I do not have a Monk-like attention to detail and, honestly, if Godzilla himself were ripping the roof off an office building a block away I’d probably miss it. This might be because I reserve all my attention for cars, meaning that I’ll notice a Ford Escort ZX2 with the S/R package driving the other direction six miles away. Perhaps this is why the appearance of three Toyota bZ4X electric crossovers at one charging network caught me off guard.
How could this be? The bZ4X is extremely mid, named like a late-gen Sony Walkman, and had its presumption of reliability immediately shot in the foot when the wheels started falling off the first examples. While sales and inventory are up for the bZ4X this year, that’s only relative to poor sales last year and after a lot of heavy discounting.
It was therefore a neck-snapping moment this week when I saw three bZ4Xes utilizing half the stalls at an EVgo charging location just outside of New York City. I have never seen two bZ4Xes outside of a Toyota dealer, so three getting a charge was as rare as seeing an albino squirrel or witnessing Astros relief pitching not blowing a lead.
Being a reporter and a curious person I had to go find the owners and figure out what was going on. I’ve been especially curious as I’ve seen a sudden uptick in bZ4Xes running around New York lately.
It’s Probably Not What You Think It Is
My first instinct was that the insane lease deals on the Toyota might have been the cause, and I’m sure that has something to do with why I’m seeing more on the road. If I had the ability to charge a car at my place I’d be tempted by a $ 190-a-month lease and year of free charging, too.
But as I got closer I noticed something all the cars had in common. Every one of them had a license plate starting with T followed by a bunch of numbers and a C. In New York, this means that the vehicle has one of the coveted For-Hire Vehicle Licenses. While you can be an Uber driver in just about anything in the burbs, if you wanna offer rides in the city you need to have a plate and a license from the Taxi & Limousine Commission.
It was clear right away these were Ubers, but to be sure I asked the two gentleman standing next to the cars.
“Ubers or Lyfts?”
“Ubers.”
“Ah…”
Again, my presumption here was that these two drivers got their cars recently, while the lease deals were great (most EVs used by Uber drivers I’ve talked to were leased). When I suggested this possibility they gave an unhappy shrug and explained that, yes, leases are cheaper now but they got these cars before the prices went down.
So why do it?
“It takes two weeks to get a taxi plate and it’s too hard to get a Tesla. The Toyota was easy.”
While I still see a ton of Teslas used as Ubers, the picture starts to become clearer the more I talk to them. Any EV is better than no EV if you want a license, and so whatever is available at the moment is often the best car.
In New York City, you can only get a new For-Hire Vehicle License if you’re an EV or a wheelchair-accessible vehicle. There was a brief pause where no one could get one due to a lawsuit, but that lawsuit was thrown out earlier this year so licenses started getting issued again.
In order to get a license, according to the T&LC, you have to have a VIN and prove you have an electric car, which means buying the car first. It would suck to buy a car and then have to wait for delivery as that’s money lost, so the two drivers I spoke to just got the first thing that was nice and available (they said Teslas were too inconsistent with delivery and they didn’t want to risk it). Plus, Toyota still has a great reputation among drivers and, in my experience, has the biggest share of the market in the city.
The drivers liked their cars and thought they were comfortable, but there was big problem.
The One Big Problem With The bZ4x As An Uber
Talking to the drivers I was surprised to find out that range wasn’t that big of an issue. Most of their driving is in the city and they aren’t covering huge miles, so the low 200-mile range they experienced was sufficient for their needs (I think these were all AWD models and therefore have 228 miles of range).
The issue is that DC Level 3 charging on these cars is kinda slow. From Toyota:
DC Fast Charging in ideal conditions: In AWD models, going from Low Light to 80% can take ~1 hour, which results in an average charging rate of ~3 miles/minute. In FWD models, going from Low Light to 80% in ideal conditions can take ~30 minutes, which results in an average charging rate of ~6 miles/minute.
That’s an hour to get to 80% under “ideal conditions,” but others, like Cars.com, have found it difficult to achieve those numbers:
Our fast-charging test of a FWD bZ4X XLE took considerably longer at 54 minutes to charge the battery from 25%-80%, which added 141 miles of predicted range at a rate of 2.6 miles of range added per minute. The 2.6 miles of range per minute was far less than Toyota’s best-case estimate of 6 miles of range per minute (higher is better when comparing miles of range added per minute).
The Uber drivers I spoke with said it was more like two hours to go to full which, for obvious economic reasons, Uber drivers tend to do.
When I end up at a public charger and see an Uber driver and look at the screen on the charger I’m never surprised when I see them at 98% or 99%.
This isn’t recommended by Toyota:
To help maintain long-term battery health, DC Fast Charging should be limited to two cycles of charging Low Light to 80%) per day throughout the year.
Since these are leased cars, the long-term battery wasn’t likely of much concern to the drivers.
I don’t blame them for fully charging as, in the same situation, that’s what I’d do. Still, this sucks for anyone who is waiting. Most people I meet at chargers usually only fill up to 80%, which means your max waiting time is usually around half an hour if you’re behind them in line. If you’re waiting for these guys? It’ll probably be a while.
The good news for the future is that there were plenty of Tesla Superchargers in the same garage and there was zero wait.
