One in five electric car drivers in California have apparently switched back to their gas-guzzlers after it turns out saving the redwoods just wasn’t worth having to keep your vehicle plugged in to your garage outlet for three days before finally being able to drive across town.
Yahoo! News reports one driver said a whole night of charging up his Ford electric Mustang Mach-E got him enough battery power to make it just 36 miles – about three miles of range per hour of charge.
The problem, it turns out, is the fact that most people’s home outlets deliver just 120 volts, compared to charging stations like Tesla’s Superchargers that can generate 480 volts. So unless you live next to one of Elon Musk’s stations or something comparable, you’re looking at having to charge up your Chevy Volt next to your chest freezer for a good long while before being able to take it any significant distance. (And we’ll just gloss over the part where that outlet doesn’t get its energy from the magical pixies living behind your drywall – they’re often powered by coal plants and other evil, planet-killing power sources that simply keep all the toxic emissions out of sight of the environmentalist who thinks his Model 3 is saving the Earth.)
If that weren’t enough of a pain, it turns out most Californians not only lack access to a higher-powered “Level 2” or “Level 3” charging station at or near their home, most also don't have access to one at work, meaning there simply isn’t a convenient place for them to charge up their car.
The inconvenience of having to charge up their vehicles for hours only to find themselves barely able to make it into the office has been too much for a full 20 percent of California's electric car drivers, who’ve already traded in their green machines for the good ol’ internal combustion engine - despite the fact that liberal officials in the Golden State have already rolled out a plan to eliminate the sale of gas-powered vehicles entirely by 2035. That plan also includes the goal of having 90 percent of all California drivers using electric cars by that same time. To reach those goals, the California Energy Commission says the state needs 8 million electric vehicles by 2030, along with about 1.2 million charging stations.
Adding to the hilarity of the state’s all-electric goals potentially being stymied by drivers not wanting to wait around for their Prius to finish powering up like an iPod before they can head to the grocery store is the fact that California is currently urging drivers not to charge their electric cars at all between the hours of 5 and 10 p.m. amid a blistering heat wave that’s currently sucking up massive amounts of energy from the state’s grid as people try to stay cool.
But hey, I'm sure people will be more than happy to spend days charging up their inefficient cars, only to have to stop whenever temperatures hit 95. Just tell them it's for the pandas.