People Instagram a picture of what they had for lunch. Or TikTok footage of themselves dancing solo. Or unironically post a YouTube video on how to boil water.
Don’t even get me started on cat videos.
With that as context, I can post about the gas mileage in my wife’s Prius Prime.
Which was 67 MPG for the 145-mile trip back from Ocean City, MD this afternoon. Not dogging it, either. A chunk of that was flying down the Lexus lanes around DC, at 75 MPH and up.
Thus demonstrating that the 72 MPG on the way out to Ocean City (Post #1454) wasn’t the fluke I thought it was.
This, from a car that the EPA lists at 53 MPG on the highway.
On the one hand, MPG is not the smartest way to measure fuel consumption. It exaggerates small differences. In terms of gallons of fuel used, the difference between 53 (EPA), 67 (return trip), and 72 (outbound trip) MPG ain’t much. Per 100 miles, it looks like this:
My incremental 27 tablespoons of savings (per 100 miles) on the outgoing trip pales compared to the eight trillion tablespoons of crude oil in the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve.
Yet it puts a smile on my face, no matter how much my savings is just so much pissing into the ocean.
Which, because I just came back from Ocean City, I will clearly state is simply a metaphor.
And yet …
And yet, the on-the-road car recharge market is a total mess.
Hey, we were on vacation. Our favorite destination store (Made By Hand, Bethany Beach Del) now had an electric car charger out front. We were driving a car that could use a recharge. I’d never used a commercial charging station before. We had a lot of free time.
Seemed like a series of matches made in heaven.
What a mess.
The plug that goes into the car is standard. So the engineers did their job.
Beyond that, I’d say that pretty much every other profession involved in this industry has screwed up to a greater or lesser degree.
Let me start with the asshole with the proudly gas-guzzling pickup who occupied one of the two EV charging slots. In an almost-empty parking lot. Clearly parked there on purpose. Clearly parked there to deny use of the EV charger.
It was one of those Dodges (now, hahahaha, Fiats!) that advertises the displacement and configuration of the engine (7.3 hemi?). I doubt that the average knuckle-dragger who drives one of those as his grocery-getter even knows what hemi is short for, or the long and proud history behind that engine configuration.
But I can assure you, as an early Prius adopter, there are a lot of insecure people out there who are threatened by changes in the car market. Just as it was common to be harassed (e.g., tailgated) driving a hybrid in 2005, it now seems some people are threatened by electricity-driven transport. (And yeah, it was true, there was a lot of anonymous hate directed at hybrid drivers back in the day.)
Suffice it to say that the aim of the Hemi is the opposite that of the Prius Atkinson engine. Which is to say, the Hemi was developed to have a high power-to-weight ratio, at the expense of poor fuel economy. Which makes the Hemi driver the natural enemy of the Prius driver.
So that much, at least, made sense. The asshole needlessly denying revenues to the private-sector concern offering charging services drove a pickup with (no doubt) great acceleration and power, but fer-shit gas mileage. And perhaps was not all that happy with $5/gallon gasoline.
And so he squatted in that precious EV charging space. Not for any benefit to himself. There were plenty of space in the lot. Just to own the libs, I guess? But he didn’t have the guts to straddle the line and block both spaces. So both a gas-guzzler and a coward. Because he did only what he had a legal right to do.
And so, it appears that the purveyors of this charging station just assumed that good will would keep those slots open. Not only is there no legally-enforceable restriction on parking there, there’s not even any signage suggesting that gas-only cars should park elsewhere.
These stupid lib-tards assumed that people would simply cooperate. In America? That because there’s no benefit for a gas-only car to park there, they assumed gas-only cars would leave those spots free for the electrically-powered cars that could use them.
Ha ha ha. Hemi ha ha. Idiots. There’s a whole piece of the political spectrum that takes pleasure in owning the lib-tards. And the lib-tards didn’t even consider putting up signage to discourage that. Because they were stupid enough to assume good will on the part of the average American.
Let alone towing non-EVs out of those recharging spaces. Which is, apparently, what it will take in that resort destination, to keep those charger spots free.
And yet, the on-the-road car recharge market is a total mess.
OK, so ignoring the asshole in the black truck, blocking one EV charging space, we pulled into the space next to that. And attempted to recharge the battery in my wife’s Prius Prime.
And we were faced with:
- No indication of what recharging would cost.
- Virtually zero instructions.
- Malfunctioning credit-card reader.
But after numerous tries, it took my credit card, and let us do some level-2 charging (240 volts).
And yet, it still has not charged my credit card. So … I guess that was free?
What? When was the last time somebody required you to swipe a credit card, then didn’t charge you? It’s hard even to characterize the degrees of incompetence involved in that.
But looking on the website for the parent company, the charging cost should have been more expensive than gasoline. On a cost-per-mile basis. If they’d been competent enough actually to charge me what their website said was the rate for charging at one of their stations. But instead, they let me charge, and then didn’t charge my credit card.
And that was true for most or possibly all the public charging stations in Ocean City, MD and environs. Sure, you can recharge at a public station. And per-mile, the resulting KWHs cost more than gasoline. At least for my wife’s PHEV Prius Prime.
Anyway, I think I learned a lesson. For now, at least. I wanted a recharge so we could do our gadding-about-Ocean-City travel with a relatively low carbon footprint.
I now realize that the public-recharge market is such that this goal is not easily obtainable. There’s just a whole lot of learning-curve, jerk-avoidance, cost-incurring turf that you have to negotiate. All for the privilege of saving a few tablespoons of gasoline, in our otherwise efficient Prius.
On net, I’ll save the recharging for home, and run this as a straight-up gas vehicle when we’re on the road.
At some point, I suppose that whole public-charging market will straighten itself out. But right now, it’s just not ready for Prime time.
