Last week I was at the local Safeway which has an electric vehicle charging station in its parking lot. On a mid-week morning there was a line of cars waiting to use the four already occupied charging ports. Are these people really sitting there for god knows how long, waiting to “fuel up”? Charging an electric vehicle is far slower than filling up a combustion vehicle with gas. The advertised maximum charging rate only occurs in spurts, and in ideal conditions.
My current stance on electric vehicles is: if you cannot charge at home, then you’re better off buying gasoline-powered. The public charging infrastructure (outside of Tesla’s own superchargers) is still not ready for primetime. I follow quite a bit of car people on twitter, and the consensus I’ve gather is that the public charging network is slow, inconsistent, and not enough. The convenience of being in and out of a gas station in under 10 minutes is still a massive advantage.
I’m genuinely surprised that people are even willing to wait that long for a charging spot. The amount of impatience I’ve witness on the driving road these days is high. You have drivers honking at cars with the audacity to wait for pedestrians to cross before making a turn. What do they want? To run them over? Worst is when I see such impatience on weekend mornings. You’re aggravated on a Sunday morning? I have to assume you’re simply in a hurry to go die.
Personally I do not have the facilities to charge a car in my home. Therefore an electric vehicle does not factor in my future anytime soon. My time is worth way more than spending an hour just to charge up a car.
Waiting for Godot.