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.

  • OtterOPAEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    Not a point against EVs, but rather about the need to build out the network even more

    I think infrastructure is still relevant (we need battery technologies so that power loss to a region doesn’t shut down all charging stations), but the other point here is that the network is still very sporadic in BC. So when a part of the network is blocked off, because of closed roads, it might leave people stranded.

    There’s also this other point which is important outside of disaster situations, but probably made worse during a disaster with limited support for vulnerable people:

    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.”