In January 2002 I visited a friend in New York City. We went bar hopping and got in for the night at around three in the morning. Sitting in his living room, chatting about the night I told him: I still had energy and didn’t feel like I was dragging. What gives?
“It’s the smoking ban,” my friend told me. “There’s no smoking in bars in New York. That’s why you feel so good.”
It was incredible. After twenty-nine years of living in smoke-filled bars, cars, airplanes, lobbies, and just about everywhere else, I was realizing how great it was to live without second hand smoke. I was living a whole new experience without having to deal with a noxious, annoying problem that I simply took for granted as something you have to live with all the time.
That night, I realized: I never wanted to be in a smoke filled room again. I became a devout convert to banning smoking in public places.
It turns out that after owning an electric vehicle (EV) for a month, I feel the same way about gas stations. I’d never thought much about them, since until now, they were just a fact of owning a car. But now: The gasoline stinks, gas stations are dirty with trash and oil spills, I hate standing outside to gas up, and there’s often very strange people hanging around.
Now that I own an EV, I mostly charge up at home. And on the few occasions I’ve charged up elsewhere, it’s been in a parking garage (free) or at a charger outside a store (pricey, but convenient). My new life without gas stations has allowed me to see that really, they suck.
Getting an EV was not in the plan this year. In fact, we’d been living with a 13 year-old Subaru with a plan to keep it at least two more years. But, Teresa introduced the back of the car to a telephone pole. She was fine, but it turns out 13 year-old cars aren’t worth much, so it’s pretty easy to total them, according to insurance company actuary tables.
After shopping around, we ended up with a Honda Prologue EV, which is actually a Chevy Blazer EV platform with a Honda wrapper. That’s fine! The car drives great, it’s spacious, we get about 300 miles per charge, and Teresa, doing penance for her telephone pole introduction, negotiated a great deal for the car.
The biggest concern we had, charging, has turned out to be pretty easy. For the first few weeks we charged the car by plugging it into a 110 volt outlet in our backyard. That takes literally days to fully charge. Then, we found free chargers at Jewel supermarkets. A free charger in the parking garage by my office. That worked fine for us, since we generally don’t drive much, sometimes no more than once every three days.
But, concerned about getting ready for last minute longer drives, we wanted to charge faster. So we got quotes for installing a car charger next to the pad in our back yard. It would cost around $3,500, including the equipment. Too much. Then we realized: Our car came with a 220 volt adapter. What if we charged with a larger outlet normally made for machinery? Our electrician offered to add an adapter to the back of our house for $900. Turns out, charging with that is the same as with a fancy home car charging port: It takes about 8 hours to get a full charge. And since I have solar panels, if we charge our car on a sunny day, the charge is essentially free.
And when we charge at home, it’s way cheaper! A tank of gas that would get me 300 miles in a car that goes 25 miles per gallon would cost me about $45. The electricity costs me about $5 to do it in 6-8 hours. Superchargers cost a lot more, about $40 to get from close to zero to 80%, which takes about 45 minutes.
There’s other amazing stuff about driving an EV. It’s superquiet with no more growling engine. You don’t need to do engine maintenance or oil changes – because no engine! And because electric motors have lots of torque, acceleration is incredible, like driving a silent sports car.
Electric is a platform for the future: computers, chips, communication – it’s like driving a phone.
In a way that’s unfamiliar for vehicles, electric car technology is moving quickly. For instance, battery storage is much better than it was five years ago and within the next five years scientists think they’ll have scaled up solid-state batteries – tech that will allow you to charge in minutes rather than hours and keep as much as a thousand mile charge in the space that now holds three hundred. At the same time, car companies are launching new manufacturing processes that should cut costs and speed by 30-40% while introducing new mobile connectivity for cars that allow over-the-air software updates.
The more I learn about EVs, the more I view gas engine cars as today’s horse and buggy. It’s a matter of time – and the time is coming soon.
Much like going out in a town with no public smoking, owning an EV makes me feel like I’m living in a future I never imagined possible. I don’t want to go back.
I admit, this month I was more sucked into politics than most. I struggled to pull out of the noise, concentrating on watching old episodes of House, the Battlestar Galactica reboot, and AppleTV’s new show, Pluribus. Definitely a lot of zoning out.
Giant Front Door – Rich people in LA are getting giant, 25-foot high doors that cost as much as $100,000 to build and install. I think if I saw one in person I would be unable to push it open because I would be paralyzed by laughter.
Chicago Stadium Plan – The Chicago AIA, now led by the former director of the city’s planning department, assembled a killer group of urban thinkers to lay out exactly how an urban stadium should be built. Every city could use this plan.
Dedícalo a los Haters – This video about how Mexico City natives can do anything is seven years old, but I only recently discovered it. It’s in Spanish, but it doesn’t matter, the energy is palpable to anyone. I feel like this kind of energy is missing from America right now.
Winter Hiking in Austria – Our family is spending Christmas in Vienna this year and we wanted to go hiking. THERE IS A WHOLE GOVERNMENT SPONSORED WEBSITE ABOUT WINTER HIKING IN AUSTRIA.
Scientists Think They’ll Talk to Whales in 2026 – Think about the implications of this: We’ll basically have our first real alien contact. Already, scientists have determined whale vocabulary has consonants and vowels, as well as diphthongs.
The Death of Mars – An amazing explainer on why Mars did not become more earth-like. It only makes me appreciate how truly fragile our Earth is.
Doggerland – During the last ice age, the oceans had withdrawn enough that the Netherlands and England were connected by land – there was no English Channel. Fishing trawlers in the Channel regularly pull up archeological finds from ancient human settlements.
The Difference Between An Artist and A Creator – An artist is self-directed, a creator seeks to please an audience.
See you at the end of the year! Next month I’ll report on the dozens of newsletters I read: Which are worth your time?