The Trouble with Electric Cars

Photograph by Rick Bowmer / AP

For seven days, beginning on September 15th, the electric-vehicle industry sponsored an event called National Drive Electric Week. In Huntsville, Alabama, people lined up to drive a fleet of Nissan Leafs. In Golden, Colorado, they did the same for five Teslas camped in a real-estate-company parking lot; nearby, a big-screen television displayed footage of Tesla’s assembly line. In Cupertino, California, five hundred and seven electric vehicles participated in a parade through town. E.V.s, the talking points went, are cheaper to maintain, are “going mainstream,” and are “creating good American jobs.” But, first and foremost, they are “fun to drive.” All told, some ninety thousand people participated.

I’d hoped to attend the Drive Electric event nearest me, which was being held on U.C.L.A.’s campus. The actor and environmentalist Ed Begley, Jr., was going to give a speech. Some cool-looking E.V.s would be available to test drive. And I’d started leasing an electric car, a cornflower-blue Fiat 500, just three weeks before. I didn’t make it to U.C.L.A., though, because my vehicle didn’t have enough charge left for the drive across town, and when I pulled up to my usual plug-in station, at a public park in West Hollywood, the network was down. This had been the story of my E.V. experience: enthusiasm for the concept, tempered by a surprisingly crummy reality.

Early the next morning, I returned to the park. The network was back up. As I sat behind the wheel, watching on my digital dashboard an image of a battery slowly, slowly refilling, I called Michael D. Farkas, the C.E.O. of a Miami Beach-based company called CarCharging, which owns and operates 13,573 charging stations, including the one I was plugged into.

“Are you having a good charging experience?” Farkas asked, after I told him where I was. I said that I was at the moment, but that yesterday the network had been down, and that I often arrived at the station to find it occupied, even though the smartphone app I use to tell me such things—an app made by his company—showed it as available. Sometimes the touch screen on the charging stations didn’t work, I went on. Sometimes the station emitted an eerie, high-pitched blurp and no charge. Sometimes a non-electric car (an S.U.V., always) was parked in a spot reserved for charging.

Farkas took my complaints in stride. He’d heard them before. CarCharging was experiencing some growing pains. “We’re a mouse that’s swallowed an elephant,” Farkas said, more than once. The elephant in question was Blink, a system run out of San Francisco by ECOtality, another charging company. Like many E.V. enterprises, ECOtality went bankrupt last year, as grants it had received through the U.S. Department of Energy’s E.V. Project—totalling, with partner matches, more than two hundred and thirty million dollars—dried up. In October of 2013, CarCharging acquired Blink and its network of more than 12,500 charging stations for around $3.3 million, which increased the number of stations that the company operated nearly twelvefold.

Taking over all of these stations from a failed business had introduced a raft of problems. Many of the Blink facilities were furnished with cords that delivered less current than the machines they were attached to could send out, causing longer charge times, and thus longer lines. Farkas told me that a big overhaul was coming by mid-October, and that, while CarCharging prepared to send local contractors to swap out the cords, the company was considering which other problems it might address in the process. He cited vandalism, connectivity issues, and faulty screens as priorities.

The hardware CarCharging uses is supplied by a range of manufacturers, including G.E. and Nissan. “I have to tell you, nobody’s is perfect,” Farkas said, adding, “but we’re lucky.” I wondered aloud why. “You have to understand, these are all first-generation models. We’re still working out the kinks.” Blink had ended up with bad cords connected to their charge stations, he explained, because it wasn’t immediately clear who might be making high-quality cords.

To me, as a customer, this approach appeared haphazard and expensive, and had left me feeling as though I was participating in an experiment. I asked Farkas when he expected standard components to emerge. “I wish I had a crystal ball,” he replied. I did, too, I said. I glanced at the battery meter on my dashboard. It had inched up a single per cent, from eleven to twelve, in the fifteen minutes we’d been on the phone.

I love to drive my electric car, particularly on the energy-sucking, twisty-turny hills around Los Angeles. But enjoyment wasn’t why I had initially leased my car. It was because it was really, really cheap—particularly after a seventy-five-hundred-dollar federal rebate and a twenty-five-hundred-dollar state rebate (sent as a check by the state of California)—and because an electric fit into my life. Because I live in a city, I’m not bothered by my car’s top-end range of ninety miles per charge, and I have reasonably ready access to public charging stations. West Hollywood has two in a park and two near a library. When these go down, as they did last week, I have no inexpensive options nearby. I tried once to persuade my landlord to install a charging station in my building; he laughed and said no. The owners of the majority of the quarter-million plug-in vehicles that have been sold in the United States, by contrast, are wealthy enough to own a home, a garage, and a charging station. Half of all of the former Blink network’s chargers are in private residences.

When I laid out my situation to Farkas, he answered with a story about his dad. “There was this guy in synagogue who used to come to my father all the time: ‘Hey, Steven, you’ve got to invest in these cell-phone-tower limited partnerships,’ ” he said. “My father looked at him and said, ‘Listen, I have to tell you something. I have one of those phones in my car. That thing cost me eight thousand dollars. I drive down the block, it takes me five dollars a minute to talk to somebody, and I can’t talk a minute without getting disconnected. Forget it. It’s a novelty. It just doesn’t work.' ”

"So what you’re saying is electric cars are like cell phones?" I asked him, feeling like a sucker.

“What I’m saying is: This is brand new. You’ve got to be patient. That’s it.”

After the call, I sat in my car for a few minutes, watching the battery image continue its leisurely march to one hundred per cent. I stepped out, as I usually do, leaving the car to recharge for three or four hours, and walked back to my apartment, about a mile away.