A friend once responded to one of my many electric vehicle-related posts with an excellent question:
“What’s going to be the tipping point for charging infrastructure? When will there be enough electric charging points to make cross country travel convenient and practical in an EV?“
This is the most commonly voiced concern about EVs. It shouldn’t be. We need a map that says” You are here,” to show us where we are on the timeline of EV adoption. Here’s your map:
Just as it was for the adoption of the automobile and gas stations, charging infrastructure will proceed parallel to the adoption of electric vehicles. It’s not “chicken OR egg.” It’s “chicken AND egg.”
Horses were much more practical for long distance travel, during the early years of the automobile revolution. There were livery stables, plentiful “fuel,” water troughs and hitching posts. For cars to have succeeded (spoiler alert: they DID), the vast majority of people decided that cars met the majority of their transportation needs. When long distance travel was required, those same people opted for other modes, like trains, ships and (a little later) airplanes.
I can remember billboards stating “Last gas for xx miles,” when gas stations weren’t as ubiquitous as they are today. People still traveled by car.
However, as daunting as the challenges were, gas stations did rise, over time. Interstate highways were created, over time. Mechanics set up garages, even in very small towns. Roadside dining and “motor hotels” popped up along the major routes. When you look back on all this development that had to occur for automobiles to dominate travel, it is amazing anyone ever bought a car in the first place, right?
No!
It was inevitable, because it was progress. Automobiles were just plain better for most people. If naysayers had been successful in using the “long distance travel objection,” we’d all have horses today. The work ahead of us, back then, must have seemed as daunting as the work ahead of us today. But we all know progress brings opportunity.
For the Internet to become the force it is today, much work had to be done. It required infrastructure that, if we knew the cost and effort before building it, we may have decided not to do so. Amazon, Google, Ebay and many other household names wouldn’t exist, if we didn’t start using the Internet until we had DSL, fiber optic networks, cellular networks, huge server farms (and the energy to run them).
But we did and here we are today reading and posting on LinkedIn. Many of you work in industries made possible, or greatly enhanced by, the Internet. We could not have predicted all the new opportunities and businesses that would spring up around the net. In hindsight, all the work paid off. The same is true of the world that EV adoption will bring into reality. We cannot, from our current spot on the timeline, understand all the benefits awaiting us, post-transition.
But they’re there, waiting for us. We just have to do what Americans do: show the world the way forward. If not, China will be more than happy to lead the way (and reap the benefits).
EVs are already a better choice, for the needs of the vast majority of drivers in the U.S., even with today’s charging infrastructure. The fact is, it’s a small minority of us who drive more than 500 miles in a single day. In most states, long-distance travel is possible for the most common routes, with existing infrastructure and a little pre-trip planning. It’s also important to remember, horses weren’t eliminated from the planet when people started buying cars. If you had to go to an area with no roads or infrastructure for automobiles, you just rode a horse. They still existed! The same is true of gas-powered vehicles. If you have to travel outside the established charging infrastructure, just rent or borrow a gasoline-powered car! ICE vehicles aren’t going away overnight. They’ll still be available, when necessary or advantageous. Once we understand this simple idea, we can drop the “infrastructure argument” and move to a more profitable use of our time, such as looking at the benefits of driving electrically, compare EV capabilities to our actual personal driving/commuting habits and use that information to determine if we can benefit from EVs as the world is right now. Future benefits are just icing on the cake (and inevitable).
Do we need more chargers for long distance travelers and people who can’t charge at home? Absolutely! But, we’ve almost got the right number of chargers, for where we are on the adoption map, right now.
