Why I’m Going To Miss America’s Crappy EV Charging Infrastructure

Chinese automaker BYD announced this week that it has designed a 1,000-kW electric charger that can add 249 miles of range in just five minutes. While America’s charging infrastructure isn’t where it needs to be to support full electrification, it gets better almost every time I go on a long road trip in an EV. This is a positive development, I suppose, but as I sat on the ground staring up through the world’s largest kaleidoscope at an exploding supernova I could only think of the negatives.

For all the complaints electric car owners and journalists (myself especially) have made about piss-poor charging, there was something romantic about the EV road trip that’s going to be lost when anyone can do it easily. Holiday Inn founder Kemmons Wilson once said “The best surprise is no surprise” in explaining the appeal of his cookie-cutter hotels.

If you’re a traveling salesman, or a family just trying to get to a far-away baseball tournament for your kid, the familiarity is comforting. But it’s not exciting. We don’t usually watch movies because we know the ending. The interstate has made it possible to, as a historian once said, cross the country without ever seeing it. The same is true of EV charging. Now that just about anyone can access the Supercharger networks and the other CCS chargers, it’s much easier to travel in an EV relatively quickly if you stick to the main roads.

Where’s the fun in that?

A Belgian Farmhouse And A Town I Forgot Existed

I was looking forward to last week for multiple reasons, but the biggest one was that my family agreed to sneak away to Cooperstown, New York for the long weekend for a visit to the National Baseball Hall of Fame And Museum – I’m slowly raising my daughter to be a baseball fan in order to have someone to go with me to games. Another cause for excitement was that I’d have the new Cadillac Lyriq, which has more than 300 miles of range and can charge on a Tesla-style NACS charger with an adapter.

A full review of the Lyriq will come next week, but the short version is that it exceeded my expectations. My wife shares neither my enthusiasm for baseball nor my desire to take road trips in EVs, seeing both as endeavors that take too long and seem to require too much planning. To me, the planning is part of the fun. I’m like the Bill James of EV road trips.

I rolled out a map (ok, I opened up Google Maps) and searched to see what kind of charging infrastructure existed on the roughly 200 miles between my house and our hotel. In theory, I’d have enough charge to make it all the way there without stopping, but the place we were staying had no charger, and Cooperstown itself only has a couple of slow ones, so I thought it prudent to stop for lunch on the way.

My strong desire was to cut through the Catskills and avoid the interstate as much as possible while also getting to the hotel before dark. To my surprise, a town I’d never visited seemed to have both a Tesla Supercharger and an Evolve NY charging station with a bunch of 350 kW ultra-fast chargers. I try to avoid the Evolve NY chargers because they’re always so expensive ($0.47 per kWh!), but this one was much closer to town so that’s what we chose.

It turns out that Kingston, a town I’d always passed on the way to somewhere else, actually rules. We had lunch at Hoffman House, which is in an old house from the 17th century, and then wandered off to explore hip retailers like the Everywhere Stationary Shop, which my daughter described as the “coolest store in the world.” I went straight to Rough Draft, a surprisingly packed bookstore/coffee shop/bar. A bar that’s also a coffee shop and a book store is kinda my ideal retail combination and, were I not driving, I’d have had a beer. Instead, I had a delicious chocolate chip cookie.

If anything, the charger was too fast, as I was approaching a full charge before we could see half the town. I was sure that even driving through the mountainous Catskills I’d probably have enough charge to make it all the way to the hotel and probably back home, but there was one slightly quicker charger just outside Cooperstown I thought we should stop to visit. That it happens to be located at the Belgian-style Brewery Ommegang is just a weird coincidence.

I highly recommend visiting if you love a full-bodied brew. The space is also architecturally interesting as the founders modeled the buildings after an old Belgian farmhouse. You can taste the authenticity.

My daughter got a Shirley Temple and, since I was driving, my wife and I shared a flight to so we could choose which cans we’d buy and take back with us to the hotel. It was the responsible thing to do.

Since we were in no hurry and the car was charging, it gave us an excuse to recline on Adirondack chairs out back while our daughter explored the vast lawn behind the brewery. A young boy with floppy blonde-brown locks zoomed after her, trying to mow that same expanse of grass with a bright orange toy Husqvarna mower. Would we have stayed as long if we weren’t charging? Probably not.

The trip itself was a success and my daughter spent hours at the museum, sharing a love of history and a pack of Big League Chew, which she’d never seen before.

The World’s Largest Kaleidoscope

On the drive up my wife noted that we’d never stopped at the World’s Largest Kaleidoscope in Emerson, so I planned the trip back to make that a possibility. According to the car’s built-in range estimator, if we stopped by and drove home we’d arrive with about a 3% charge. That’s basically nine miles, which is cutting it too close.

Amazingly, Emerson has a Tesla Destination Charger station. These aren’t as fast, but it would be nice to add just enough buffer.

We did need breakfast, however, and I was worried the Tesla Destination Charger wouldn’t play nice with the Cadillac, so I suggested a stop at a medium-speed charger near the ballpark south of Cooperstown.

This was my kind of place. When I see a bunch of old heads sitting around, each enjoying the smallest coffee they could buy, I know I’m going to have a good breakfast.

The Jive Cafe delivered. I got a “Jivin’ Egg,” which is cheese, bacon, and jalapenos with eggs on a ciabatta roll. My daughter got her usual bagel and was able to sneak in a quick game of chess while I enjoyed all the pins from assorted baseball teams that had played a tournament nearby.

I was sad to see Cooperstown go, but we had a giant kaleidoscope to see.

Did the Tesla Destination Charger work with the Cadillac when we arrived? Of course not. The trippiness of Emerson is that it has the world’s largest child’s toy but there’s absolutely no cell phone service and I think the car had a hard time communicating with the charger.

Oh well, we had a kaleidoscope to see.

Actually, multiple kaleidoscopes. While you wait for the ten-minute show at the World’s Largest Kaleidoscope you can enjoy a bunch of other optically pleasing mirrored surfaces. The main attraction, though, is a 56-foot-tall kaleidoscope built into the silo of an old dairy barn. When you go inside it’s a little like entering a space ship and your options are to lean against saw-horse-like seats or lie on the ground.

For some reason, I was the only person who thought to lay flat against the Earth. The show we saw was inspired by the idea that everything is created from stardust and something about the repeated patterns and mellow narration lulled me into a state of complete relaxation. Honestly, by the end of it, I think it was the most relaxed I’ve been in months.

Would I have stopped in had we been in a traditional gas-powered car? Maybe. But we certainly wouldn’t have then gone back to Kingston to top off (and so I could try the chocolate-dipped almond horns at Diesing’s Bakery, which I’d eyed the first time but didn’t stop to enjoy). They were delicious.

Sometimes the best surprise is an actual surprise. Like a booze-filled bookstore or a town you thought you’d never visit but now can’t wait to get back to.