Guest Post by Eric Peters
Electric cars are unforgiving things. If you forgot to plug in the night before – or just didn’t have time – they’ll make you pay for it . . . in time.
My 18-year-old non-electric truck is much more forgiving of my forgetting . . . to fill it up.
I was driving down to Lowes the other day – and from there to the coffee shop where I spend a few hours each day composing the rants – when I glanced at my fuel gauge and realized I was almost running on empty.
No worries – as the Aussies say.
There’s a gas station just up the road. I’ll roll in – maybe on fumes – and roll out just a couple of minutes later with a full tank. No planning – or waiting. A minor detour and back to my day.
But what if I’d had an electric car?
Lots of worries.
The first being to try to find a “fast” charger before I ran out of charge. Because if you do run out of charge, you are out luck. You can’t hike to the nearest “fast” charger and bring back a gallon of electricity. You must get the car to the charger – which will mean towing it there, if you run out of charge.
And there may not be a “fast” charger anywhere near-by.
Many cities have installed some, but outside of most towns, “fast” chargers are kind of like Little Caesar’s – they are around, but it’s usually a drive to locate one.
But let’s say you do find one. There’s still no getting around the wait. You won’t be rolling out of there for at least half an hour or so – and when you do, you’ll only be carrying a partial charge. Which means you’ll have to plug in again . . . sooner, this time.
Having to unexpectedly stop for half an hour can completely screw up your day. What if you had something else planned – or needed to be somewhere else? Like work? Too bad.
The EV is unforgiving.
The wait might also be unpleasant in other ways. If it’s pouring – or freezing – outside, you only spend a couple of minutes outside . . . if you’re not driving an EV. Let’s hope it’s not snowing . . . if you are driving an EV. A lot of snow can accumulate in half an hour. Enough to make the difference between getting home and not.
And if you can’t find the “fast” charger? Or it’s occupied by another EV? Now an inconvenience morphs into a debacle. You have to wait for the EV ahead of you to “fast” charge for half an hour or so. Half an hour becomes an hour. Your boss – or clients – will understand.
Right? 
On standard 120V household current, the EV will need several hours to leach back enough charge to let you gimp to where you were headed.
That’s a day-ruiner.
EV apologists will say that so long as you plug in every night, you’ll have no worries. Certainly. But what if you forget? This will happen for the same reason that people forget to fill up. Life happens. Distractions occur. You pull into the driveway in your EV, intending to plug in – when your wife rushes out to tell you something and you get excited and go inside with her . . . and forget.
The assumption that you’ll always remember and that planning around all this recharging -which you’ll have to remember to do every day as opposed to filling up once a week – isn’t going to add another layer of hassle to life is as silly as it is disingenuous.
Even the best-laid plans run afoul of the unexpected. You come home – and remember to plug in. But 20 minutes after you get home, your kid has an accident bad enough that you need to get him to the doctor right now.
What then?
Hopefully, you’ll have another car. . . a not-electric car.
And what if the power goes out and you can’t recharge?
Oh, but that only happens occasionally – usually because of bad weather. True. But it happens never with non-electric cars. Power outages have no effect on how much gas is in your tank. And as long as you’ve got a gallon, you’ll be able to drive to where there’s more gas.
Which you can get in minutes, not hours.
Speaking of hours. Or rather, kilowatt hours . . .
The more EVs there are in circulation, the greater the likelihood of the power being interrupted more frequently because of the increased draw on the grid – which lacks the capacity to deal with a massive increase in demand, especially during peak usage hours. 
EVs are immense energy hogs, with 400 volt battery packs. Adding a 240V “fast” charger to your house is functionally not much different than adding a welder or other high-draw appliance and running it regularly.
Imagine millions of these things hooked up at night – when the draw on the grid is already highest because that’s when people are getting home from work and cooking dinner (appliances) and cranking the AC (or heat) and watching TV and doing dishes and all the other things that use power… and now add the draw of those millions EV to the mix.
Expect the power to go out – but not because of ice storms.
This would be poetic justice were it not for the fact that people who don’t have EVs will also have their power cut – or just rationed.
Which means we’ll all have to sit tight – instead of getting where we’re going.
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Why such a rant on forgetting to plug you car in? Don’t they have an ‘App’ for that on your phone or maybe the refrigerator will remind you (and by the way, you need milk too)……
Don’t you ever pass out on the couch with a half-finished cocktail at your side and Shine On You Crazy Diamond playing and wake up in the morning with pizza crust on your chest and you forgot to plug in your phone?
Did you, by the way, forget to add a //Sarc off// to your comment?
Not to be dramatic but life is full of surprises and emergencies. And further, life has a way of throwing them together. You’re real low on charge and an emergency arises. You run out of juice 1 mile from the hospital and granny dies in the back seat because of it. Something like that is sure as hell to happen. The possibilities are endless. Hmmmmm, maybe an IC engine is the better option?
Or a combo of the two as I previously stated.
Thats why i keep a backup engine in my car. Seriously, why would you want to haul around a thousand pound battery and 400 pounds of electric motor gadgetry when you could drive an efficient gas car. My 1980 vw got 70 mpg if i didnt beat the tar out of it.
I lived in Newtown, CT in 2011- there were two separate instances- late August and again in late October and November when the power was off in over half of the state for at least 4 days- the first from Hurricane Irene, and the second from the Halloween snowstorm that year. You wouldn’t be able to charge jack shit without home generator. Seriously, can you just imagine a world where a hurricane or a mild earthquake leaves everyone immobile because their cars have no power- including emergency services?
You mean without a generator JUST for your toy electric car. And how many gallons of gas will you end up consuming just to produce enough electricity to get your car a hundred miles or less? Probably way more than if you had simply put it into the tank of an IC car.
I disagree with the grid being overloaded from these stupid things because LED lighting has largely become mainstream and has caused a huge reduction in load from lighting and other innovations have also reduced electrical loads.
It’s too bad the cars today don’t have a diesel engine providing motive power while charging the big battery which you plug into your house’s inverter, so it can power the ac, teevee, stove, etc., when you go home after work.
I already came up with the solution: put alternators in Teslas to change them as they go. No more plugging in at all.
Cute comment, wow , we instantly have a perpetual motion machine.
An led bulb does not equate to a massive car battery charging on an oven circuit. Shit, my home genny wont run the oven, and its a 16kw unit.
We won’t have to worry about driving at all. LED lighting is turning us all blind (literally).
“But what if I’d had an electric car?
Lots of worries.”
I laughed out loud. Seriously.
Hey Admin, how’s that big ass Denali doing you? You’ve got to get out of those tiny Hondas, your body is gonna pay a heavy price.
Great article and it’s why I drive a Plug-in Prius. This is a used 2012 I luckily found with about 50k on the clock, so it’s plug-in EV range isn’t as great as later models, BUT it meets my needs for most of my consumer missions. And if the ICE kicks on it’s usually because I punched the accelerator making a light, so as soon as it hits operating temp it kicks back off (if I still have EV power).
But the thing is, I get the real benefits of EV w/o the hassles of waiting to recharge. BTW filled it up today prior to a long distance trip; it took 3 gallons.
How far is long distance to you? Standard distance for me is 200+ miles. But i’m in the sticks. Its 35 miles to the gas station. We are on DSL. Power goes out for 9 days at a time and we make do. We have a yeti for grocery shopping because its 95 miles to a major grocery store. The nearest bar is one county over. I put 600 miles on my atv just maintaing my property this year. Electric car up here is a suicide mission. Get caught in one of those in the winter up here.
So a Prius kind of hybrid makes more sense. I think a small diesel would make the Prius even better. A truck version would be good also.
yet you would have that 7000 dollar battery that will eventually need to be replaced. Not really much of a solution to anything.
Bs article keep buying gas and giving money to rich corporation long live oil
No worries, i have a gas generator. Lol.
Violets are blue
And so is the sky
If you loved mother earth
You’d stop breathing and die
Painfully ignorant rant