Slow, fast, and faster: Where to charge electric cars

Plugshare's Web site shows electric car charging stations throughout the country.

(Credit: Screenshot by Wayne Cunningham/CNET)

One advantage of electric cars comes from the huge available infrastructure: We have electric plugs just about everywhere. There are many more electric plugs than even gasoline stations.

So charging an electric car should be easy, just plug it into the nearest outlet.

And it is that easy, almost. Your standard home outlet in the U.S. offers 120 volts of alternating current (AC), with a circuit breaker rated at 15 or 20 amps. Most electric cars I have seen come with a cable adapter for that outlet, a grounded three-prong plug on one end and a J1772 SAE electric car-charging plug on the other. The J1772 plug was specifically designed for electric car charging.

Problem is, given a typical electric car like the Nissan Leaf, it will take about 15 hours to charge the battery from empty to its EPA-rated 72 mile range from that standard household source.

Most plug-in cars have a J1772 port, letting them plug into public charging stations.

(Credit: Josh M… [Read more]