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.
I’m conflicted because this is true, the article might discourage someone that was thinking of buying an EV.
At the same time, it’s valuable to hear from people’s experiences. Many regional governments want to transition to EVs. Hearing a detailed personal account of the different places this person went, and the issues they faced, is very valuable to addressing the issues. If you want to encourage EVs, and someone shares an experience about the issues they had, you’re more likely to address them.
It would be nice to also have an article analyzing the issues around ICE vehicles in a forest fire, and if there’s a good one, then I’ll edit it in to the post. However, I don’t think that’s the only content we should be able to share. Sometimes people want to share a personal account, and I think it’s nice that there’s a column for that.