I've always been ambivalent about electric cars. On the consumer end, eliminating exhaust fumes and engine noise is attractive, especially in cities, though I'm not convinced that electric cars are all that environmentally friendly when you look at the big picture. The electricity has to be produced somewhere, and while large-scale power generation and distribution might be more efficient than having an engine in every car, that doesn't make it harmless. It is beyond me why California—which already suffers from lack of what it takes to produce enough power for its popuation—is pushing to ban non-electric cars. Then there's the problem of the batteries that drive these cars: expensive to produce, requiring scarce resources, relatively short-lived, and difficult to recycle—I'm not convinced they aren't worse than the problem they are trying to solve. I don't think we know enough about it at this point, and I can't see burning our bridges until we know the cure isn't worse than the disease. We've had enough of that approach!
Be that as it may, I can still see the attraction, for the individual, of a small electric car for tooling around town. Not that I forsee living long enough for an electric car to fit into our budget. Even used they are ridiculously expensive. But that doesn't mean I'm not open to the idea.
Or rather, I was open. Having had an electric rental car forced upon us during our recent time in Maryland, you'd pretty much have to give us an electric car to make me want one at this point.
That's not to say that the computer nerd in me didn't find it exciting to read our Chevy Bolt's instruction manual. So many amazing features! It was a lot like getting a new computer, and upgrading to Windows 11 from Windows 3.1. Only no one ever expected me to learn a new computer operating system at highway speeds with our lives, and those of two grandchildren, depending on it. Fortunately, Porter—who had lots of experience with strange rental cars during his IBM travelling years, though none were electric—did a fine job. I wasn't even driving, but the flurry of on-the-fly questions ("What does that light mean? What does this button do? Where on earth is the shift lever? (There wasn't one.) How do I read these dispay heiroglyphics?") and the rapid flipping through the very thick manual on my part, hoping for answers, about did me in. I'm not against new technology, but prefer to get acquainted with it slowly.
That, however, was the least of my complaints. I was not at all happy with the 200-mile range of the car. Fortunately, all the wedding venues were reasonably close to the hotel, so we managed to get back to the airport without having to give it a recharge, but that doesn't mean it wasn't stressful. Especially since the battery lost about 20 miles of reserve just sitting in the parking garage overnight. It's not as if we could have just zipped into a gas station for 5 minutes to "fill the tank." I have run out of gas once in my life, and that's an experience I don't wish to repeat.
I know, theoretically there are places available for recharging electric vehicles. Even our local botanical gardens has a couple of spots in its parking lot where you can charge while you admire the plants. But we were in a strange city, and in all our driving never saw such a place to pull over and fill up. Google indicated that there were some in the area, but we never saw them. Oh, wait—even if we'd found such a place, we didn't have the time it would have taken for a recharge.
When we picked up the car, the Avis agent had brushed off our concern, with "any decent hotel will have plenty of charging stations." True, our otherwise lovely Hyatt Regency had a good number of such stations—but every single one of them was out of order, so we couldn't recharge overnight.
We survived the experience—Porter even enjoyed braking with the turn signal. That's not quite an accurate description, but it's what it looked like. There was also a foot pedal brake, but the hand brake somehow shunted power back into the battery, which was cool. But I don't quite see the usefulness of an electric vehicle if you want to travel more than 200 miles away from home; 100 miles if it's a day trip.
Maybe if we needed a second car just for short trips, an electric one would be nice. But for now, I hope we can enjoy for many more years our 11-year-old gasoline-powered car that seats eight, has a range of over 400 miles, and a tank that can be fully replenished in under 10 minutes. Okay, 30 minutes if the stop is at Buc-ee's.
Here’s an article that’s pro-EV and still reaches similar conclusions: https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Items/Jan31-6.html. (Sorry, I don’t trust my phone to type correct HTML.) It’s definitely hard to get such a huge change right, and the period we’re in where the system goes from where a few aficionados have their shiny toys to where all is established and running smoothly is obviously going to be bumpy.
Stephan's article mentions that the very little funding for chargers has been spent yet. And that is because the federal government makes it so hard for that money to be spent, with short term deadlines to get the required applications in order, even when we have state agencies looking out for them and trying to prepare our town to have the right paperwork, we end up applying for grants that aren't appropriate, being late to the deadlines because they require a full-time grant writer on staff.
Our town is in one of the target areas for chargers and we still can't get anything done.
I read that over 40% of electric vehicle owners in America want to switch back to gas next time they buy a car, citing the same reasons that frustrated me. It was less for the rest of the world, but still over 20%; well over, I think, but maddeningly, I can't find the article again. Stephan is right that the middle of the path is bound to be bumpy. Few people are going to want the cars until the infrastructure is there, and it's hard to look ahead enough to invest in the infrastructure if people don't want the cars. I'm not convinced it's a good idea for the federal government to subsidize an idea whose time obviously has not come yet, but maybe they're hoping that if they give it a push it will start rolling. (That's how my father used to start cars sometimes when I was young.)
