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

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After studying Jennifer’s glorious article on the flood hearth threat with EVs associated to hurricanes, I assumed I might additionally current the optimistic facet 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 determine should you and your loved ones are staying or going.

In case you are staying, it’s a must to purchase provides and safe your private home. In case you are going, it’s a must to pack and know the place you’re going to. 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 have been additionally going to order a spot in southern Georgia, however didn’t due to a miscommunication, however fake we did for the sake of this text. We didn’t know if we have 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 important to make your reservations early, as a result of by the point you need to depart, all of the locations are both booked up or they’ve tripled their costs (I help the value system and don’t contemplate than dangerous “value gouging” however simply essentially the most environment friendly strategy to allocate scarce assets 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, similar to my fossil fuel-loving mates advised me could be the case when the “massive one” was able to hit.

12 stalls accessible. 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 traces?

8 stalls accessible. Might or not it’s that my fossil fuel-loving mates received is all improper? That EV chargers are extra accessible than fuel when on the brink of evacuate, and in addition alongside the best way? I captured these photos at 3:40PM on October eighth, mainly the height of individuals evacuating in Florida.

8 stalls accessible. I haven’t discovered one full but. Possibly Tesla hasn’t given up on the Supercharger enterprise. Possibly they have been prepared, even after they opened as much as different automakers’ automobiles.

10 stalls accessible. Let’s look east as a substitute 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 group is the embodiment of Epcot? Nicely, I assumed that, however researching that, it turned out to be a standard delusion!

12 stalls in Sanford, sadly identified for Trayvon Martin’s loss of life.   

8 stalls accessible in Deltona. 

And 12 stalls accessible in one other Orlando location.

Florida has 172 Supercharger places (second solely to California) and I wasn’t going to test all of them. I couldn’t discover any that have 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 house owners extra data on the right way to keep away from the fires which have been occurring with the current hurricanes.

As we have been working many errands, main as much as the storm, we appreciated that we weren’t utilizing up the dear fuel our neighbor’s have 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 traces topping off their tanks, none of these is a good choice.

Lots of them additionally have been getting fuel for his or her turbines. 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 absolutely charged, it could possibly hold you at a cushty temperature for 3 or 4 days, cost your telephones and laptops, and even provide you with web entry you probably have bought Premium Connectivity.

Conclusion

Though there are various benefits to each fuel and electrical automobiles in a storm scenario, I needed to cowl so a number of the benefits to having an EV over having a fuel automobile. I hope you may share this with individuals who don’t suppose EVs are good in a storm scenario.

If you wish to reap the benefits 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 a substitute 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 provide no funding recommendation of any kind right here.