In the year 2035 — just 13 years from now, for those of you with a Common Core math education — California plans to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles.
Other states might potentially follow suit — and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has said he wants to “continue to set a national policy that’s the baseline for all of this” at the federal level and “make sure that this happens quickly enough to help us be climate change.”
This sounds easy enough. EVs are on the market right now, after all — and while charging on the road is a time-consuming hassle, they can be charged at home, right?
Well, yes — but as a viral TikTok video from last year demonstrates, there are definite trade-offs plenty of Americans can’t make.
The video, posted in September 2021 and viewed over 700,000 times, shows a Tesla driver with a slight issue involving home-charging: There is apparently no driveway or garage to charge in. This was one solution:
@tycoonist The EV charger problem #tech #business #fintok #tesla ♬ original sound – Tycoonist
The cord to charge the Tesla, with a Massachusetts license plate, was run from the car, across the yard, through a window and into an apartment.
“Points for creativity,” noted the video creator, who calls himself “Tycoonist.”
“But really, how are we going to replace all of our gas cars with electric when there’s no chargers?”
Do you think gas-powered vehicles will ever be banned by the government?
The Western Journal couldn’t verify the contents of the video or the circumstances in which it was made. But regardless, the question it asks is a good one.
And keep in mind, what it shows is likely a slow method of charging a car — known as Level 1 charging, which delivers a regular home current to the vehicle. Getting a full charge this way can often take days.
The answer, EV evangelists will say, involves installing what are known as Level 2 chargers — more powerful charging devices — in apartment complexes and other neighborhoods.
That, obviously, would require a significant amount of money — most of which will likely have to come from the government. Cha-ching!
But there’s another issue, naturally: Most apartment complexes were designed before EV charging was considered. Here, we see the Tesla owner parking on the street. How are we to expect areas with street parking to be retrofitted easily or cheaply in order to facilitate recharging at home?
There’s always the option of public chargers on streets — a route taken by liberal cities like Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the residents of the City of Angels haven’t treated their public fast chargers so well; a video from May showed that, in one area, a majority of them were unusable because they were covered by trash.
Thank you @MayorOfLA . pic.twitter.com/0wqDDwxbVL
— edmund dantes (@Edantes112) May 22, 2021
As for home charging, keep in mind it isn’t quick.
A recent YouTube viral video from the EV-centric channel TFLEV showed how long the GMC Hummer — which the narrator described as “the fastest-charging vehicle on the market right now” — took to charge from almost empty to full.
On Level 1? Four days. Level 2? About 24 hours.
“Wow,” the narrator said. He ain’t joking.
These are, at present, the only chargers that can be installed residentially, according to Compare.com. While faster chargers are available at charging stations, it’s not the cheapest solution.
A Car and Driver test in August found the GMC Hummer — if charged at an Electrify America station — could cost as much as $100 to “fill up.” That’s roughly as much as a 2010 Hummer would cost at current gas prices.
Keep in mind that the 2010 Hummer could be filled up in just a matter of minutes, though. The EV GMC Hummer, even on a “fast” charger, took one hour and 49 minutes to get an 80 percent charge.
Imagine how long it would have taken if it would have taken if they’d charged it with a cord running through a window. Because, if this is our future, that’s going to be a question a lot of car buyers are going to want to have answered.
