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.
Not a point 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.
There was also this bit about charging locations and how it might affect vulnerable people:
In order to make the system better, it’s helpful to talk about people’s experiences