Crossing the country on nothing but electricity

“The challenge has been charging reliability, we don’t get a lot of reliability in charging. This started off at 125 kW, 125,000 watts worth of energy going into the battery per hour. Now it’s down to 58 kW going in, so its charge per-minute the longer you’re going to charge, the more you’re going to pay,” Wright said Monday.

Another challenge for electrification has been trying to convince rural regions to buy electric vehicles. The majority of rural communities don’t have the infrastructure capable of hosting charging stations so the only choice for most people would be to charge at home. Sandy MacDonald at Big M Ford in Medicine Hat says that electric vehicle sales are around what they have expected at the moment.

“The sales of electric vehicles are kind of going the way we thought they would. It’s basically less than 10 per cent of our whole market so it’s not a huge part of the market right now. Keeping that in mind, we are stocking electric vehicles and they are selling the way we thought they would,” MacDonald said on Monday.

Wright had to wait two and a half years for his Ford F-150 Lightning, and received it in October. He said the largest drawback he’s seen since owning the truck is the large hit its driving range took over the winter. Still, Wright says electric vehicles are becoming better at a fast rate.

Time will tell how much better the performance of electric vehicles will get in the next couple of decades. There’s still an overwhelmingly high demand for internal-combustion engine vehicles, and MacDonald believes that internal-combustion cars will still have a big demand in the next few decades.

Doug Wright says that he and his wife plan to do more cross-country road trips with their EV in the future.

by Jayson Taylor

Crossing the country on nothing but electricity

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