Hi all,

First, this is not a complaint post, though I suppose it could be one if I was in a worse mood. This is mostly just a report on our experience driving up California in our Kia EV6 on Saturday 11/26. We decided to leave on Saturday to return home from our family Thanksgiving trip, hoping to avoid the worst of the Sunday end-of-holiday traffic.

The traffic itself wasn’t too bad, relatively, as our total driving time by the time we got home was about 7 hours. Longer than on non-holidays by a good 90 minutes, but not awful. What completely f’ed up our return was the dearth of charging stations–and ones that functioned–along Highway 5.

Now, we knew what we were getting into. We’ve taken the EV6 on many long road trips across the state , and have waited in line on occasion–but usually just one or two cars deep. This was on a whole other magnitude of horrible. We had dutifully route-planned via ABRP and the Electrify America app (we wanted to stick to EA mostly because we’re still getting free charges from the car purchase but also because our experience is that EA has been the most reliable). We knew we only had to charge once to make it home, and we knew that Kettleman City was our best bet because the EA there has 10 chargers, and according to the app 9 were operational at the time we were checking.

Welp, when we arrived there only 7 were functioning. And the line was out of control. We were about 20 cars deep, and the only positive thing to say about that is that by the time we eventually left the line was more like 40 cars deep (and I wish I was exaggerating) --so in that sense we were “lucky.” For awhile the scene was chaos, as cars didn’t know where to line up–so at one point there were two separate lines until it was decided, strictly by all the people waiting, as there was no “official” there to monitor the scene, that one line had to dissolve and all those people had to get in the other line. So that sucked, as we were in the line that was forced to merge, and we lost multiple places in line after already waiting about 45 minutes.

By the time it was our turn to charge, we had waited 3 hours in line. We charged up to 80, which didn’t take too long, but when all was said and done our usual 5.5 hour drive had turned into a 10.5 hour drive. Left L.A at noon, arrived home at 10:30 pm. Woof.

Some observations:

1. People were cool, courteous, and helpful. There was a general sense of camaraderie, as we were all equally fucked. Once the chaos of the two lines was solved, people behaved. About every 5 minutes some new car would drive up and try to immediately pull into the lot, somehow not noticing the endless line of cars waiting, but there was obviously a lot of diligence to shoo them to the back of the line, as no one was going to let anyone cut given how long everyone had to wait.

2. Leaving earlier in the morning would have helped. We couldn’t get on the road until noon because my wife was teaching, so we were right in the middle of the heaviest daytime traffic. I’m sure the situation would have been different if we had left at the crack of dawn. So that was on us.

3. There was no consensus on how much everyone could charge. Some people went to 80, some people sat there to 100. No one was policing it, and, at least while we were there, there were no confrontations or arguments. Since everyone had to wait so long, and since no one would want to go through that again, it was understandable that people would want to go to 100. In our case, we knew we could make it back home just charging to 80, so our charge only took 20 minutes. But there were plenty of cars who had been sitting at the chargers a long time before our turn, and were still there when we left. Yay for the EV6’s fast charging and range.

4) Three stations down on a holiday weekend was ridiculous. These chargers should have all been functional, of all weekends of the year. And if it were up to me, there’d be an employee (even a temp) on hand to manage the line on such a weekend.

5) The nearby Tesla charging area made us all wish we had Teslas. No denying it–the Tesla owners had it made compared to us. Plenty of chargers, no wait, a nice lounge area to wait. There was just no comparison. I hate Musk and for that reason alone don’t want one (though we rented one in France this summer and enjoyed it), but man, give him all the credit for establishing a workable infrastructure that actually makes these long drives feasible.

6) Still love the EV6, still not sorry we are an electric-only household. Yeah, it sucked. But big picture, I still wouldn’t go back to ICE. The car is still tons of fun to drive, and this is the first time since buying the car in May 2022 that we’ve had this experience. And on the plus side, we were able to listen to 12 episodes of a podcast lol, and the friendliness of everyone waiting–a we’re all in this hell together feeling–helped keep our mood in check.

Good luck to everyone making this drive today. Plan on being patient. Or buy a Tesla.

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