A Two-Day Battle to Charge My Car Convinced Me We’re Not Ready for EVs

A Nissan Leaf at a charging station. Gordon Chibroski/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

When I set up a loan for an electric Nissan Leaf last month, I didn’t expect a 35-mile trip from San Francisco to Mountain View to lead to two of the most stressful days I’ve experienced this year. And I didn’t expect to walk away from the experience convinced that, although electric vehicles are great to drive and slowly overcoming their range shortcomings, the infrastructure needed for owners to keep them charged is woefully inadequate—even in EV-lovin’ San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where Teslas are as common as pigeons.

The problem is not a lack of places to plug in: There are at least stations 20,000 in the US, and that number is quickly growing. But they’re no help unless they’re both easy to find and available. In my case, they were neither.

Before I tell my tale, there’s a big caveat: I live in an apartment in San Francisco, and I don’t have anywhere to charge an electric vehicle overnight. Many EV advocates argue we will charge our cars like we charge our phones: At night while we sleep, during the day while we work, and any other time we don’t need to be moving. It’s a “grazing,” rather than “gorging,” mentality, and it makes a lot of sense.

With nowhere to plug in when I’m at home, I was stuck with using public charging stations during the day. And that’s where the trouble began.

Silicon Valley

The real-world range of a Nissan Leaf is roughly 80 miles (84, according to the sticker on the window). That’s on par with pretty much everything else except the way more expensive, road trip-ready Tesla Model S. I left San Francisco with about 50 miles left in the Leaf’s 24 kilowatt-hour pack, and knew when I arrived that I wouldn’t have enough have enough juice to make the 35-mile drive back.

Once I’d wrapped up my meeting and gotten back to the car, I used the Leaf’s navigation system to find the nearest charging station. I figured I’d hang out for half an hour or so before heading north. The Leaf, like many EVs, will direct you to the nearest charging station. That system isn’t nearly good enough: First off, it doesn’t tell you whether the station is occupied. That’s a real problem: Unlike a gas station, it doesn’t take three minutes for each car to fill up and move on. It takes at least 20 minutes, and that means if the plug you need is taken, you’re going to be waiting a while. And secondly, the nav system didn’t pick out publicly available chargers. The first destination? Some kind of (defunct?) BMW facility.