While we are used to hearing about electric cars by now, it is interesting to hear a different perspective. This is from an owner of an electric car who has some negative viewpoints. While not saying that they are “bad” or “not worth it”, he is realistic in showing that electric cars are far from ready for the mainstream and can present some real problems:
For seven days, beginning on September 15th, the electric-vehicle industry sponsored an event called National Drive Electric Week. In Huntsville, Alabama, people lined up to drive a fleet of Nissan Leafs. In Golden, Colorado, they did the same for five Teslas camped in a real-estate-company parking lot; nearby, a big-screen television displayed footage of Tesla’s assembly line. In Cupertino, California, five hundred and seven electric vehicles participated in a parade through town. E.V.s, the talking points went, are cheaper to maintain, are “going mainstream,” and are “creating good American jobs.” But, first and foremost, they are “fun to drive.” All told, some ninety thousand people participated.
I’d hoped to attend the Drive Electric event nearest me, which was being held on U.C.L.A.’s campus. The actor and environmentalist Ed Begley, Jr., was going to give a speech. Some cool-looking E.V.s would be available to test drive. And I’d started leasing an electric car, a cornflower-blue Fiat 500, just three weeks before. I didn’t make it to U.C.L.A., though, because my vehicle didn’t have enough charge left for the drive across town, and when I pulled up to my usual plug-in station, at a public park in West Hollywood, the network was down. This had been the story of my E.V. experience: enthusiasm for the concept, tempered by a surprisingly crummy reality.
Early the next morning, I returned to the park. The network was back up. As I sat behind the wheel, watching on my digital dashboard an image of a battery slowly, slowly refilling, I called Michael D. Farkas, the C.E.O. of a Miami Beach-based company called CarCharging, which owns and operates 13,573 charging stations, including the one I was plugged into.
“Are you having a good charging experience?” Farkas asked, after I told him where I was. I said that I was at the moment, but that yesterday the network had been down, and that I often arrived at the station to find it occupied, even though the smartphone app I use to tell me such things—an app made by his company—showed it as available. Sometimes the touch screen on the charging stations didn’t work, I went on. Sometimes the station emitted an eerie, high-pitched blurp and no charge. Sometimes a non-electric car (an S.U.V., always) was parked in a spot reserved for charging.
Farkas took my complaints in stride. He’d heard them before. CarCharging was experiencing some growing pains. “We’re a mouse that’s swallowed an elephant,” Farkas said, more than once. The elephant in question was Blink, a system run out of San Francisco by ECOtality, another charging company. Like many E.V. enterprises, ECOtality went bankrupt last year, as grants it had received through the U.S. Department of Energy’s E.V. Project—totalling, with partner matches, more than two hundred and thirty million dollars—dried up. In October of 2013, CarCharging acquired Blink and its network of more than 12,500 charging stations for around $3.3 million, which increased the number of stations that the company operated nearly twelvefold.
Taking over all of these stations from a failed business had introduced a raft of problems. Many of the Blink facilities were furnished with cords that delivered less current than the machines they were attached to could send out, causing longer charge times, and thus longer lines. Farkas told me that a big overhaul was coming by mid-October, and that, while CarCharging prepared to send local contractors to swap out the cords, the company was considering which other problems it might address in the process. He cited vandalism, connectivity issues, and faulty screens as priorities.
“So what you’re saying is electric cars are like cell phones?” I asked him, feeling like a sucker.
“What I’m saying is: This is brand new. You’ve got to be patient. That’s it.” The Trouble with Electric Cars
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