OPEN ROAD HONDA UPGRADE

Unsold electric vehicles are piling up – people like the idea but are not buying them Then one day on a trip to Quebec City with my daughter, Sophia, I noticed that when we stopped to charge, she popped open her laptop and did some school work. I had not thought that the chargers are usually located on service islands where there’s nowhere to go or in dreary retail strips where there’s nowhere you want to go. I’ll just go for a stroll whenever the car is charging.

OPEN ROAD HONDA UPGRADE

The charging unit cost me about $1,500 to install, including an upgrade to my electrical panel, and since then I have spent about a quarter of what I would to fuel a regular car.īut as soon as I hit the road – which I am doing more these days because I am retired and because I am trying to cut back on air travel, also for environmental reasons - life becomes complicated.įirst of all, there’s the time it takes even at a “fast-charger.” When I got the car, I thought, well, I love to walk. I have a Level 2 charger at home that will fill the battery overnight on 240 volts. It cost me only a little more than the average car sold nowadays in Canada, in part because of the $5,000 federal subsidy. When I am at home in Ottawa, the car is perfect. There aren’t enough chargers in enough places, and way too many of them don’t work well or don’t work at all. But the fast-charging network is not nearly as robust as it needs to be. In pursuit of our climate goals, Canada has mandated that 60 per cent of new car sales be EVs by 2030, just seven years away, and 100 per cent by 2035. That was the worst day in 10 mainly wonderful weeks that included all the joys of a long-distance road trip: seeing old friends, exploring new places, hiking, taking pictures and crossing the Rockies twice.īut that day north of Superior illustrated some of the problems that face North America as the rush is on to replace our vast gas-guzzling fleet of vehicles with EVs. I turned off the electric luxuries like the warmers for the seat and the steering-wheel and then, as I got more nervous, I dropped my speed to 85 kilometres an hour and started turning off the interior heat from time to time. But my hope was to do an insurance charge-up there so I could get to the charger after that, a Petro-Canada in Marathon.Įven before I reached White River, I was starting to worry.

I knew from experience in Southern Ontario that the Ivy Charging Network (a joint venture of Hydro One and Ontario Power Generation) was not especially reliable. I was aiming for the Ivy chargers in White River, 93 kilometres out. When I left Wawa, the algorithm in the car told me my range was likely a little more than 300 kilometres, but I could quickly see my projected range dropping much more quickly than the distance to my destination. But electric vehicles get less mileage in the cold and at highway speeds. Perhaps in perfect conditions - in the city on a pleasant spring day. In the showroom, they will tell you that my model of Leaf can get 400 kilometres on a charge.

Open road honda