My misadventures with an electric vehicle

By Matthew Gagnon

Last weekend, my wife and I were traveling with our oldest son to Pennsylvania to do a college visit and attend a baseball prospect camp at the school the next morning. We arrived at the airport in plenty of time, but our flight was delayed by about 50 minutes, meaning we would miss our connecting flight from Washington, D.C., to Pittsburgh.

This was a problem because we needed to get there that night for my son to play in the camp the next morning. With no available flights within a three-hour radius, our only option was to fly to D.C. and then drive five hours in a rental car to our destination.

I booked a car at Reagan National, and upon landing, we rushed to the rental counter. The line was short, and I quickly got the paperwork done. I was told to go up to the second level and pick out anything I wanted in row three.

Upstairs, row three offered several tiny, unappealing cars. However, there was a new-looking pickup truck with a full cab. “Perfect,” I thought. It would fit my son’s gear in the bed, provide ample space and get us on our way.

What I didn’t realize is that I had just chosen an electric truck. 

I was in such a hurry and so concerned with getting my family in the car to get on the road that I didn’t realize what I was sitting in. It wasn’t labeled, and since I was told to just pick something out, no employee was around to point it out to me. I just thought that it was a new truck.

It wasn’t until I got through some construction 30 minutes later that my wife and I figured out what we were sitting in. We also figured out that we started with an 80 percent charge, not 100 percent.

Recall that I have written fairly positively about electric vehicles in the past. Indeed, while I was firmly opposed to government mandates and cautioned against forced adoption, I declared rather definitively last August: “I’d probably buy an electric vehicle.”

After this trip, I won’t. 

This was my first electric vehicle experience, and immediate concerns became apparent. We were short on time with a long drive ahead, and I realized we’d likely need to stop to recharge, adding at least 20 to 30 minutes to our journey when my son desperately needed sleep for the camp.

We also needed enough charge to reach the hotel, get to the college 10 miles away the next morning and then find the nearest charging station. 

We had to stop twice. The first was at a Walmart in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania, six minutes off the highway. That burned 20 minutes. 

The second was near Pittsburgh, eight minutes off the highway. The first charger I attempted to use wasn’t functional, and quit charging two minutes into the attempt twice before I switched to another charger that did work. The first time it failed, I had plugged it in, started it up and then walked into the convenience store assuming the charge would continue — it was going to take a half hour, afterall — and only realized it failed 10 minutes later when I came back. All told the stop added another 40 minutes. 

Ordinarily I would have tried to “make up” the time on the highway, but pushing the vehicle hard radically drops the charge. At one point, after I passed a couple of cars I looked down and realized that my expected range had dropped by 25 miles in just a couple of minutes. 

We ultimately got in at 2 a.m. 

The following day I learned that the closest charging station to us — another 15 miles away from the college — was a particularly slow charger that would’ve taken hours to recharge the battery.

This is only part of the story. I have other inconveniences and annoyances that I can tell you about, though I have limited space and will stop here. 

The real point is that an electric vehicle may be a fine option for a person reasonably tethered to a small radius around their home, and who does not need to use the vehicle to do a lot of work. But for anyone who travels long distances, has time constraints and needs to manage multiple activities in close proximity to one another, my experience shows that having an electric vehicle is not rational.
When you look at the electric vehicle market and the low adoption of them, despite all the mandates and subsidies offered to purchase them, it isn’t hard for me to understand why they haven’t really caught on.

Gagnon of Yarmouth is the chief executive officer of the Maine Policy Institute, a free market policy think tank based in Portland. A Hampden native, he previously served as a senior strategist for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C.