- cross-posted to:
- climate@slrpnk.net
- cross-posted to:
- climate@slrpnk.net
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.
A petrol car has access to gas stations everywhere. Electric charger are spaced out quite a bit, where you need to use up quite a bit of range to get from one to another. If sitting in traffic, with the AC going for hours, that could be a problem. Then when you get to the charger, it takes a long time, so getting out of the area takes longer and the wait times could be days if a lot of people have electric vehicles. You’re also limited to the built in car battery, where a petrol car could technically have some extra tanks to carry more fuel with them to fill up on the side of the road… or emergency crews could deliver gas to cars that ran out.