Venture a Highway

On electric cars & my complete driving history.

I first learned how to drive on a standard VW Bug. Standard meaning stick shift. I just point this out so you’ll understand what a badass I am. Still, for a first-time driver, it could be challenging to shift gears on a VERY STEEP hill at an intersection, causing me to roll back more than once to the wide-eyed terror of the driver behind me.

When I was in college I drove a used Honda Prelude. I loved that car. I named it Pounce, back when I thought that naming cars was cool. Eventually the driver’s side window was ruined by all those parking violation stickers slapped on by Wake Forest security.

My Saturn was next. Post-grad school. It was all I could afford because it turns out that print journalism doesn’t pay very much. But at least it was functioning and if you ever got a dent in it you just punched it out from the inside. I had no power steering so it looked like I did one-armed pushups every day. Also, no power windows. No radio. Just me, my butterfly chair, and the open road.

Not my actual Saturn. Some other loser’s actual Saturn.

As I got older, I returned to my Honda roots, first with an Accord, then a CRV and finally a Pilot. The Pilot got totaled when a young woman on her phone flew through a stop sign and slammed into me. When I got out of my car, she looked at me and said, What happened?

What happened? You HIT me and then I STRANGLED you.

Which brings me to my current electric Hyundai Ioniq 5. I had no intention of going electric, to be honest. I’m not Al Gore. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that since I would be doing more than my part to fight climate change, I would no longer have to pretend to compost.

So as you can imagine, I was quite upset to discover that the $7.5 billion approved by Congress two years ago that included the installation of tens of thousands of car chargers across the country has yielded exactly…zero chargers. There are only 180,000 chargers in the U.S., and less than half of those are so-called fast chargers. Most of the chargers available now will fully charge your battery in about two weeks.

I have a funny little story about that. My family was driving to Ft. Worth over the summer in my new electric car. The battery was fully charged. About two hours in, after several rounds of pointing out the nearest Starbucks at every exit, we noticed that the battery was at like 15%. So I yelled WE’RE NEVER GOING TO MAKE IT to ensure that my daughter remained calm.

Not a charging station in sight. At least not one with full chargers. We had no choice but to stay the night in…Hillsboro. Which is somewhere in Texas. We got a hotel and ate at Chili’s. I’ve never been so depressed in my entire life.

On top of everything else, there’s a new state tax on electric car owners. We’re now required to pay an initial $400 fee with a recurring $200 annual renewal, on top of standard vehicle registration fees. You know what? I’ll pay those fees once I see some chargers. And not just the ones at Whole Foods that are always taken by non-electric cars.