Most Americans Won’t Buy an Electric Car Unless They Get the ‘Gas Station Experience’
If the U.S. wants to win the electric car war, it needs to aggressively build out a charging network
If you’re the average American, there is one thing you are generally unworried about: finding gasoline. You live within a mile or two of one or more of the country’s 115,000 gas stations. You sleep soundly knowing that as sure as the sun comes up in the morning, even if your car is empty, you can whip into your neighborhood 24-hour gas station, pump your 15 or so gallons in three or four minutes, and be good for the next 400 to 450 miles.
So it has been since the 1880s if you happen to be from Germany, and in the United States since 1905, when the first American purpose-built fueling stop opened at 420 South Theresa Avenue in St. Louis, Missouri. Six years later, the first station arrived in Russia. That is, some five generations of the human race have grown up on the ubiquity and convenience of the carefree fuel-up. In a world where very little can be taken for granted, the full tank has been as near to an entitlement as anything there is.
This is a big problem for the electric car. Over the next three or four years, nearly every major automaker on the planet and not a few startups…
