When Jamella Hagen and her boyfriend planned a four-day road trip to bring his new electric pickup truck from Vancouver to Whitehorse, she anticipated challenges.
She knew the gaps between fast chargers in the North, so they planned stops in communities with EV charging stations.
What she did not anticipate were the wildfires.
“Our choice to drive an EV was an attempt to reduce our personal impact on climate change,” she wrote in a CBC first person column. “But on the road, we encountered climate change disasters all around us, and we had to cope with them while learning to use a new and still fragile charging network.”
Some of the routes Hagen planned to take were shut down and redirected to make room for evacuees leaving Kelowna and the Shuswap region.
Knowing the EV truck wouldn’t make a long distance between chargers, Hagen made unexpected stops, like a hotel where a charger was a 20 minute walk away. Hardly unusual, she said, as she often finds EV chargers located in inconvenient places, such as the edges of town or behind buildings.
“If I was travelling as a single woman, I would have found myself missing the comfort of a brightly lit gas station on a lonely stretch of highway.”
Overall, Hagen says she’ll still consider buying an electric vehicle herself while living in the north, but only if her family had an additional, fuel-powered car at the ready.
EVs are great in 999 ways out of 1000, but let’s find one extreme example of how they may not work perfectly in extreme conditions that won’t happen to the majority of people. There are obvious bias things in the article, as with many anti-EV articles as gas companies pour millions every year into anti-EV articles. Do they mention gas stations are turned off around fires for obvious reasons so gas vehicles also have issues - nope. There are simple obvious solutions around this that are simply not presented.
It just reminds me of an article that I read everywhere about how a tesla blew up. Nearly every article talked about it like it just spontaneously blew up. Nearly no article mentioned that it blew up after it collided into a huge boulder on the road. Nor did they mention that the driver was totally fine as it caught fire half an hour after the accident. Or the obvious, that gas cars can also blow up but they slam into a boulder at high speeds.
I didn’t really see it as a knock against EVs, but the need to expand the network and make it more robust, specifically paying attention to regional challenges that could impact the network.
It’s about some of the existing issues that we need to address in order to make the system better, not that we should stay with gas cars. I’m all for EVs, but we can’t make the system better without talking about where we can improve it