Growing up on the beaches of Southern California, I have had a love-hate relationship with the oil companies. For most of by early years I would come home with tar on my feet and have to use paint thinner or turpentine to remove it. I can’t imagine that stuff is good for your skin.
When I look out to Catalina in the morning and my view is dotted by oil rigs, and then on my bike ride home I pass more oil pumps. On my occasional drive into Los Angeles, I pass oil wells, refineries and storage tanks. Clearly big oil is everywhere in Southern California.
The romantic thought of driving an electric car and giving the bird to the oil companies is something that appeals to me, and I am guessing most Southern Californians given the number of hybrids running around. I reached out hoping to find something that would fit my needs, and within my current budget, there was the Nissan Leaf.
My wife convinced me that it wasn’t a real solution, so we added a Chevy Volt to our collection of transportation devices. I am happy to say in two months, we have driving 2041 miles and used just 6 gallons of gas. The biggest problem is charging. The places I work in Los Angeles only have chargers for their regular employees, not day visitors like me or my wife. I have found a Carl’s Jr with chargers that has become a regular stop, and a parking garage in Beverly Hills with chargers when I am too late to make it home for dinner.
The other issue we are having now is the lack of chargers when we do find them. For instance at Bella Terra in Huntington Beach, the same Slate Grey Volt is always there leaving just one spot which is usually taken and last week wasn’t working at all.
This week we made a trek to the Reno-Tahoe area to take a short break visit, family and friends and catch up on some business up there. We pulled out the Mercedes ML CDI and ran it over to the biodiesel station and topped off.
Now I have to make a note here, just because I use biodiesel and now have a Volt, it doesn’t mean I vote to give away the store. There are no “Change” stickers in my house.
The Volt simply can’t haul three people and two dogs. The ML is the best solution I have found for long hauls so far, and here is where the story really begins.
As we pulled into our regular stop on I-5 just north of Grapevine, we noticed three of the six Tesla supercharger slots were full, and by the time we let our dogs out the count grew to five. As you’ll note in the picture one of them is pink.
Impressed there were that many Tesla Model S cars running around, we loaded up the dogs took a break ourselves and hit the road again. More focused on hitting the road, I didn’t bother to see how many cars were still charging.
As we pulled into Harris Ranch for our second stop, there were again. Before I could park the pink one arrived. Clearly this group was together and keeping up with us while driving electric cars.
Building enough charging locations will take time. The good news is the basic infrastructure is already there. Electricity is everywhere. No tanker trucks, no in ground trucks to leak whatever chemical the state decides we need before they take responsibility for what it does to our water.
With technology like Terrawave on the horizon, and electric storage technologies improving each year, the electric car looks like it might have a chance.
