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Electric vehicle owners can “fill up their tank” for free on Electric Avenue and try out one of several battery-charging systems.

While the cars are docked at one of eight charging stations on a single block at Portland State University, researchers hope to glean some insights about consumer behavior of new EV owners.

“Generally, we’re interested in how vehicles interact with the charging devices we have there, and we’re interested in the behavior of the drivers who come and visit Electric Avenue,” says George Beard, manager of PSU’s Office of Research and Strategic Partnerships.

Electric Avenue is a series of side-by-side charging stations on Southwest Montgomery Street between Sixth and Broadway avenues, near PSU’s Urban Center. The two-year research and development project, which launched last August, is still in its infancy, but it has already made a big splash.

“When we opened the project back in August, we picked up 300 news stories around the world off this,” Beard marvels. “We came to market before anyone else did.”

The project is a partnership between PSU, the city of Portland and Portland General Electric. PSU provides the electricity at no charge, purchased from one of PGE’s green power options. EV owners only have to pay the city’s hourly parking fee, with time limits based on charging times at the stations.

The Electric Avenue stations are sponsored by different vehicle charging-system manufacturers: Eaton, ECOtality, General Electric, Northwrite Inc., OpConnect, Shorepower and SPX.

Additionally, a number of car manufacturers have promoted their local vehicle introductions on Electric Avenue, and allowed PSU to test their cars, including the all-electric Nissan Leaf.

“It’s a very visible location in a very active part of the city, so it’s a great place for us to do product launches,” Beard says.

Electric Avenue is one of the first places in the nation with so many public charging stations in one locale. Most other EV charging sites only have one or two charging stations, and some are only Level 1 chargers that use 110 volts. Seven of the systems at Electric Avenue are Level 2 chargers, which use the equivalent of 220 volts, or double what is common in residential applications.

According to the manufacturers’ spec sheet, a Nissan Leaf should take six to eight hours to charge on a Level 2 charger. “We were interested in finding out if the charging rates matched what the manufacturers said, but also to find out how reliable the charging stations were,” Beard says.

In addition to sponsoring one Level 2 charger, Eaton also sponsors a direct-current quick charger. The DC blasts in electricity at 440 volts. “When you look at the fueling nozzle for that it almost looks like a nozzle for an Indy racecar,” Beard says.

A Nissan Leaf battery can be restored to 80 percent of its capacity in 25 minutes.

One early observation, Beard says, is that people park at the DC charger for five to 10 minutes, much as they would when filling up their internal combustion engine.

“It begins to parallel the experience when you go to a Shell gas station,” he says. “Having access to DC quick chargers is not only practically important; it’s kind of psychologically important.”

Also, the connector on the charging station “approximates the appearance of a gas pump handle,” he says.

Early research has revealed some glitches in some of the charging systems and points to a need to make the technology more universal.

“We’ve had some problems with some of the charging equipment tripping warning lights on some of the cars. It didn’t do any permanent damage. It’s kind of like when you have to reboot your Windows computer.”

PSU also is studying EV owners’ driving habits and learning some lessons that may prove useful to vehicle marketers.

“We Americans tend to overbuy,” Beard says. “We buy cars for our vacations rather than for our daily life.”

An electric car may not be convenient for getting up Mount Hood for skiing trips, but if most of a person’s driving is to work and back home again, an electric car might be a good investment.

“If we better understood how we roll, we might roll differently,” he says.

The hefty price tags are making many people hesitant about buying electric cars. Beard argues that if consumers are looking to buy a new car, then electric cars are worth a look.

A Nissan Leaf runs around $35,000 and up, while the hybrid electric Chevy Volt starts less than $40,000. But the average cost of a new car these days is $30,000, and the federal government is offering tax credits for alternative vehicles that reduce the out-of-pocket price.

In addition to lower fueling costs, they cost less to maintain over time, Beard notes.

There’s also greater reasons to switch to electric — ending American dependence on foreign oil and keeping money spent on energy in our own economy. “In the future,” Beard says, “I believe people will turn around and say that there were people in the early 21st century who had the wisdom and clarity to move away from a car-based, oil-based transportation mode.”