Lack of EV Charging Scuppers No-Emission Road Trips
Summer is perfect for road trips — pavement, sunlight, and junk food by the bag. But looking back this summer, you’ll be plagued by road trips that weren’t.
The car was better than I deserve. I’m not a petrol head, or “car man” in American terms. As a reporter, I’m interested in products that Ford and General Motors sell to the extent that the lineup determines what they earn. As a natural cheap skate, I am the owner of the 2004 Honda Civic. But for the FT film, Ford lent me a 2021 Mustang Mach-E. The moment it rolled up my Chicago street, I felt a turbulent mix of horror and charm that the poet calls love. It was red.
The Electric Mach-E is not really a car, but a sports utility vehicle. Ford sold 16,000 units in the first half of this year, behind Tesla. Still, electric vehicles are still rare on the road, accounting for only 2 percent of the US market. I wentggles when the courier opened the lid and found the plug instead of the familiar petrol hole.
I promised the driver to park safely in my place all weekend after shooting. Honda has been demoted to the street. He stared into my eyes and said in a disappointing, heavy voice, “Don’t do that.”
As such, I was in a personal remake of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, the soundtrack pumping. Oh yeah.. Where are you going? About three hours from Chicago, which was flattened by glaciers and fled, I decided to head to the debris-free area of Illinois, a beautiful hilly area along the Mississippi River.
My plan quickly failed. Tesla, Ford, GM and others make electric vehicles, but the necessary charging infrastructure is still in its infancy. Most EV owners are time consuming and need to be charged at home. House owners typically spend up to $ 300 on the slowest level 1 charger. This can take up to 25 hours to fully charge the battery. Level 2 chargers take 4-8 hours and can cost up to $ 2,000 including installation.
Most EV owners need to charge at home because it takes time © Claire Bushey / FT
But like millions of others, I lived in a multi-unit home and didn’t have a place to connect the Mach-E. The Landlord and Condominium Management Companies may decide to spend $ 50,000 in the future (or now if they live in California) to install a high-speed DC charger that can charge the vehicle within an hour. Instead, I woke up later than planned to get on the road.
There are approximately 54,000 public and private charging stations in the United States. It sounds a lot until you try to find it. There are about twice as many gas stations. Excluding private stations, that number is reduced to 50,000. Only Tesla vehicles can access Tesla stations. In addition, many stations are older and slower charging types.
But it was a beautiful Sunday morning and I was optimistic. The US Department of Energy website displayed a DC station at a nearby drugstore. Perfect.
The EVgo station looked like a fuse box installed in a parking lot. I downloaded the EVgo app, but I didn’t have a payment method because I didn’t have a credit card slot. After all, it didn’t matter. A customer service representative contacted me that the station was broken.
Next, I noticed that the Mach-E keychain had a bar-coded plastic card attached to it, which was linked to the account of “Chargepoint”, a competing chain of charging stations. Perhaps I was miscalculating. The Chargepoint app took us to a DC station about 3 miles south. I found it, scanned the card, plugged it in, and. .. .. Nothing happened. I was now making a second call to the third app and customer service. The parking clerk asked me to move the car, just as the clerk picked me up. I gave up.
I could have tried a quick charging station in the suburbs, but I was hesitant to set foot far away from my house for fear of getting stuck. The whole process took about 90 minutes. If I were driving a Honda, I would have been in the middle of Illinois.
The US Senate resolved on Tuesday to proceed with an infrastructure bill that includes $ 7.5 billion in charging stations. This is only part of the estimated $ 60 billion needed to build the $ 500,000 requested by President Joe Biden. Until the country’s charging infrastructure becomes more robust, EVs will continue to be good cars, if any, with another petrol engine.
Source: californianewstimes
