Tesla owners reportedly waited hours to charge their vehicles after Monday’s total solar eclipse. The long lines at charging stations are like salt in the wound of EV owners who are forced to wait as their cars charge enough to reach home — a major concern when major traffic days can cause long delays.
“(The eclipse) was spectacular, but I had to rush back because I noticed the battery on my Tesla was running low and all the charging stations at Jay Peak were taken,” Monica Livesey told WCVB.
Livesey, who is from Wakefield, Massachusetts, and drove to Vermont in an EV on Monday to see the total solar eclipse, said her return home was made worse for her family — as well as other Tesla owners — when they all had to search for charging stations in rural areas.
And when they eventually did find a charging station in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, there were met with long lines of electric vehicles, she said.
“I got there with one mile only to find out there were about 60 cars waiting to be charged,” Livesey told the outlet.
The Livesey family reportedly helped a couple try to organize the lines by handing out numbers that made electric vehicle drivers wait their turn to charge.
“We were giving out paper tickets with a number on it,” Livesey’s 16-year-old son Niko said, adding that he was “trying to keep the mood pleasant.”
“In my mind, I was thinking it’s going to be a long night,” he said.
The Livesey family ended up waiting more than four hours to charge their Tesla, and got home at 4:00 a.m. on Tuesday. They noted that the last ticket they handed out was number 189, and that they saw more people pulling up to the charging stations as they left.
“I don’t know where all these people came from,” Livesey’s 13-year-old daughter Jessica said. “I didn’t know there were that many Tesla’s.”
Monica Livesey insisted that the hassle was “worth the trip.”
“It doesn’t matter if we’re waiting for four hours to charge. It was so worth it. It was beautiful,” she said. “I feel like everybody came together as a community. At the end, people were hugging. They were thanking us.”
The Livesey family are not the only ones to experience a difficult road trip in an electric vehicle.
As Breitbart News reported, a Business Insider reporter learned how “brutal” a road trip in an EV can be when he was forced to bundle up instead of using the heater in his car to try to maximize his range.
Last year, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm even had the police called on her after embarking on a four-day road trip in an electric vehicle, which presented her with a few other issues, including trouble locating chargers and long downtimes as batteries slowly refilled.
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