About EV Readiness Check

Most EV advice starts with range. The question that decides whether owning one feels easy or miserable is smaller than that: where does the car sleep, and is there a plug near it?

I drive about 140 miles a day in a Volkswagen ID.4 and have never had a charger at home. Making that work took real trial and error — workplace charging, a couple of public stations that became routine, and learning which numbers mattered and which didn’t. At the same time, in the Chicago EVs group I run on Facebook and the r/ShouldIBuyAnEV community I help moderate, I kept seeing the same questions get the same wrong answers in both directions: people with a driveway and a regular outlet told they couldn’t own an EV without a Level 2 install, and people in apartments with no plug at all told they’d be fine.

Both are expensive mistakes. EV Readiness Check exists to answer the question the way it should be answered — with your parking, your charging access, and your miles — before you sign anything.

You answer a few questions: where you park, what charging you can reach (home, work, or public), how many hours the car sits near a plug, and how far you drive in a typical week. The engine turns that into two numbers — how many miles a week you need to put back into the battery, and how many miles your setup can realistically add in the hours you have — and scores the gap between them from 0 to 100.

The score comes with a verdict, the charging setup that fits (often the outlet you already have), what changes if you add Level 2 or workplace charging, and a cost comparison against gas. When the gap is too large — a long weekly commute and no reliable plug — it says so, and it will tell you that a plug-in hybrid or waiting is the better move. A readiness check that never says no isn’t measuring anything.

The math is the same for everyone. It runs in your browser, it doesn’t know which link you arrived from, and nobody — no automaker, dealer, charger company, or utility — can pay to change the answer.

The inputs are public data, and the file each one lives in cites its source.

• Vehicle specs — range, battery size, onboard charge rate, and efficiency for 40 EVs and plug-in hybrids, from the EPA’s fueleconomy.gov. Level 1 recovery is outlet-limited to roughly 1.1–1.4 kW for every car; Level 2 recovery uses each vehicle’s own onboard rate.
• Electricity rates — residential rates by state from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Electric Power Monthly (Table 5.6.A); Canadian rates from Hydro-Québec, BC Hydro, the Ontario Energy Board, and the Alberta Utilities Commission.
• Gasoline prices — state averages from the EIA, for the cost comparison.
• Grid emissions — state factors from the EPA’s eGRID database.

It covers all 50 states plus Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. Electricity rates are current to May 2026. The code that computes the score is checked against a fixed set of test cases on every deploy, so a change in one place can’t quietly move results somewhere else.

Since launch in March 2026, about 500 people have completed the check. Two things stand out as of September 2026:

• 46.4% had nothing more than a standard wall outlet where they park and still scored as ready. The outlet they already have is enough — no install required.
• For apartment and condo residents, the median weekly shortfall was 235 miles, against 15 miles for people charging from an outlet. That’s the group the check tells to look at workplace charging, a plug-in hybrid, or waiting.

Neither group is well served by advice about range. Both are served by a plain answer about fit.

I’m Roy. Before this I founded and ran Simplify Solar, a solar installation company, which is where I learned how installers price a job, how permitting and utility interconnection actually work, and what a home’s electrical panel can and can’t take. I’ve also worked in utility-scale renewable energy. That background is why the check treats charging as an infrastructure question, not a car question.

EV Readiness Check is a one-person operation. When you write in, I read it.

It’s free, and there’s no signup to get your score. It doesn’t run ads, take referral fees from dealers or charger sellers, or rank vehicles for money.

Your individual answers aren’t shared with anyone unless you choose to share them. EV owner associations share it with their members through co-branded pages. What a partner can see is how many of their members completed the check and how the results break down — not who said what. A privacy page spelling out exactly what’s collected, where it goes, and how to have it deleted is on its way; until then, email and ask.

Most utilities first learn about a new EV on their system after it’s already plugged in — a rebate application, a rate enrollment, a new overnight load. People who take this check tell it when they plan to buy, and most know months ahead.

The check is built to run under your name with your rates, rebates, and programs in the results, so members see the right next step before the car arrives — and you see, in aggregate, where EV interest is building in your territory before it shows up on a transformer. If you run an EV program, I’d like to hear how you enroll new EVs today.

Email hello@evreadinesscheck.com or use the contact form. Corrections to any number on this site are especially welcome — say which page and which figure.