Hamilton Nissan Leaf Silent Cruise September 1st 2013

The first Hamilton Nissan Leaf Silent Cruise is set for September 1st leaving from the Wentworth Arena at 27 Hwy-5 West Waterdown. All EV owners are welcomed. We will meet at the Wentworth Arena at 2:00PM and depending on charging needs of the group leave by 3:00 PM. The group will head to the Tim Hortons at 228 Wyercroft Road Oakville. At the Wentworth Arena there are 10 charging stations at the Oakvile Tim Hortons there are 4 chargers plus a few more in the area. Let's be seen and bring awareness to electric cars.

Silicon Valley to Malibu EV road trip in a Nissan Leaf Electric Car Part 2

As readers of this blog might know I love electric car road trips. Living in Ontario Canada it is becoming a little easier to take an electric car on a road trip with more chargers going live each day. I thought I would share my friend Deborah Petersen’s recent trip in California with her husband’s Nissan Leaf and as California is very EV friendly state it make an interesting read. Is the infrastructure in place enough to get her from Silicon Valley to Malibu in a Nissan Leaf.? The following post has been posted with kind permission from Deborah you may find the original post at her blog http://myhusbandselectriccar.com/ which as an EV fan is a must read.

Am I too negative about #EV 

driving or just a realist?

Am I too negative about EV driving, or just a realist? The debate is one of the themes emerging since I announced that my husband and I will be driving his all-electric 2012 Nissan Leaf from Silicon Valley to Malibu later this week.

Besides some of my readers misunderstanding my attempts at humor such as my tongue-in-cheek references about whether my marriage will survive the road trip, I think the question of whether my writings turn people off to EV ownership is a good one.

My purpose is to neither encourage or discourage, but to report my experiences while having as much fun as possible. I do know that plenty of my friends think the whole thing is cool, while others crack jokes about how I am an advertisement for gas-powered vehicles. The trip we are about to embark on raises plenty of
EV uber- issues at the get-go, and will likely bring up more as we go along.  The most glaring one at the moment is the question of when we are going to see more super chargers made readily available or when Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors is going to make his accessible to those of us who cannot afford to purchase his sleek Model S.

If we could find one or two super chargers along the route from Silicon Valley to Malibu, our road trip would be as close to one with a gas-powered vehicle as  you can get.  Yes, it would take 20 minutes to charge instead of five minutes to fill a tank with gas, but that sure beats three hours a charge.

Then again, as a reader points out, maybe slowing down is just the ticket to de-stress for a long weekend.  Will we be forced to stop and smell the roses, and visit  sights which we would have certainly overlooked had we been bombing down I-5 instead?  I hope so. And as another reader notes, this might be a business opportunity for those who want to provide short-stay tourism to EV drivers stopping to charge.

However, as that reader also notes, not everyone has the time or the patience to turn a simple drive into a lengthy adventure, not to mention the extra cost of staying overnight on what should be a one-day trip. There, too, is the uncertainty of not knowing if the chargers we will need will be available.

As for me, I have made peace with all of these issues, and I am, indeed, looking forward to the spontaneity and adventure of it all.  Whether or not I will feel that way if we get stranded somewhere without a charger, well, that’s when my husband is going to start worrying. I am packing tonight, and can’t wait to get on the road.

By the way, I have also created a new Twitter account where  you can also follow our travels, it’s called @survivingEVLife.  Thanks for coming along for the ride!

Silicon Valley to Malibu EV road trip in a Nissan Leaf Electric Car Part 1

As readers of this blog might know I love electric car road trips. Living in Ontario Canada it is becoming a little easier to take an electric car on a road trip with more chargers going live each day. I thought I would share my friend Deborah Petersen’s recent trip in California with her husband’s Nissan Leaf and as California is very EV friendly state it make an interesting read. Is the infrastructure in place enough to get her from Silicon Valley to Malibu in a Nissan Leaf.? The following post has been posted with kind permission from Deborah you may find the original post at her blog http://myhusbandselectriccar.com/ which as an EV fan is a must read.

Lately I have been wondering which is crazier, my decision several years ago to bicycle across America in my first year of marriage, or the plan my husband and I have hatched to drive his 2012 Nissan Leaf fromSilicon Valley to Malibu.  That’s 365 miles. It’s an easy day drive for anyone cruising in a traditional car, hybrid or Tesla. But his Leaf cannot make even 100 miles on a single charge.

Still, there’s no turning back now. The Malibu hotel reservations are made, and soon we will depart from San Jose after work on a weekday evening, chug along to Salinas, the home of John Steinbeck, whose writings coincidentally inspired our bicycle trip. But it is practicality, not sentimentality which is bringing us to to Salinas. There is a charging station there, and after 60 miles of traveling, we will need one before we turn in for the night. Traveling only 60 miles on the first night of a trip? It’s unheard of right? Not when you have an EV.

Then, it is up early the next morning so that we can make it 194.4 miles to the quirky, Danish-inspired village of Solvang, California. (If you saw the movie “Sideways” you saw Solvang).  If any of you are doing the math at this point you will know that on this day, we will drive for about four hours and charge the car for close to seven hours, spread over two stops. Through his ChargePoint app, my husband has been keeping his eye on one of the crucial chargers we will need along the way, and every day, it has been available. We are keeping our fingers crossed that it will be vacant when we arrive.  Then, we will need to find a way to kill three hours while the Leaf charges. Blogging about our adventures (and misadventures) will occupy some of the time, but three hours is a long time to do nothing. We were unable to find any super chargers along the way. There are only about 386 of these DC Quick Charging Stations  in the nation. The only ones in between San Jose and Malibu are  those specifically designed for Tesla Motors vehicles. These super chargers would reduce our charging time to less than 30 minutes, but the Tesla ones are not compatible with my husband’s 2012 Nissan Leaf.

Our destination in Malibu has not one, but two chargers, and the inn owner drives aChevy Volt. Now, that is our kind of place. We are spending two nights there so we can relax and rest up for the trip home, which honestly, we haven’t quite figured out yet.

The logistics of planning this trip are not for the faint of heart, and underlines the challenges of selling the Leaf to Americans as the only car in the family,  as the latest advertisements are trying to do. ( We could, by the way, ask Nissan for a free gas-powered rental car to take this trip, a benefit offered by the dealership for those who want to take a jaunt past range, but what fun would that be?)

This beats the challenges of planning a bike trip, and we will be able to beat our 44 miles a day average for that trip.  When we pedaled 4,697 miles across America  in the 90′s, we actually used paper maps and had to cut out the names of motels and tape them on pieces of paper and pack them in panniers. Now, we just search for the charging stations through Blink Network or ChargePoint apps, plot them on Google maps, and click to find the accommodations nearby.

Nevertheless, what traditional driver needs to spend an entire evening creating a spreadsheet for 365-mile road trip?  That is what we have done, mapping out charging stations, and our backup, fellow EV drivers who are part of PlugShare, and allow others to come to their home to charge an electric vehicle. A total of 4,785 chargers of the 20,138 chargers in the nation listed by PlugShare are home charges which EV drivers open to others.  We are hoping we will not need to do that, but  if there is one thing I learned about out bicycle trek, it is to expect the unexpected, and never underestimate the kindness of strangers.

We are hoping for both as we take on the EV ride of our lifetime- or perhaps the first of many. Come along for the ride, and see how well our EV and our marriage survives a road trip from Silicon Valley to Malibu. And, wish us luck!