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!