At current, range anxiety makes it difficult to truly see the USA in your Chevrolet. But, General Motors and others have signed on to help change that.
Reuters reports the Obama administration has will rely on private organizations to help get the ball rolling on 48 electric vehicle charging stations across the United States. The national network is said to encompass 25,000 miles of road through 35 different states.
The network would mean greater access to chargers, especially if you don’t own a Tesla, which already employs its own Supercharging stations across the U.S. With an electric range of 238 miles from the 2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV, charging infrastructure is exactly what’s needed to really get consumers into more EVs.
Comments
I think GM needs to take the approach Apple took with opening stores. It picked California as a very ‘Apple-y’ place and opened one store there for every store it opened anywhere. (Back in the early days.) The reason for this was to ‘swing’ the influential state to Apple. As goes CA so goes the nation.
I believe the Bolt needs to not only be a BIG deal in CA but perhaps the gold standard. So CA must be saturated in charging stations first. And it’s amazing what even a little impact can have by opening some in critical places.
For instance: Vegas. It’s 270 LA to Vegas. Yet there’s a famed halfway point stop full of restaurants and what have you. One there and at least one just off the strip and that entire region becomes open to electric. Hell there’s a massive solar power situation in the desert near Vegas which could double as a station. 😉
The Reuters article is worded poorly, but it talks about 48 charging **networks** on “nearly 25,000 miles of highways in 35 U.S. states.” I don’t think your interpretation of 48 chargers being installed across 35 states is accurate.
It will be very interesting to see what GM’s involvement is. “Working together” with partners to jump-start additional stations could just mean providing test vehicles, adhering to SAE standards, ensuring that GM vehicles are compatible with DC Fast station firmware before shipping, providing RFID tags to new customers, etc. I doubt they’ll actually be paying to install chargers, but who knows.
As electric range improves, I think fewer and fewer people will need to depend on local chargers. Fast chargers along major interstates and “destination” chargers at hotels, theme parks, airports, and other vacation/travel spots will be sufficient. I think this is a great opportunity for the federal government to take a leadership role in planning and working with individual states to implement a nationwide network that can be accessed with a single membership.
Actually as the number of EVs on the road increases, the local chargers will need to increase as well, as Tesla owners can attest to.
There is the assumption that EVs will remain the domain of the upper-class demographic, but that’s not a safe bet as used EVs are dropping below $15,000, and more players are entering the field. This is significant because of the number of renters in the USA in the middle-lower economic demographic. We are not suddenly going to mandate that all rental properties will be EV friendly retroactively. It will affect new construction. Remember that a lot of politicians are landlords either directly or indirectly which has normally meant that no law will ever stand that affects their personal or family income.
If in fact General Motors is going to invest in EV infrastructure now that they are finally entering the national EV marketplace, a LOT of people in the media need to make real apologies. They have been insisting ever since the Chevrolet Bolt was announced that they have proof that General Motors will ‘never’ participate in infrastructure. They based their claims on their inability to understand the english language as spoken or written in America. The ‘never’ word is not from General Motors, Mary B, Pam F, it’s from the media.
But since I doubt the media writers involved will be interested in publicly acknowledging their lack of linguistic abilities, I think the best we can hope for is a national interstate CCS EV charging grid, while they dine on huge helping of crow.
The press release stated “48 national electric vehicle charging corridors on our highways” which would indicate many more charging stations than 48. Every 50 miles is the general idea, this is great news!!
“The Reuters article is worded poorly, but it talks about 48 charging **networks** on “nearly 25,000 miles of highways in 35 U.S. states.” I don’t think your interpretation of 48 chargers being installed across 35 states is accurate.”
so, at 50 stations per mile, we’re talking about 500 stations, in useful locations (i.e. along interstates).
Nice!