I have quietly and religiously been following electric vehicles for nearly 10 years since the Chevrolet Volt concept was first shown at NAIAS and not so quietly talking the ear off of anyone who would listen to me extol the virtues of electric vehicles. I have long had the idea of doing my own writing on the topic of EVs, but never found the right motivation to do so until a few days ago.
Hot on the heels of the Tesla Model 3 unveil on March 31st, Breakfast Television ran a small segment on the reservations numbers and the car in general, I watched the segment generally hoping for a positive piece that would drive some EV interest in the GTA; unfortunately that was not the case.
Well, OK, it generally was positive; up until Frank and Winston started talking about "concerns" around the Model 3, namely with charging. Not only was it riddled with inaccuracies they showed this image to convey the lack of chargers in the GTA:
Now I will be the first person to tell you that the state of charging options in Toronto and Ontario in general is dismal at best. But Frank had made a comment along the lines of that he (and I am paraphrasing slightly here) 'had a hard enough time waiting to fill up his car at a gas station, much less waiting 3-4 hours at a charger and finding something to do'.
That is when the above image from Tesla's website came out to back up Frank's issue with Electric vehicles. Unfortunately they neglected a few important facts:
1) Yes, your at home charge might take a while, but it will normally be overnight and every single morning you will leave with a "full tank" so to speak. That "full tank" will let you drive 350km that day and as the majority of people do not drive more than that in a day and also most likely won't crack even 100km in an average day of driving. So in reality, you will never visit one of these destination chargers or super chargers in a Model 3 unless you go on a trip which leads to fact #2.
2) Winston correctly pointed it out that there was only one supercharger in Toronto, which is correct. However the spin they were putting on it made it seem like people were going to have to use it as their one and only gas station in Toronto when in reality, Superchargers are for long distance travel enabling you to hop from charger to charger stopping once every 2-3 hours or so. Had they zoomed out a bit they would have seen this:
Which clearly paints a different picture; a picture that shows you can use Superchargers to get to many of North America's major cities as the network was intended to allow. In fact you can probably get to the majority of North American cities by the end of this year as the below picture is the build-out plan to the end of 2016.
3) Lastly, they stated that there are very few "destination" chargers only in the downtown core of Toronto. True if you use only Tesla's site to find chargers with a Tesla plug, but a simple adapter can allow you to use almost all the chargers in the GTA. The below screenshot from Plug Share clearly shows that they are not just located in the downtown core.
All in all I was disappointed with the segment and I realized that as EV's take root in Toronto as the Bolt and Model 3 come to market, there should be a GTA-centric resource for everything EVs and so GT EVs is born.
I hope that the segment aired the way it did simply due to a lack of education on electric cars in the newsroom and not out of malice. I tweeted some corrections to them immediately after the segment aired and offered to speak with them if they wanted to speak to a current EV owner and expert on the topic, but as of writing this blog I have not had a response.
Should you want to watch the segment you can find it here
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