Gil Tal is alive in Davis, California, where winter daytime temperatures are in the mid-1950s and annual rainfall is well below the national average. But the Sierra Nevada mountains are two hours away, so Tal made sure his latest car had four-wheel drive. “One day I’ll go to the snow,” he says.
It turns out that’s how Americans feel about buying vehicles. They buy trucks because they power one day need to transport something – or SUVs, because what if every kid wants to take a friend with them on a trip? The same goes for electric vehicles, says Tal, director of the Plug-in Hybrid and Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis. Despite leaps in battery technology, allowing some EVs to travel hundreds of miles between charges, surveys suggest that fear of range still scares potential buyers. That means, the participants in Tal’s study say, people want to know that there will be charging stations on every possible route, even if “they don’t normally stop,” he says.
That explains why the federal government last week told state and local governments to use $5 billion of the infrastructure bill to place EV charging stations about every 50 miles along designated sections of national highways; the stations do not have to be on the side of the road, but must be within a radius of one and a half kilometres. That’s despite the fact that the average American drives less than 35 miles a day (even before the pandemic), and the vast majority of current EV owners charge at home.
The chargers are a critical part of the Biden administration’s plan to build 500,000 public fast-charging stations over the next eight years, in support of what it hopes will support a flood of EVs on the road. According to the Energy Department, the US currently has 47,000 public charging stations, less than 6,000 of which are fast chargers that can top up an EV in just 30 minutes. This government wants half of all new car sales to be zero-emissions by 2030, up from 4 percent last year. In California, where 9.5 percent of new vehicle sales were electric last year, the governor wants to end sales of new gas vehicles by 2035.
But why put some charging stations in remote areas where they may not be used much? In short: psychology.
Paul Stern, president of the Social and Environmental Research Institute, which studies how people make sustainability decisions, says seeing EV charging stations on a map may alleviate some potential buyers’ fear of finding a charging point. A network of highly visible charging stations along busy highways could also draw drivers’ attention to EVs, Stern says.
“People think, ‘This has to be something other people do,'” said Nicole Sintov, a psychologist who studies electric vehicle adoption at Ohio State University. In a new paper (still pending) she looks at the relationship between the density of charging stations in an area and the willingness of residents to use electric vehicles. She concludes that as the number of charging stations in an area increases, the fear of the reach of the local population decreases and they are more willing to drive electric.
Given the limited amount of money available — the $5 billion, plus the funds that states would have to provide tens of thousands of four-port charging stations — any decision about where charging stations will be placed will be shrouded in uncertainty. The states that decide where to build these stations “can’t predict where charging stations should be located because we don’t know how people will change their behavior,” said Laura Schewel, founder and CEO of StreetLight Data, a transportation analytics company. In some ways, she says, the government is behaving like a tech startup. “If you drive innovation, you do it like this: quickly,” she says.
Of course, these highway stations won’t be the only ones being built. The FBI has another $2.5 billion to distribute through grants for placing chargers in underserved and rural communities. And many cities and states offer incentive programs to get more public charging stations in cities. Utilities have pledged to spend billions to support stations, and EV proponents hope other companies will join the station building bill as well (although the cost of charging can get tricky at times).
Certainly, even with charging networks built in, car buyers will still have many psychological canals to cross, such as accepting the higher costs of electric cars, jumping through hoops to claim government discounts or otherwise take advantage of incentive programs, and finding a new technician. qualified to work on electricity.
But just seeing more electricity can generate electricity. “Life is complex and people are very good at learning from each other,” said environmental sociologist Thomas Dietz of Michigan State University. “So of course, when something new comes along, part of our process is to see how people like us react.”
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