When Jamella Hagen and her boyfriend planned a four-day road trip to bring his new electric pickup truck from Vancouver to Whitehorse, she anticipated challenges.
She knew the gaps between fast chargers in the North, so they planned stops in communities with EV charging stations.
What she did not anticipate were the wildfires.
“Our choice to drive an EV was an attempt to reduce our personal impact on climate change,” she wrote in a CBC first person column. “But on the road, we encountered climate change disasters all around us, and we had to cope with them while learning to use a new and still fragile charging network.”
Some of the routes Hagen planned to take were shut down and redirected to make room for evacuees leaving Kelowna and the Shuswap region.
Knowing the EV truck wouldn’t make a long distance between chargers, Hagen made unexpected stops, like a hotel where a charger was a 20 minute walk away. Hardly unusual, she said, as she often finds EV chargers located in inconvenient places, such as the edges of town or behind buildings.
“If I was travelling as a single woman, I would have found myself missing the comfort of a brightly lit gas station on a lonely stretch of highway.”
Overall, Hagen says she’ll still consider buying an electric vehicle herself while living in the north, but only if her family had an additional, fuel-powered car at the ready.
Can’t electric cars also charge, slowly, at any random power outlet? While gas cars need an actual gas station?
Very slowly from a normal outlet - like over a day to fully charge the battery
A few days, even. My Bolt’s battery isn’t huge and holds about 60kwh, and a normal outlet only gives about a kilowatt (so you’d be looking at about 60 hours of charging). Granted, you don’t have to go from 0 to 100 if you only need (for example) 30% to get to a fast charger a few towns over, and you can maybe get by on even less if there’s a level 2 (220V) in between, but level 1 (normal outlet) is really meant for people who don’t drive that much and/or are often home. Not road trips.
But to a normal outlet’s credit, you can easily get about 40 miles of charging overnight on a smaller car. That’s over 14,000 miles per year, which is a little above average for most drivers
It’s 2-4 miles charged per hour on a 15 A circuit, so several days for a full charge.
When I first got mine charging equipment was out of stock, so I used this method. It was plenty sufficient for my daily needs.
Personally I wouldn’t want to wait that long while there’s an active wildfire. You’d need hours to go even a few miles and a day+ for a full charge. Not arguing against EVs, just saying regular outlets are not the fix in this situation.