These days it seems it has become somewhat of a ritual for journalists or influencers to rent an electric vehicle (EV) and take it out for a road trip to see how it works out.
Usually, those stories end in some kind of disaster such as their timetable being thrown off due to the time it takes to charge their car. And on Sunday, NPR reported on Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s decision to take a four-day road trip with EVs.
The story, titled, “Electric cars have a road trip problem, even for the secretary of energy,” details the struggles Granholm’s electric caravan experienced.
It noted Granholm is “a two-term former governor of Michigan, she helped rescue the auto industry during the 2008 global financial crisis, and she’s a longtime EV enthusiast.”
“That makes her uniquely well positioned to envision the future of the auto industry and to sell the dream of what that future could look like,” it argued.
However, the story explained the energy secretary “at times had to grapple with the limitations of the present,” such as the lack of fast charging stations for EVs. And that caused an incident in a suburb of Augusta, Georgia, when her advanced team determined one of their stops was not going to have enough chargers.”
“One of the station’s four chargers was broken, and others were occupied. So an Energy Department staffer tried parking a nonelectric vehicle by one of those working chargers to reserve a spot for the approaching secretary of energy,” NPR noted. It added, “In fact, a family that was boxed out — on a sweltering day, with a baby in the vehicle — was so upset they decided to get the authorities involved: They called the police.”
Yep, that’s a good look for the Biden administration’s push for EVs: Step aside family with a baby on a hot day. You have to wait your turn to charge your car because there aren’t enough chargers and the energy secretary is coming through to show off how amazing EVs are!
While the police were called, the outlet explained there wasn’t anything they could do because it is not illegal to block an EV charger with a non-electric vehicle. Eventually, Granholm’s team got the situation smoothed out.
That incident occurred after what NPR described as a painstaking process of mapping out the trip to make sure the caravan could have chargers available.
On top of the issue of the speed and availability of the chargers that drivers might encounter on an electric road trip, there is another issue they could face: the charger just might not work.
According to the outlet, “On the secretary’s road trip, that stop in Grovetown included a charger with a dead black screen. At another stop in Tennessee, the Chevy Bolt that I was riding in charged at one-third the rate it should have. Electrify America says that’s not an isolated problem; a faulty component has caused a number of chargers to be ‘derated’ while the company works on a fix.”
The Biden administration has been aggressively pushing a transition to EVs. In June 2022, Granholm argued soaring gas prices were a “very compelling case” to switch to an electric vehicle, despite the trade-offs.
It seems Granholm’s team managed to avoid some of the worst examples of an EV road trip, such as driving in the winter without the heat to conserve the battery.
Still, the fact she encountered these problems after all that planning should be a bright red light that the administration should maybe slow its push for EVs.
Story after story has shown the technology and infrastructure are just not there to make a complete switch to EVs practical and painless. And some may see making a family with a baby wait in the heat so a government official can charge her car as a “very compelling case” against EVs.
