Lorraine Explains: Electric vehicles are coming, but we're hardly ready

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“We’re going electric, you might as well get used to it now,” I confidently said in a radio interview. Well, I’ve said it more than once, because as every manufacturer announces the dates of their swan dives into the electric vehicle pool, it becomes more and more obvious that we shall be following the money. The very, very big money.

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But back-to-back with the stories of the power, comfort, range, and performance that accompany each debut are the consistent reports of the fact that we are caught in an equally consistent game of chicken-and-the-egg: we won’t get the infrastructure we need to make owning electric vehicles attractive to the masses until the masses show up, plug in hand. Picture a headlining band demanding the arena be full before they come out.

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Tesla has the most, and the most reliable, network of charging stations across Canada and the U.S. for its customers. But those outfits only work for Teslas. Fair enough. For those locked out of Musk’s castle, there is a dog’s breakfast of three levels of charging times, varying plugs, those who can charge at home or work, and those jostling for street-charging. China and Europe already have a “one-plug” policy, as explained by this owner.  We’re going to have to do the same, but in the interim, we have networks of suppliers that take various forms of payment that all rely on a remote machine accepting your card. Or not. Canada has 6,000 charging stations across the vast country, but that doesn’t mean they’re all working.

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Opening the ChargePoint app on my phone, I successfully managed to link it to the station – but it refused to debit my account and the transaction was declined. After several repeated attempts, I returned to PlugShare to find the nearest FLO station, a network I’d already used successfully. Unfortunately, it was occupied, which meant travelling to Burlington to find the next best choice. By this time, my range had dropped to 70 km. Putting on my hat and scarf, I switched to Eco+ to conserve energy and rolled in with 20 km to spare. —  Lesley Wimbush , piloting a Kona to Detroit.

I fire up PlugShare, one of the five EV charging apps I have on my phone. PlugShare provides locations, updates, and reviews of public chargers so EV owners can avoid experiences like I just had. I find this station on the app, and my jaw drops. “All Stations Broken” one user reports. “Both Stations Aren’t Working,” another one writes. “Could not initiate a charge.” All of these reports are in the last 48 hours, while reviews from earlier in the week suggest a successful charge. — Sami Haj-Assaad , taking a Mustang Mach E through cottage country.

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At this point, the most readily-available anecdotes are from car testers who are doing just that: testing the cars. When GM rolled out the EV1 in 1996, it was the first modern all-electric car (cool history of the pioneers is here ) and had a top range of 160 km (I don’t usually recommend Wikipedia, but there is an interesting read on the EV1 here ). The Tesla Roadster debuted in 2008 with a range of 320 km; today several cars can approach 555 km. The improvements year over year are stunning, but the fact remains that unless you’re pressing across the country on a long-distance jaunt for a story, getting stranded somewhere isn’t really appealing. 

More than one colleague has mentioned the locations of some of those existing stations are in less-than-desirable areas — usually remote and not conducive to a feeling of safety, especially after dark. There are safety concerns in another arena as well, as reported by Emily Atkins : “ Concerns exist at several levels about the security of public charging.” As a cyber security expert told her, “[a]s soon as you plug anything into anything else in the cyberworld, the thing that’s just been plugged in can either hack, or be hacked, by something else,” he says. Beyond the car and the charger, he says, the user and any networks their phone is connected to may also be at risk.”

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We need public charging to be as safe and reliable as gas stations. This means cooperation between manufacturers, every level of government and a public that can embrace change. Canada has nearly 12,000 gas stations. We have 6,000 charging stations. I never read about colleagues getting stranded with no gas, but I read constantly about hassles with charging EVs. For city use, it’s not much of an issue. People with the means can kit their homes out accordingly, but even that doesn’t solve the issue of unreliable charging while on the road.

In Ontario, we have a government that is talking out of both sides of its mouth at the same time. While taking a bow earlier this year for billions invested in Ford, Stellantis, and GM to produce electric vehicles, it’s hard to reconcile that intent when a few seconds after they were elected, they demolished rebates on electric car programs, removed existing charging stations, “ deleted a section of the provincial building code that would have required that any new home parking garage have a “rough-in” for a vehicle charger,” and “ … spent more than $230 million to cancel renewable energy projects that included a partially-built wind farm in a cabinet minister’s riding.” You need a government with long-term goals, and the intention and muscle to see beyond the end of its nose – or at least the current election cycle. The previous Liberals are guilty of gas plant removal in a similar hypocritical move. But will Doug Ford now ‘build back better’? 

Remains to be seen.