Who's Got The Plug?

EV Infrastructure is a Critical Part of the Segment’s Growth – and we’re still trying to figure it out as a business

- Michael Coates

The first question anyone asks when thinking of diving into the electric vehicle market is, “Where do I charge it?” The easy answers take care of most folks – at home at a 120-volt (Level 1) wall plug or a 240-volt (Level 2) “fast” charger – or if you’re lucky, at work, usually at 240 volts. But what if you venture out of the comfort zone of the home-work orbit? What if you want to take a trip beyond the range of a single charge? What if you want to use your EV the way Americans have traditionally used their cars?

This is not an isolated issue. A Volkswagen executive, Reinhard Fischer, told the trade journal Automotive News that “range anxiety has now been replaced by charging anxiety. A hundred years ago, gasoline was sold at pharmacies,” he said. “Today, we have 122,000 gas stations in the United States. It’s transformed from a bottleneck to a commodity. Electric charging is going to be exactly the same.”

As posed by this automaker – it’s a quantity issue. But he also noted another aspect: anxiety. That’s not always addressed by quantitative answers. If it were, there would be no fear of flying.

Building an extensive network of EV charging stations is both a matter of physically putting the stations in place and also making sure folks know they’re there. The economic opportunity has garnered the attention of several companies, but some have chosen different paths toward the same goal.