ESSAYS on THE NEW ECONOMY #7
The "New Economy" is coming into existence during our lifetimes. In these essays we explore more balanced and humane ways of working to understand how money can serve our society and planet better.
Electric Cars are for Grandmas
Because, well, you’ll see… If you read to the end.
Not so long ago, I booked a rental car for a winter vacation with my mom and daughters. The rental car company I was looking at offered a fully-electric vehicle as an option and — curious to see how it worked — I selected it during booking.
Months later, I was there to pick up the car, having forgotten the selection I made. We had just come off of a 4-hour train trip, and I was a bit tired. The rental car salesman reminded me the car was fully electric and gave me a look as though to say, “You sure you wanna do this?” After the usual inspections and sign-off, I hopped in with my family to find our Airbnb.
At first, an electric car appears not so different from any modern automatic vehicle. It has an accelerator and brake, steering wheel and rear-view mirrors, a radio and heat / AC, a simple toggle for shifting from parked, reverse, neutral and drive. An electric car also has a speedometer and something like a fuel gauge, though here is where things begin to differ.
An electric car, as you might have guessed, does not run on gas. It might seem obvious but until you experience it, it’s difficult to imagine the consequences. For example, you can not refuel at gas stations (unless they have a special recharge station for electric batteries). The “fuel gauge” is also really only an approximation, where the real measure is a number that describes the RANGE (the number of kilometers you can drive before running out of battery).
The dashboard of an electric car often also has something similar to what is used to measure acceleration in a gas-fueled car, but in this case it measures “POWER” (draining the battery fast), “ECO” (normal driving), or “CHARGE” (when the battery is actually being recharged by your driving habits). So you are much more conscious of the power you are using (or recharging) when driving an electric car. Whereas in a gas-fuelled car, you pay attention to what gear you are in and the acceleration, an electric car only has one gear, which becomes critically important to understand when driving on high-speed autoroutes.
Though it seemed simple enough to understand how an electric car functions —turning on the car and pressing the gas pedal, looking in the rear-view mirror, putting on the turn signal, and executing other routine functions — it turns out I did not know what I was doing:
The first full day of vacation I decided to drive my 10-year-old daughter and I to a ski station which was, according to Google Maps, one and a half hours away (and more importantly, 85km). Looking at the dashboard, the car’s RANGE was currently at 250km. Doing the math in my head (85 x 2 = 170km), I saw quickly that I would have enough to go to the ski station and back, no problem.
Except I was wrong.
Halfway to the mountain, I saw the RANGE drop to 160km. This was a little troubling and I didn’t understand why it was happening, but I stopped at a Tesla Supercharger station (which we found by googling) and tried to recharge the car battery.
Recharging an electric car battery takes a lot longer than traditional refueling (x3-x5 longer if at a high-speed charging station, x72 longer if charging from an electric outlet at home).
This particular Supercharger station was located in a grocery story parking lot, and there were two other Teslas charging, with their drivers seated inside casually waiting for the recharge to be complete (because the recharging device locks into place, once it’s plugged in; no need to hold it there standing). Trying to verify if I could still use the Tesla Supercharger even if I wasn’t driving a Tesla, and I saw a sign that said ALL electric cars can use them, so I plugged the recharging device into my car. Nothing happened.
We waited 15 minutes, because I read online that it can take 20-30 minutes to fully recharge an electric car battery using a Supercharger. Still nothing happened. The RANGE still read 160km.
Not wanting to be super late to go skiing and imagining it would be OK if we figured things out later — after all, it was only 40km more to our destination — I continued on.
Unfortunately, after getting off the highway, driving through the winding back roads up into the mountains, and parking the car, the RANGE on the dashboard of the car said we only had 40km left in the battery. Somehow, the battery had drained at 3x the speed expected. We would not have enough charge to get home.
When I called the rental car company, they said they weren’t sure that electric cars made in Europe could be charged at Tesla stations because it’s an American company. In other words, they had no idea how electric cars work. If we needed the car to be towed, they reminded me that there is a service number listed on the keys to the car. Thanks for nothing!
Part of me was deeply anxious at this point, uncertain how to get out of the dilemma, wishing I had made a different decision about which car to rent, and worried for what this would mean for my daughter and me.
I was asking myself, Why is it that I love giving myself challenges? This is stupid! Why don’t I know how this works?
Fortunately, the people around me were much kinder. Friends we were meeting at the ski station offered to take us to their place that evening if our car needed to be towed. They were staying in a house around the corner and could offer us dinner and a floor to sleep on. My mom reminded me that worse case, we could trade in the electric car for a gas-fueled one. My daughter didn’t fully understand the situation, but she trusted her dad and was excited to ski. So we focused on that — skiing for the rest of the day.
End of the afternoon, we were back in the car. None of our friends knew precisely how electric cars work (though admittedly I haven’t asked everyone in my network, so I figure maybe someone reading this will know?) but we had safely determined that :
Highway driving (anything faster than 80 km / hr or 45 mph) drains the battery of electric cars much faster than city driving (frequent stops/starts, or going slower than 45mph)
Braking helps recharge the battery, and if you are going down a steep hill (or driving down from a ski station) then you can travel quite a distance without appearing to use any battery at all (because it’s constantly being recharged by the brake, as well as being carried downhill with momentum)
Electric charging stations exist in towns and some gas stations, not only at Tesla Supercharger locations
Unfortunately, when we tried out 4 different locations where an electric car battery recharger was supposed to exist, all 4 of the recharging stations we tried were in some way “out of service." It appears the rarity of electric cars means the maintenance of many charging stations is a non-priority. When calling customer service, several of the companies responsible for maintenance did not seem to even be aware of the problem, nor did they have a timeline for when the charging stations would be repaired.
The Good News — before end of day, we figured out how to recharge the car and how not to drain the battery so dramatically.
Driving at a steady speed, without dramatic acceleration and frequent letting off the accelerator pedal (to allow for the battery to recharge while the car coasted a bit), meant we could go much further without dramatic loss of RANGE.
To recharge at a Tesla Supercharger, we needed to download the Tesla mobile app. The advice given online was to stay within 20% to 80% charged, for optimal long-term battery health, and total costs for the trip came to 32EUR (recharging the car four different times). If we had rented a gas-fuelled car, our expenses likely would have been x3 - x4 more.
We understood that if we were staying in a house that had an exterior outlet, we could have plugged in the car overnight for a slow charge that would take several hours. As it was, the Tesla Supercharger stations took on average 20 minutes to recharge half-way. We learned to enjoy the wait.
While I didn’t know what I was doing when I started out, I learned something valuable from the challenges faced along the way. & one major reason I had thought to rent an electric car was to experience what it felt like to drive in case we ever wanted to own one ourselves.
Driving an electric car in a way that supports long-term battery health made me feel like a grandma…
going slow on the highways, such that almost everyone would pass me
OR taking the non-toll backroads, one lane and less busy
taking long breaks to recharge the battery, making our trips less about getting there as fast as possible and more about enjoying the journey
driving as smooth as possible, to avoid large changes in acceleration
enjoying the economical benefits (as well as the ecological)
wisely laughing at myself rather than stressing about learning something new
This felt like things my grandma would do, and it put me more at ease with the changes required.
I’d be curious to learn from others what has been their experience driving an electric car. Have you tried it?