A Nondriver’s Experience with EV Infrastructure

Arriving in Vermont recently for a wedding, I was asked by the rental car agent at the Burlington Airport if I was OK with an upgrade from my sensible sedan reservation to a Jeep Wrangler 4xe, currently the top-selling plug-in hybrid EV (PHEV) in the US. I most certainly was. The employee handed me the keys and said, “Don’t worry about the battery.” Of course, as a sustainability researcher working in transportation and mobility, I got extremely worried about the battery.

Put simply (and to borrow from the Barbie movie), my job is “cars.” Despite that, I do not currently have a car; I’ve lived in cities for years and have figured out how to meet 99% of my transportation needs by bike, bus, or train. So when I sat down in the Wrangler 4xe, I took it as a chance to review EV infrastructure in a new way: from the perspective of an actual driver.

Hitting the Wrangler’s push-button start and watching the LED dashboard come to life, the first thing I noted was that the previous driver had clearly heeded the agent’s advice and hadn’t worried about the battery, which was at 0%. The gas tank was full, so range wasn’t a problem, and I made it the 80 miles to my hotel with no issues. The hotel had several Level 2 chargers, which I was excited to use to get a few extra miles of range for free. I plugged my car into multiple chargers, and none of them worked. A nearby Tesla owner was having similar issues, so we went to the front desk to ask for help. A few hours later we heard that the chargers had been “reset,” and we were able to charge our vehicles.

The next day, with the Jeep fully charged and showing a mere 21 miles of range, I did a bit of driving to see the area around the hotel before the wedding. It was nice to drive the vehicle in its fully electric mode and not have to worry about gas. By the time I got back to the hotel, I had 2 miles of range left, and the chargers once again did not work. I informed the front desk and tried to plug in the vehicle again in the evening, to no avail.

For the rest of the weekend, I was only able to drive the vehicle in hybrid mode, which is the default if the battery is empty. There were few charging stations in rural Vermont, and when I did find one, the handful of chargers were occupied, while the gas pumps were open, leading me to just fill up the gas tank rather than save the few dollars I would by charging. I returned the Jeep as I had received it, with a full tank of gas and a fully drained battery.

I am just one driver (who doesn’t own a car), but the weekend gave me a sense of what the average PHEV owner probably experiences. While Vermont has a very low EV adoption rate, chargers were still more plentiful than I see in much of the Midwest. Despite that, every EV charger was either occupied or not working, so I had no choice but to treat the battery as an afterthought.

PHEVs have the potential to be an important bridge between gas vehicles and full EVs. From a consumer perspective, PHEVs give drivers the chance to experience the benefits of electrification without any range anxiety. That potential, however, relies entirely on the charging infrastructure being extensive enough to support an EV transition. When I look at the Biden administration slowing EV adoption targets over the next several years, clearly I’m not the only one feeling disappointed.