Time for a Charge

I guess I’m lucky to have had my electric vehicle for almost 8 months without charging incident. I’ve taken a few longer trips but was able to make it there on a full battery, charge it while it was parked, and travel home a day or two later without needing to find a charger. The honeymoon came to an end when I boldly tried to do a one day road trip. Upon arriving at my destination the parking garages with chargers were full, leaving me with a very limited amount of power to get to a charger on the trip back. I searched for the closest fast chargers and was thankful to find them with 35 miles left on the battery. I plugged in and the charge failed. After a few attempts, I tried a different charger, which also failed. While I struggled to get the unit working, another EV pulled up, hooked in and the charge began without incident. I called customer service and they walked me through it, activating the unit on their end - failure. With customer service on the line monitoring things I tried all 5 open chargers at the location and they all failed. By that time, an hour later, the charger that had been in use opened up but the charge to my vehicle failed again. I eventually found a level 2 charger a couple miles away and plugged in. Rather than wait in a cold car until morning to get enough charge to drive home, I calculated that 30 miles of charge were needed to make it to the next fast charger. That took 1.5 hours. Not wanting to use power for heat I drove an hour and found superfast chargers. Thank goodness for the heated seats and steering wheel, but my teeth were still chattering as I plugged in. I had 19 miles (7%) of charge left by then. Fortunately, these chargers worked and within an hour the car was charged to 90% and I headed home, arriving back 5 hours after I would have if I didn’t have to charge the vehicle during the trip home.

The experience clearly doesn’t make for an enticing EV vehicle sales pitch. It does, however, highlight the critical need for a reliable network of chargers, particularly fast chargers (which in and of themselves require a travel delay when compared to refueling at a gas station), if we have any hope of converting our transportation system to electric. This all occurred in and around New York City. If a major metropolitan area doesn’t have this infrastructure, we clearly have a long way to go, but I’m optimistic we’ll get there. I have to admit, I wasn’t happy with my decision to switch to EV while shivering in my dark, cold car waiting for it to charge, but must remember the bigger picture.