Ford’s Power Promise Means Home EV Chargers For New EV Buyers

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Normally, when Ford wants to announce something new, there’s a press release. For those unfamiliar, a press release is written basically like a newspaper article. Some websites (including us sometimes) publish it just like that, because it’s ready to go. Most outlets instead retell the story in their own way and pull some of the quotes out of it. The better ones add some information that the press release didn’t tell you, even if that means bad things the company didn’t want to tell you gets shared.

Ford has been experimenting with different formats, like stories, to share news because they know many people link directly to the press releases on social media and in media. However, Ford did something even better today and told us about the news the company wants to share with a blog post from the company’s CEO, Jim Farley.

At this point, you could probably just bail and go read Jim’s post, and I’ll just be sure to get to my word count with some lorem ipsum dolor sit amet … nevermind. I’ll go ahead and sum it up for people who don’t like to click links.

Basically, Ford’s going to give every new Ford EV buyer a complete home charging station. This includes not only the station itself, but installation of it so that it will actually charge cars (kind of an important thing). Farley says that this is important to do because half of the car-buying public doesn’t know how EV charging works, including at home. If someone drives away from the lot and doesn’t know where to get a charging station, who to call to install it, and such, it might not happen at all.

He compares this “take care of everything” approach to what many other manufacturers are doing right now: offering cheap lease deals to get the EVs off the lot. This works, but it doesn’t take care of the underlying problems of insecurity, lack of knowledge, and fear of the unknown. By simply putting the charger in for customers, they’ll be able to just plug the thing in and have no problems figuring all of that out.

This dovetails quite well with other things Ford’s been up to. Adding access to the Supercharger network was a big one that took a lot of the guesswork and uncertainty out of charging away from home. Pull up, plug the adapter in, and get a charge going instead of worrying about whether a charging station works or not (at least in most cases). The BlueOval Charge Network’s app makes it easier to navigate there and start a charge by just plugging in.

To be honest, it would be nice to have some deals on top of this, but it makes more sense in the long run to get it right and make for a better value proposition instead of trying to buy your way out of the problem.

Many Of Us Have Seen The Value Of This In The Wild

To really illustrate the value of what Ford’s doing, I’m going to share a story from Roswell.

You see, one night on a dark road between Roswell and Corona, I saw a bright flash in the sky. A large object came down from the sky, crashed into the ground, and split in two. After about 30 minutes of driving on sketchy dirt roads, I got pretty close to the crash site. When I walked up to it, hundreds of chickens poured from the wreckage and—

Oh, not that story. Sorry. Maybe some other time.

OK, so one time I was at the NMDOT ChargePoint station west of town charging my Bolt EUV on the way back from a long, long trip across the country pulling a trailer. After a few minutes, I saw a car pull up next to mine. A woman got out of it and had no idea what to do to get the charge started. So, I got out to help her out.

She had just bought a Cadillac Lyriq. It was a nice vehicle, and she really loved driving it, but when the battery indicator started looking low, she had no idea at all what to do. The only thing she knew was that there was a charging station, and she pulled up to it hoping that things would just work out. Then, she started looking around hoping that somebody would come to her aid, and I was literally the only somebody within 50 yards.

It turned out that the car dealer hadn’t taught her a thing about charging it. I mean literally nothing. I helped her search her car for the home charge cord, which was just like the one my Bolt came with. I showed her how to swap the end out for the 120V plug and explained to her that it would add 40–50 miles overnight. She thought that would be dreadfully expensive, and I explained that the Level 3 ChargePoint station was 4× the cost of charging at home, making it something you only want to do if you need a faster charge.

Once I explained all that, I explained that you need to install an app at most charging stations. So, we installed 6 or 8 of the most common apps on her phone. Then, I explained that the car gets less range on the highway, and how to use both Chargeway and A Better Route Planner to plan road trips. She was about to drive the thing into Texas to visit family and would have been in serious trouble if she had just winged it.

I then helped her figure out that she could get a free installation for home L2 charging from GM, and this is something that the dealer hadn’t told her a thing about! I explained that they’d probably just wire up a 240V plug for the charger she had in her hand, and explained how to swap the fatter plug back onto the box to take advantage of that NEMA 14-50 plug when it was ready.

After going through all this, her car was up to about 70%, and she was ready to go, but I had to wonder why nobody spent a few minutes telling her at least how to plug the car into a regular 120V socket for now to avoid needing to go to the ChargePoint station and spend 4× more.

Really, just putting in a home charger makes a lot of sense here. It’s hard to get it wrong when somebody just does it all.

Featured image by Ford.