Electrifying vehicles used by rideshare drivers delivers a lot of emissions-reduction bang for the buck, because drivers for services such as Uber and Lyft travel many more miles than average drivers. Electrification can also save money for the drivers, who are usually responsible for their own vehicles’ fuel and maintenance costs.
Obviously, drivers are only going to go electric if they know they’ll be able to reliably and conveniently charge their EVs. As cities, fleet owners and EV service providers develop charging infrastructure strategies, they need to know when and how rideshare drivers charge in the real world. The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), in collaboration with partners on the WestSmartEV@Scale project, collected driving data from a sample of electric rideshare drivers in Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Portland, Oregon.
RMI’s report identifies the challenges involved in building out charging infrastructure, and identifies best practices for addressing them.
RMI found that over 90 percent of rideshare drivers using EVs charged them at home. Furthermore, when drivers did use public chargers, they tended to use them for short periods of time, rarely charged their EVs to 100%, and often made long stops without availing themselves of nearby public chargers.
The drivers spent lengthy periods of time at locations such as shopping centers and libraries, but they showed a preference for waiting to charge at home. The logical inference is that this is because it’s cheaper to charge at home. This jibes with what an Uber driver told me in London in 2023. His Hyundai Ioniq’s range of 200 miles was plenty for a day of stop-and-go city driving. When he got home at night, he plugged into a lamppost charger for a slow charge (he had no driveway). A nightly charge cost him about a third what driving on petrol would cost, and also less than what he’d pay at a DC fast charger.
This is just one of the insights found in RMI’s report. Anyone involved in the rideshare industry, or in urban charging infrastructure planning, should read it in its entirety.
Source: Rocky Mountain Institute
