Why I built EV Readiness Check

I drive an electric car roughly 140 miles a day, and I don’t have a home charger. No garage, no driveway, no outlet near where the car sleeps. I charge at work and at public stations, in Chicago, through the winter.

According to most of what’s written about EVs, that shouldn’t work: you need a garage and a Level 2 charger, or you should wait. It took me a few months of trial and error to learn which parts of that were true for my situation and which were just people describing their own driveway.

Where the idea came from

I run the Chicago EVs group on Facebook and help moderate r/ShouldIBuyAnEV, so I read a lot of “should I buy one” posts. Most sound like this: I drive about 40 miles a day. There’s no fast charger near me, but there is a Level 2 at the grocery store. Is that enough for my commute? What if I get stuck between charges? Does winter change the math? Then thirty confident people answer, half of them contradict each other, and almost nobody does the one thing that would settle it.

That thing isn’t opinion, and it isn’t the car’s range. It’s whether the charging you can actually reach keeps up with the driving you actually do, week after week, cold months and long days included. When it does, EV ownership is boring in the best way. When it doesn’t, you live at fast chargers, and no amount of enthusiasm fixes that. The getting-stuck fear is the same question in disguise. I wanted a tool that worked it out for one specific household in about two minutes and told the truth about the result.

What solar taught me

Before this I spent seven years in solar. From 2011 to 2013 I ran SolarSyz, a solar panel distribution company. Enough customers asked me to install what I was selling that in 2014 I started Simplify Solar, and ran it until 2018.

Simplify Solar was an online installer, built on one idea the industry didn’t believe at the time: you don’t need to send someone up a ladder to know whether a roof is right for solar. Satellite imagery and high-resolution mapping could tell you the roof’s orientation, shade and usable area from a desk, in minutes. That let us skip the site-visit sales model most installers depended on, and our installed cost ran around $2.80 a watt, among the lowest in the market.

Two things stuck with me. The assessment is the honest part of the business: some roofs pencil out and some don’t, and the point of checking is to know which before anyone signs anything. The industry’s worst reputation problems came from skipping that step. And a good assessment doesn’t need a truck in the driveway. The right facts, asked the right way, get you most of the answer remotely.

If you have solar, or you’re weighing it: an EV is one of the largest loads a home ever adds, so the two pair well on paper. In practice most people charge overnight, when the panels are idle, so the economics run through your utility’s rate plan and net-metering rules. The check doesn’t model solar yet. It models the part that decides whether the car works at all: where it charges and how much you drive.

Two ways people talk themselves out of an EV

EVs are going through what solar went through, and I watch it play out in two camps. The first shows up every time gas gets expensive. They size up an EV like a gas car: range, price, a test drive, and charging treated like finding a gas station, a detail for later. That mental model is the whole problem. A gas car gets filled wherever you happen to be. An EV gets charged wherever it spends its nights and workdays, and if that place doesn’t exist, the range on the window sticker doesn’t help you. That’s how an EV ends up back on the dealer’s lot a few months later: not because the car was bad, but because charging turned out to be a hassle nobody had checked.

The second camp knows an EV has to be charged and has absorbed a rule: you need a Level 2 charger at home, or an EV isn’t for you. Then they hear the charger might mean upgrading the electrical service, add that to the price of a new car, and stop looking before they’ve started. This camp never gets to the lot. Solar left me with a healthy respect for electrical panels, and with the knowledge that the upgrade conversation happens far less often than the fear of it. For almost half the people who have taken the check, the outlet they already have is enough.

Both camps walk away, and carmakers read the result as no demand. But look at who is still buying. Rivian and Lucid, brands built on expensive EVs, keep growing deliveries while Tesla, the market leader, has flattened out. The pattern underneath is simple: people buying $70,000 EVs mostly own a home with a garage, so a Level 2 charger is a line item, not a question. Everyone else is solving two problems at once, finding a car they can afford and figuring out whether they can charge it. That’s the part of the market that isn’t buying, and it isn’t because they don’t want the car.

The script flips when you start from the driving instead of the charger. Under 40 miles a day? A charger at work? A fast charger near the office or home for the weeks that run long? Put those together and a lot of people in both camps are ready right now, with the outlet they already have. A garage isn’t automatic readiness, and street parking isn’t automatic disqualification. For a few, the honest answer is still no. Either way, you want to know before you buy.

Nobody runs that check before the purchase; the electricians and installers who could only show up once you’ve decided to buy. EV Readiness Check is that site check, done the way we did roofs: remotely, in a couple of minutes, from the few facts that decide the outcome. Where the car parks, what outlet is within reach, how far you drive in a week, where you live.

A check, not a pitch. A signal, not a surprise.

What the check actually does

Five questions: how you park, where you can plug in, how much you drive in a typical week, what kind of EV you have in mind, and where you live. You get a 0 to 100 score, a plain verdict, a recommended charging setup, and what a typical week looks like for the battery, including winter, using your state or province’s electricity rates and cold-weather range loss rather than national averages.

Sometimes the honest answer is no, or not yet, or “a plug-in hybrid until your parking changes,” and the check says so. It’s free, it doesn’t ask for an email to show your score, and the score is computed the same way for everyone. The scoring engine doesn’t know or care whether you end up buying anything.

What the data says so far

EV Readiness Check launched on March 11, 2026, and several hundred households have completed it since. Two things stand out. Almost half of everyone who has finished the check has nothing more than a regular wall outlet where they park, and still scores ready; these are people who have often been told they can’t own an EV. And the shortfall is real for people with no place to plug in: apartment and condo residents in the data come up a median 235 miles a week short of what they drive, against 15 miles for households with a wall outlet. Both groups deserve a straight answer, and they were getting neither.

Where it’s been featured

• The Southeast Florida Clean Cities Coalition, a U.S. Department of Energy Clean Cities coalition, listed EV Readiness Check in its August 2026 newsletter alongside the DOE’s own AFDC and AFLEET tools.
• Atlas EV Hub, Atlas Public Policy’s transportation-electrification data platform, lists EV Readiness Check among its resources.
• Clean Machines, the Delaware Electric Vehicle Association’s newsletter on Substack, featured the check in its August 2026 issue.

Who this is for

Mostly it’s for one person at a time, at a kitchen table, trying to decide whether an EV is a smart move or a headache. It’s also for organizations that want their members to get a straight answer before they buy. EV owner associations already share a co-branded version with their members, and I’m talking with utilities, electric co-ops and Clean Cities coalitions about putting the check inside their own programs. If that’s you, get in touch.

Roy
Founder, EV Readiness Check
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