THE LONG ROAD AHEAD

It’s the worst possible time to buy a car, but events recently forced my family to do it. I regret the shudderinducing premium we paid to get our hands on a little piece of CarMax’s pandemic-depleted inventory. But I also regret having to buy now because I’d hoped we could hold onto our old vehicle long enough to make our next purchase electric.

Once an electric vehicle skeptic, I gradually came around as the technology matured, and automakers got serious about electrifying their lineups. A big order from Hertz boosted Tesla’s market capitalization above $1 trillion Monday. Governments are also behind this push; President Joe Biden wants EVs to make up half of all U.S. car sales by 2030, up from about 2 percent now.

There’s a lot to like about an all-electric future. EVs are cleaner, obviously. They’re quieter, too. And of course, they reduce our dependence on a commodity currently soaring in price.

Then there are the personal benefits: On average, electric vehicles accelerate faster, cost less to maintain and fuel more cheaply (at least, if you charge at home) than cars with internal combustion engines. Plus, my husband and I are nearly the ideal case for an electric car: urbanites who drive fairly frequently, but not very far, so we don’t need to worry much about range.

And yet, we did not buy an electric car for two reasons: the cost of the vehicles, and our inability to figure out where the heck we’d charge it.

Even with tax credits, and even with lower costs for fuel and maintenance, EVs still seem pricey compared with their internalcombustion counterparts. That’s a problem that I hope will be solved in coming years, as mass production generates cost efficiencies. But at the moment, there’s often still a significant premium for going green.

Yet with all the other benefits, we might have been willing to pay extra, except for one major problem: Like many people who live in dense, walkable neighborhoods, we park our car on the street, leaving us nowhere to charge it.

OK, not literally nowhere; we could have paid to get an outlet installed in front of our rowhouse, and hoped we’d be able to find a spot out front often enough to keep the car powered. Or we could have planned our weeks around finding public charging stations where we could regularly top up. But both seemed rather speculative for such a major investment, and in the case of public chargers, quite inconvenient. Road trips also posed a quandary — if we did want to go more than a couple hundred miles, how long would we have to stop just to recharge the battery? (Answer: It varies by model and charger, but can run from 30 minutes, in the best case, to hours.)

We’re not alone in having this problem, says Loren

McDonald, a consultant working on EVs and EVcharging projects. He told me that 35 to 40 percent of households lack access to easy charging, and ironically the problem is greatest among the people who otherwise should be the natural market for electric vehicles: urbanite apartment-dwellers.

As for road-trips, McDonald calls them the “noose around the neck of electric vehicles.”

Neither problem is insoluble. There are still plenty of garage owners able to install a relatively inexpensive charging station that can power up their vehicle overnight. As those folks shift toward electric vehicles, it will become more economical for stores and other public places to install charging stations where you can pay by the kilowatt while you’re inside. Apartment managers will also presumably face pressure to install chargers in their garages or risk losing tenants.

There are many roadblocks that stand between millions of Americans and their first electric car.

But that still leaves the street parkers with a problem that local governments and utilities will probably need to solve for us. And there’s no guarantee that any of it will happen on the ambitious timetables suggested by automakers and the president, unless all levels of government work to provide a push.

I’m not just talking about the billions the administration has proposed to spend building charging stations, which is at best a down payment. We also need to make grid upgrades, and rationalize the patchwork of state and local regulations and utility rules that take time and money to navigate. Chris Nelder, who used to work in the carbonfree mobility practice at the Rocky Mountain Institute, and now runs a podcast called “The Energy Transition Show,” told me, “Because this process is so complicated and so messy, we found that developers would actually have to develop 2.5 sites to get one through.”

That’s a problem the market can’t solve, no matter how cheap or attractive electric vehicles become. Nor is it likely to be solved entirely by farsighted local governments and utilities voluntarily preparing themselves for the future long before it arrives. It will take uniform state and federal standards, and probably some financial assistance, to clear the roadblocks that currently stand between millions of Americans and our first electric car.