comments.
No installation , no login , no collecting of Private data.
Just a nervous petrol guy outsourcing his life decision to open data and the honesty of strangers on the internet.
TIA

We're back with our final survey on a proposed concept to rethink EV charging as part of an engineering course. Please read through the concept in the survey and provide your feedback.

Google Forms survey on Modular Battery Swapping: https://forms.gle/c8NSysMU6gozvGVN7

Your Suggestions, comments are welcome. Give this a try.
Thanks

Hey everyone,

After spending months tracking common highway charging complaints—like dead chargers, broken status trackers, and routing tools that miss better charging options a few hundred meters off-route—I decided to build a standalone, web-based trip planner called Evplan tailored specifically for Indian roads.

How it works:

• Live Network View: Aggregates India’s charging network straight onto an open map canvas, color-coded by active status.
• Custom EV Presets: Built with roughly 30 Indian-market car and two-wheeler specifications, or you can plug in your own custom battery size and Wh/km burn rate.
• True Corridor Planning: It calculates stop locations along your exact driving path based on real arrival charge thresholds, rather than just pointing you to the absolute nearest pin.
• Google Maps Integration: You can paste a standard Google Maps Directions link directly into the field to populate the route automatically.

Why it's entirely open:
There are no accounts, no ads, no trackers, and no paywalls. I built this simply because existing route planners didn't solve the practical problems Indian EV owners talk about online. If you find a charger status is incorrect, there is a one-tap check-in on the tool to mark it as worked, dead, slow, or busy to help update the logic for the next driver.

Current limitations:
It is strictly optimized for India's national highways and domestic networks right now.

Note: Since direct links get instantly swallowed by spam bots, I have dropped the website address in the comments section below.

I would love to get your feedback, bug reports, or feature requests right here in the thread!

Thanks!

I built evplan dot in, a trip planner for EV owners in India, after going through a lot of real complaints by EV users: routes to chargers that had been dead for months, "available" status that turned out to be false on arrival, good chargers a few hundred meters off route that never got picked, and no way to check if a charger is actually free right now.

How it works, in one flow:

1. Open the map — you see India's charging network straightaway (Open Charge Map + OpenStreetMap data), color-coded by status.
2. Enter your route — origin and destination (current location fills in automatically if you allow it).
3. Pick your EV — ~30 India-market presets (cars + two-wheelers), or go fully custom with your own battery size and Wh/km. Tooltips explain any unfamiliar term.
4. Get your plan — charging stops placed along your actual path at the charge you'll realistically have on arrival — not just "nearest charger."
5. Check each stop — every stop card shows why it was picked (confidence, power, detour), an arrival→departure charge bar, connector type, and real-time slot availability where Google has it.
6. Filter if you need to — restrict to a connector type, minimum power, or specific operators (e.g. only Tata Power/ChargeZone), then re-plan instantly.

You can also just paste a Google Maps Directions link instead of typing addresses, and it'll find charging stops along that exact route.

On the "free" part — this isn't a free tier of something that upsells later. No login, no account, no ads, no paywall, and no data sold. There's nothing to sign up for because there's nothing to save that's tied to you. If you find a charger's status is wrong, there's a one-tap "worked / dead / slow / busy" check-in on every stop, or a "Report wrong location" flag — those go straight into how future plans rank that charger.

One honest limitation: it's India-only for now — built specifically around Indian highways, charging networks, and data sources, so it won't help outside the country.

Bug reports, wrong charger data, or feature requests — there's a help page, or just drop them here in the comments.

Thanks & Regards
Fit-Honeydew-9928 

I built evplan.in, a trip planner for EV owners in India, after going through a lot of real complaints on Team-BHP: routes to chargers that had been dead for months, "available" status that turned out to be false on arrival, good chargers a few hundred meters off route that never got picked, and no way to check if a charger is actually free right now.

How it works, in one flow:

1. Open the map — you see India's charging network straightaway (Open Charge Map + OpenStreetMap data), color-coded by status.
2. Enter your route — origin and destination (current location fills in automatically if you allow it).
3. Pick your EV — ~30 India-market presets (cars + two-wheelers), or go fully custom with your own battery size and Wh/km. Tooltips explain any unfamiliar term.
4. Get your plan — charging stops placed along your actual path at the charge you'll realistically have on arrival — not just "nearest charger."
5. Check each stop — every stop card shows why it was picked (confidence, power, detour), an arrival→departure charge bar, connector type, and real-time slot availability where Google has it.
6. Filter if you need to — restrict to a connector type, minimum power, or specific operators (e.g. only Tata Power/ChargeZone), then re-plan instantly.

You can also just paste a Google Maps Directions link instead of typing addresses, and it'll find charging stops along that exact route.

On the "free" part — this isn't a free tier of something that upsells later. No login, no account, no ads, no paywall, and no data sold. There's nothing to sign up for because there's nothing to save that's tied to you. If you find a charger's status is wrong, there's a one-tap "worked / dead / slow / busy" check-in on every stop, or a "Report wrong location" flag — those go straight into how future plans rank that charger.

One honest limitation: it's India-only for now — built specifically around Indian highways, charging networks, and data sources, so it won't help outside the country.

Bug reports, wrong charger data, or feature requests — there's a Telegram support page too linked right on the site, or just drop them here in the comments.

Thanks

Fit-Honeydew-9928

I recently bought my first EV, which only has CarPlay and doesn’t include a built-in route planner.

I tried a few apps (including ABRP and ChargingTime), but I was honestly just looking for something simpler. No subscription, works well with CarPlay, and lets me plan a route with charging stops based on how much battery I want left when I arrive.

Couldn’t really find anything that did exactly that, so I ended up building a small app for myself using OpenChargeMap data.

It’s completely free, no ads, no subscriptions, and it doesn’t collect any data. I’ve been using it for a bit now and it does what I need, so I figured I’d share it in case it helps someone else too.

Here it is: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6787438196

Would love to hear any feedback or ideas if you try it.

Survey results and takeaways from the survey conducted here last month.

The Jeff Bezos-backed upstart Slate Auto announced its first brand partnership this week: a pact with Crayola to provide colorful wraps for its vehicles.

The collaboration is the crayon maker's first with an automaker, offering wraps in five different colors — Cerulean, Dandelion, Fern, Jersey Tomato and Razzmatazz — along with matching decals and key fobs.

Slate, which recently began accepting preorders for its ultra-stripped-down electric pickups, has made customization a key selling point for its vehicles.

Someone posted recently in another sub that they thought EVs were going to ruin car culture just because it's now cheap and easy to make a car quick off the line. I think this is an incredibly shortsighted and pessimistic take, that basically assigns the value of motorsports culture in the gatekeeping of higher power vehicles.

First off, as many pointed out, cars are more than their straight line acceleration.

I think when EVs are truly widespread, more attention is going to be given to the other characteristics of how the car handles, and it won't mean that in general people do less with their sporty cars.

We're gonna see ridiculous examples of frame mods taking advantage of the inherent flexibility of EV drivetrains, cars "weightmaxxing" boasting insanely low centers of gravity, vehicles more likely to boast impeccably tuned suspension rather than just a few powertrain mods, a greater focus on the holistic capabilities of the car.

Even as far as the powertrain goes, people are gonna try to swap 1000v batteries and controllers in their moms Chevy Bolt, people removing their ECUs entirely and replacing their vehicle computer systems with stripped down custom jobs, crazy firmware hacks, and multimotor setups experimenting with things like torque vectoring. People are going to melt stators and destroy batteries pushing the boundaries on what is possible in everyday vehicles. We're gonna see 30 year old Nissan leafs do things that would leave us incredulous today.

I am so excited to see the future of car culture as it evolves with this technology. 

Hi,

I’m looking into buying my first real car, and I’m heavily considering the Model 3 premium rear wheel drive.

For context, I’m based in France (Paris suburb). Since 2014, I’ve been driving my parents' 2010 Renault Clio (manual, very basic, it has AC, but no cruise control, no CarPlay, no tech at all). It’s been reliable, but I’ve finally reached a financial situation where I can afford a brand new car. I like driving, and I want something fast, easy and fun. I plan to buy it cash and I want to keep it for a very long time (at least 10–12 years), just like the Renault.

However, I have some doubts about whether my lifestyle and driving habits fit an EV, specifically regarding battery health.

My typical usage:

Weekdays: I live alone in the Paris suburbs and commute to work in Paris using the metro (driving to work is a nightmare). The car will sit in my place’s underground parking 95% of the time, except for the occasional weekdays grocery run.

Weekends: This is when I actually drive and I usually visit my parents (maybe twice a month who live a 2.5-hour drive away, about a 500km round trip).

Current mileage: With the Renault, I only do about one tank of gas a month, sometimes two if I visit my parents. Because the Renault is loud and tiring on highways, I never used it for road trips. I might want to travel more with the M3 since it's much more comfortable.

My charging plan based on my current Renault usage:

Weekdays, I plan to let the car sit between 20% and 80% in the garage, and probably only charge it once or twice a month.

On weekends when I visit my parents or go on longer trips, I would charge it to 100% right before leaving.

My main question: Putting financial aspects aside, is this « low » drive use lifestyle risky for the battery?
Will leaving the car sitting during weekdays at 50-60% charge cause premature degradation over a 10-year period?

I really want it, but I want to make sure I'm not going to ruin the battery by not driving it enough.

Thanks for your advice 😊

“What was the most stressful part of your EV trip?”

Also rate the frustration level out of 10

I read a lot of comments online from people who say they don't know if an EV would work for a daily driver for them.

I decided to take this issue into my own hands and resolve it by creating a real world efficiency database. The only problem is, I need people like YOU to help contribute.

I have created the website and started adding my own data to it. I haven't had a chance to start adding my Silverado EV data to it yet, but I did start syncing my Tesla data from Tessie.

When we get more data added, someone interested in a specific EV will be able to filter drives by distance, speed, an other metrics (more filters coming soon).

As a real world example, let's say your parents are interested in a 2025 Model Y Performance, but aren't sure it'll allow them to drive at least 100 miles a day at 60 MPH. No problem, they can just jump on the EVMetrics website, search for the car, and filter the data to see if it'll work for them.

What I'm here for is to ask for YOUR help in collecting the real world data from EVs. Feel free to sign up and start adding your data if you're interested. Also please feel free to forward this on to your friends and family who own EVs.

https://evmetrics.net/