Electric Cars are Awesome, Charging is a Crapshoot
Green machines get better every day. But when you’re relying on public chargers? Getting juiced up can be a huge pain.
Later in the day, it would actually snow. But at the moment, it was only pouring rain in Los Angeles. The battery on my electric press car was under 15 percent — and the range was dropping quickly.
To preserve juice, the small crossover had cut the climate controls, so the interior was rapidly fogging up, and I was running out of options. Two of the ChargePoint stations the car’s navigation had directed me to were broken. The janky Flo Charging station was — apparently — members-only. The instructions on the Powerflex station, located in an empty parking devoid of services, proved impossible to decipher. And the Electrify America stations at the grocery store were all in use.
Out of options, I limped back to my girlfriend’s house, and resorted to the vehicle’s 120v charging cord. It had been a miserable morning, and it would be more than 24 hours before I felt confident enough to drive this fast, expensive machine again. Unfortunately, as this recent AudiWorld thread details, my experience wasn’t all that unusual, and showed that even if you’re in an area — like Southern California — rife with charging stations, actually charging can be a crapshoot.
So if you’re going to drive an electric car, the best bet is to pony up for a home charging station, as many members have done.
Now, while I’m an old-school gearhead who loves the smell of gasoline and the feel of a clutch pedal, I happen to love electric cars. I love the silence, the lack of emissions, and especially, the incomparable feeling of thrust they deliver. But for someone who lives in an apartment? Where I can’t even hook a battery tender to my motorcycle? I wouldn’t actually consider one, because I’d always feel — whether it’s realistic or not — like I was a hat trick of broken chargers away from being marooned.
This is to say nothing, of course, about the experience of using a fully functional charger. For example, all of the ones I’ve encountered require you to download an app to use them, which is stupid. Sure, it’s useful to be able to see your state of charge while you’re walking around the grocery store or sitting in a restaurant. But it’s far from necessary, and if you’re visiting a type of station you haven’t used before, it means that you have to spend five or ten minutes slogging through a setup before you can get a trickle of juice into your car. And what happens if your phone is dead? Or if you don’t have service? At that moment, you’re screwed.
After my recent charging odyssey, I had three useless apps on my phone — all of which had access to my billing address and credit card info. It’s enough to make you want to go and buy a diesel pickup.
So I’m proposing a couple of ideas to make charging easier. First, every charger should have a credit card reader. That doesn’t mean you still can’t use an app, because heaven knows companies love apps. But you should also be able to roll up to a charger, plug in your vehicle, slide your card, and start charging. It should be no harder than using a gas pump. Second, every charger should ping out not only whether it’s occupied, which some do, but whether it’s actually functional. Given that cars already receive real-time traffic updates and the like, that shouldn’t be hard. Either of those would have saved me a bunch of grief on my little adventure.
But what do you think? Am I whining unnecessarily? Or am I on to something? And what else could be done to make charging less risky when you’re on the move? Hit me up and let me know!
Image Source: Audi, ChargePoint