What If A Hurricane Comes & You Solely Have An Electrical Automotive?

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After studying Jennifer’s glorious article on the flood fireplace danger with EVs associated to hurricanes, I assumed I’d additionally current the optimistic aspect of getting an EV as a serious hurricane is headed towards your private home. As somebody who has lived in Tampa for 33 years, I do know that with each storm, it’s a must to resolve if you happen to and your loved ones are staying or going.

If you’re staying, it’s a must to purchase provides and safe your private home. If you’re going, it’s a must to pack and know the place you will. On Monday, as I used to be placing up shutters on my townhome and serving to some neighbors that didn’t have an enormous ladder, my brother-in-law made a reservation for us in Fort Pierce.

We had been additionally going to order a spot in southern Georgia, however didn’t due to a miscommunication, however faux we did for the sake of this text. We didn’t know if we had been going to make use of it, however with Milton’s winds gusting as much as 220 mph, we needed an choice to get out of Dodge (Tampa). That was out of the cone. We deliberate to take 2 automobiles, one fuel and my lengthy vary Tesla Mannequin Y. It’s a must to make your reservations early, as a result of by the point you wish to depart, all of the locations are both booked up or they’ve tripled their costs (I help the worth system and don’t contemplate than dangerous “worth gouging” however simply essentially the most environment friendly method to allocate scarce sources to those that worth it essentially the most). So on Tuesday when it was time to both depart or keep (based mostly on up to date climate forecasts), I wanted to test if the Superchargers would all be overflowing with 2 hours waits, identical to my fossil fuel-loving pals informed me could be the case when the “massive one” was able to hit.

12 stalls obtainable. Hmm, did I inform you that almost 2,000 fuel stations are out of gasoline? And lots of the ones which have gasoline have HUGE strains?

8 stalls obtainable. Might it’s that my fossil fuel-loving pals received is all mistaken? That EV chargers are extra obtainable than fuel when on the brink of evacuate, and in addition alongside the way in which? I captured these photographs at 3:40PM on October eighth, principally the height of individuals evacuating in Florida.

8 stalls obtainable. I haven’t discovered one full but. Perhaps Tesla hasn’t given up on the Supercharger enterprise. Perhaps they had been prepared, even after they opened as much as different automakers’ autos.

10 stalls obtainable. Let’s look east as an alternative of north.

12 stalls open in Davenport (near Disney).

8 stalls in an Orlando location.

8 stalls in Celebration. Do you know that this Disney-designed neighborhood is the embodiment of Epcot? Effectively, I assumed that, however researching that, it turned out to be a typical fantasy!

12 stalls in Sanford, sadly identified for Trayvon Martin’s dying.   

8 stalls obtainable in Deltona. 

And 12 stalls obtainable in one other Orlando location.

Florida has 172 Supercharger areas (second solely to California) and I wasn’t going to test all of them. I couldn’t discover any that had been full. One other little bit of misinformation that’s generally unfold is that EVs will depart you stranded in a site visitors jam within the winter chilly or summer season warmth. That isn’t true. They’re much more environment friendly than fuel automobiles and that effectivity benefit is much more pronounced in site visitors jams which have prolonged idling and cease and go site visitors that’s excellent for regenerative braking.

We Determined To Keep

Tesla despatched me this discover, which is try to offer homeowners extra info on how you can keep away from the fires which were occurring with the current hurricanes.

As we had been working many errands, main as much as the storm, we appreciated that we weren’t utilizing up the precious fuel our neighbor’s had been, since every day we refilled our battery as much as run extra errands. Our neighbors with fuel automobiles needed to both not run the errands they needed to run or use a lot of their fuel or spend hours in strains topping off their tanks, none of these is a superb choice.

A lot of them additionally had been getting fuel for his or her mills. My neighbor spent hours making an attempt to get his generator to work, shopping for fuel and a brand new spark plug and nonetheless couldn’t get it to work. My electrical automobile is my generator. It holds 3 or 4 days of energy and if wanted, I can recharge it for extra days of use. As I defined in nice element on this article a yr in the past, the Tesla Mannequin Y may be very comfy place to sleep 1 or 2 individuals. If totally charged, it could maintain you at a cushty temperature for 3 or 4 days, cost your telephones and laptops, and even provide you with web entry when you’ve got bought Premium Connectivity.

Conclusion

Though there are numerous benefits to each fuel and electrical automobiles in a storm state of affairs, I needed to cowl so among the benefits to having an EV over having a fuel automobile. I hope you’ll be able to share this with individuals who don’t assume EVs are good in a storm state of affairs.

If you wish to make the most of my Tesla referral hyperlink to get Reward Credit, right here’s the hyperlink: https://ts.la/paul92237 — however as I’ve stated earlier than, if one other proprietor helped you extra, please use their hyperlink as an alternative of mine. If you wish to study extra about Tesla’s new referral program (August 2024), Chris Boylan has written an glorious article on it.

Disclosure: I’m a shareholder in Tesla [TSLA], BYD [BYDDY], Nio [NIO], XPeng [XPEV], Hertz [HTZ], NextEra Vitality [NEP], and a number of other ARK ETFs. However I supply no funding recommendation of any kind right here.