Good morning from the parking lot behind Darling’s Auto in Augusta, Maine where I’ve spent the night in fetal position on the back seat of my electric vehicle, waiting the required seven hours for it to charge. Oh, it’s a wonder, this new form of transportation. Drive awhile, wait awhile; drive and charge, drive and charge. What’s time to a weary traveler? A parking lot can feel like home!
Yes, this could have been my fate but for a sliver of luck. In another scenario, I and my Chevy Bolt might have arrived at our destination on the back of a tow truck. The story begins in the rental car lot at the Boston airport where I am paired with a cute little electric vehicle or EV. My chance to become a forward thinking future dwelling citizen! What mastery could it take to drive a car?
Anyone else would have spent a moment reading the manual, but alas, I don’t read manuals. There were icons and messages on the console that could have been helpful had I known what message they were trying to convey. Instead, I accelerated forth in ignorance. There was, however, a number in green that continued to decrease at a rapid rate and seemed to indicate something important. I decided correctly that it was the harbinger of bad news. Its message was: YOU HAVE ONLY 22 MILES LEFT BEFORE YOUR ADORABLE LITTLE CAR WILL COAST TO A STOP! At that fateful point I realized it was time to try and understand how this charging business worked.
Possibly it was in the manual, but no one had said to me, “Don’t be a fool! Download any of several apps that will show you where the charging stations are. That way you can plan your route.” Fun fact: There are relatively few charging stations in northern New England. Portland, Maine has only three and one of them was temporarily closed. This means you necessarily suffer range anxiety, a condition that will soon appear in the DSM. It’s the terror of not making it from one charging station to the next, especially when your less-adorable-by-the-minute EV gives you fewer than 200 miles per charge. There are many many Tesla charging stations, by the way, but they are useless to those of us who are captaining a different ship. We hear there will be an adapter coming soon, to allow EVs to charge at Tesla stations, but there’s no prediction about when soon will be.
I limped into Augusta, Maine having consulted AAA about the nearest charging station available to me. They kindly referred me to the app that indicated I was only 8 miles away. If the mileage indicator in my Bolt was accurate (sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t), that gave me a cushion of only 14 miles. If the app was right, I was in luck, but if not, I’d be looking for a tow. I pulled into the station and a man selling used cars showed me a couple of chargers on the wall of the building. One of them worked, the other did not. I was giddy with relief and asked how long the charge might take to get my little vehicle 200 miles farther up the road. It was five in the afternoon. The man looked at his watch and delivered the sad truth: My car would be fully charged by three in the morning. “We have a vending machine inside,” he said kindly. “And you can sleep right here in your car. No one will bother you.”
In the course of my adventure, most of the charging stations I found were in the parking lots of used car dealers. They were not fun-filled places with food, drink and entertainment for the kids. I’d seen futuristic drawings of restaurants and playgrounds where we electric vehicle users would all stretch our legs and wander on grassy knolls for the 20 minutes it took to charge a Tesla or the considerably longer time required for an EV. Well, the future is just that, the future. The present was where I happened to be. And when I learned I would be sleeping in a parking lot instead of in a familiar warm bed beside the ocean, I was at first disbelieving. How could this bright new idea of traveling electrically be so impractical, so unsupported by infrastructure? I felt deceived, actually. Who had allowed me, a quasi-Luddite, to take to the road in a car that caused my blood pressure to rise and doubled the time of my journey? I consulted my app and learned the important fact that there are three levels of charging for EVs. With the first stroke of luck I’d had all day, I discovered there was a fast charger only a couple of miles away. It too was located in the parking lot of a car dealership where I walked the dreary perimeter for an hour while inside the Bolt the magic happened.
I was naïve in every way, to be sure. I was an ignoramus ripe for unpleasant surprises. And of all the surprises that came to me that day, I can’t say which was the greatest, but I confess I wasn’t prepared for the cost of the journey. I thought in monetary terms I’d be rewarded for my willingness to step into the future, but the fast charging of my car was far from cheap. For every 200 miles I paid about 30 dollars, some of that being what’s called a Station Time Rate, and if time is money the expense was greater still. For every three hours of driving there was more than an hour of stopping and waiting. By the time I got to my destination, a five hour trip, I’d been on the road nine hours.
Rural Maine is not the right place for your maiden voyage in an EV. And I would guess the same holds true for the long empty stretches of northern Arizona. Unless you’re in a Tesla, the infrastructure can’t support you yet. Yet. I have hopes for that three-letter word. It implies a future. But in the present this is the state of all things EV.
One last tale to bring the journey to a close. Your EV can charge off a regular outlet in your house. The same plug you plug your rice cooker into can, amazingly, charge your car. I don’t know what it adds to your home electric bill. I’ve read the cost is about five cents a mile. But there’s a catch. Because I was 40 miles from the nearest fast charger, it seemed wise to take advantage of the plug-in-at-home feature so my Bolt would be topped up and ready to go. I plugged it in on a Tuesday morning and a friendly message lit up on the console: CONGRATULATIONS! YOUR CAR WILL BE FULLY CHARGED BY 5 A.M. ON FRIDAY. And so it was. 70 hours later I was on the road again, armed with a little more knowledge and a little less range anxiety than when my journey began.
