Nissan, EVgo team up to connect Boston, DC with EV chargers
It'll connect the two cities with a network of DC fast chargers.
Later this year, it'll be easier to get from Boston to our nation's capital and back in an electric vehicle.
Nissan and charging network operator EVgo have teamed up to build something called the "I-95 Fast-Charge ARC." ARC stands for Advanced Recharging Corridor, which basically gives away the premise -- it hopes to assemble a corridor of fast EV chargers between Boston and Washington, DC along I-95.
Five-hundred miles is quite the distance for modern EVs, many of which have trouble eclipsing the 120-mile mark, never mind driving 200 or 300 miles between charges. The corridor will consist of nine sites, combining for a total of 50 actual chargers, and it should go online this fall.
The more chargers installed, the more likely buyers are to consider EVs, especially if long-distance driving is occasionally in the cards.
The "advanced" portion of the name refers to the sites' charging capabilities. They are wired to work with 150 kW of juice, which is more powerful than even Tesla's Supercharger. Once EVs are built to handle a charge that big, replenishing roughly 80 percent of an EV's charge should only take about half an hour. That's more than enough to hit the next station, or to skip over one and hit the next.
And, because Nissan isn't a bunch of self-interested jerks, the corridor won't be littered with some sort of proprietary charging tech. Featuring both CHAdeMO and CCS connectors, the DC fast chargers will work for nearly all EVs, including Teslas -- with adapters, of course.
This may seem like Nissan is doing a bit of good for the general cause of EVs, but there's other slyness at work. You see, Nissan's sole EV is the Leaf, and its range is a barely-there 107 miles. This charging network will not only rapidly speed up EV treks from Boston to DC, it will help alleviate Leaf range anxiety in the face of the Chevrolet Bolt and other, newer EVs with much longer ranges.
Of course, it's only a temporary bolstering, because a new Leaf is due very soon, and it will likely pack a greatly improved range.
