Charging Anxiety
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One of the biggest reasons people don’t buy electric cars is that they worry about being able to find a charging station or that charging will take too much time.
Finding charging stations was one of my concerns. There are OBVIOUS gas stations everywhere, but you don’t see charging stations unless you’re looking for them. If you don’t have an electric car or haven’t researched the issue, it looks like they could be hard to find. Once you start looking at electric cars, you learn that the car navigation includes the locations of charging stations. Even tiny Creswell, Oregon, has three.
And then there are differences in charging plugs, which are easier to get past. You just have to learn which your car takes.
I approach new situations of this complexity by learning something reliable and then branching out. The first charging stations I learned were ChargePoint. They require an app, which I’m not fond of. Today I tried the Ionna station, and it’s going to be my standard now. It only requires a credit card, and it charges faster! About 15 minutes for my typical weekly usage. Fifteen minutes isn’t a whole lot longer than it takes to gas up. Maybe less if you have to wait for a pump.
The Ionna user interfaces are easier to read, too. One of the things that fascinates me is that the charger talks to the car and they work things out to start charging.
Chargers are often located near fast food places, even as gas stations are now variety stores. This Ionna station was next to a gas station, a pizza parlor, and a game store. Today I realized that you can just leave the car charging, and nobody is going to steal it without the smart fob.
The only not so good thing is that I have to back into the stall. I’ll get used to that too.
And I’m spending $14 a week for normal driving. Used to be $50 for two weeks, and that was before most of the recent price rise.