My Inconvenient Life with an Electric Car

Seven years ago, my wife and I travelled to the future: we bought an electric car.

We had previously owned a gas-powered car for a while, then chose to ride the bus, bike, and walk to go places. When we moved from Winnipeg, Manitoba to the small town of Owen Sound, Ontario, we decided that we needed a car again. We purchased a used car but we were still uncomfortable using gas.

I had read about electric cars for several years. At one point, I was so anxious to get one that I sent a money order to a man in New York state as a deposit on an old van that had been converted to electric. I hadn’t even seen a picture of the van before I headed across the Canadian-American border at Niagara Falls. I eventually found the man’s rural address and he showed me what looked like a well-used, 1970s-era small family van with bulky batteries installed under the floorboards. The man took me for a little test drive around his property, and then I headed back to Canada, disappointed in the van and not interested in buying it.

A few years later, I was walking in downtown Owen Sound and I spotted a small, funny-shaped car with writing on the side. I went closer and saw that it was an electric vehicle. I couldn’t believe it! Someone already had a brand-new electric car in town. I looked online and saw that the Mitsubishi and Nissan dealerships were now selling electric cars in Owen Sound. My wife and I went to both dealerships, and test drove the Mitsubishi iMiev and the Nissan Leaf. We chose the Leaf.

I am still not thrilled to have a car called a Leaf. It’s kind of like saying you’ve just bought a tree, or a piece of nature, not a mode of transportation. It’s an environmentally-themed name, yes, but hardly hyper-masculine or jealousy-inducing (which are not truly high concerns of mine, but I think about these things sometimes). The names of the other electric cars on the market today are not any better: Chevy Bolt, Chevy Volt, Tesla Model S, BMW i3. It seems like on the day these cars were named, the marketing professionals were out to lunch, and a few scientists and computer programmers sneaked in and had a little fun.

A purely electric car, like the Leaf, runs on electricity alone. I find this fact incredibly futuristic. It seems like light years ahead of the internal combustion engine. I like to imagine the internal combustion engine was thought up by a Neanderthal who had just found the secret of making a fire and then promptly went about setting gasoline on fire and making it explode. In contrast, I like to think of my electric car as being designed in a lab by a physicist who expertly hacked into the atom (incredible!) and took control of a stream of electrons. It’s like something out of science fiction!

The best and worst part of living with an electric car is charging it up. Normally, we refuel at home during the night. When we are on the road, we need to find “charging stations.” These sound like something similar to gas stations but they are nothing at all like gas stations. Charging stations are small, discreet structures that only function to hold a hose and a charging plug. They usually have only one or two plugs, meaning only one or two cars can charge at a time. On top of that, these cars are sitting there for long periods. There is no convenience store, no attendant to take your money (it’s automated), not much that reminds you of a gas station. It’s not even big companies like oil companies that normally control these chargers. Rather, it’s cities and municipalities, car dealerships, and small business owners. Hardly an organized force to inspire eco pioneers with confidence.

One of my favourite parts of this charging situation is using the mobile app called PlugShare. This app shows you a map, powered by Google, of all the known charging stations in the entire world. Blue house icons show you home chargers. Green pump icons (resembling a gas pump) show you public stations. Orange pump icons show you extra-fast chargers. Grey pump icons show you stations currently in use. You click on one of these icons and it shows you pictures of the station, its address, whether it costs to charge, what plugs it has, and most importantly, feedback from other drivers who have used the charger. Besides these comments are a green dialogue box with a “+” sign, meaning a successful charge; a red dialogue box with the “–” sign, meaning charging was not possible (often because some Neanderthal in a gas car can’t read the “EV parking only” sign); or a blue dialogue box with a “…” icon, meaning a driver is only leaving a comment.

The PlugShare app and other similar apps, not to mention simply having a cellphone, are quite necessary if you drive an electric vehicle beyond a short commute around town. The very limited amount of charging stations means that you absolutely need to know whether you can charge at a certain destination or not. When you get there, you’ll typically need an app to get the charger started.

I love looking at the PlugShare map with all the different icons. I imagine taking road trips and searching out these rare charging stations. It feels like I am a fifteenth-century ship captain charting undiscovered lands beyond all known maps. Of course, Google Maps is the most accurate map in recorded history, but still, it feels like an adventure into the unknown. However, once my wife, daughter, and I are actually on one of these adventures, the experience is not quite so thrilling. Most of my mental energy is used up doing mental calculations. Do we have enough charge to make it to our next charging station? How many kilometres are we getting for every one percent of charge? I am constantly doing mental gymnastics, especially while I am driving. Then, once we find these elusive charging stations, we are bored out of our minds waiting for the car to charge up. 30 minutes would be a quick charge. One to two hours would be more typical. Not exactly paradise.

So … not everything is perfect in the future, but I find consolation and motivation by telling myself that we are eco pioneers. Not exactly like the pioneers who took covered wagons on long, slow journeys across Canada to settle the land. Well, now that I think about it, actually yes, rather like those pioneers. My family has a covered wagon of sorts, our journeys seem to take forever as we wait for our car to charge, and we have no choice but to stop in large settlements where the charging stations are.

I guess the science-fiction future I imagine is not so different from the past.