New York City is Not Ready

Doug Garr
Doug Garr
Jul 22, 2017 · 5 min read

For Prius Prime Time, or any electric cars

(Unless, of course, you own a townhouse with a garage.)

You would think that Manhattan Island is the ideal locale for electric vehicles. I always thought the city’s cabs, traveling a hundred miles or so a shift in heavy traffic, would be the early adopters. Every eight-hour shift change, you’d just swap in a fresh battery pack for the next driver. But the politics of city fleet owners — who see them as too expensive — have ensured that this is one notion whose time will not soon come.

Not only is the plug-in cab full of overcooked dreams, so is the privately owned electric vehicle. Let me explain. While environmentalists and forward-thinking auto industry mavens have been extolling the advantages of Volts, Teslas, and Prius Primes for some time, the reality is that they don’t make any sense yet in dense urban areas. And all the articles I’ve read in the past two years about the EV panacea in New York City are doing a disservice to the reality. Not fake news. Just not up to date. This piece is largely personal and anecdotal, but I’m willing to bet that plenty of motorists will agree with me.

Six months ago, when the lease on my 2014 Prius was about to expire, I looked into getting in the queue for the Tesla Model 3 (the inexpensive one that Elon Musk is soon to roll out). I’d already checked out charging stations in NYC, thinking I would put down the thousand dollar deposit and wait a year or longer for delivery. (The Model 3 is supposedly starting around $35,000, a middle class car compared with the first versions that are in luxury land). While I had the normal “range anxiety” befitting many new and prospective electric car owners — 250 miles per charge doesn’t quite cut it for a weekend trip where you may worry about conveniently topping off the battery at your destination before driving home. You really need 350-plus miles on a charge, or what you would get on tank of gas from a conventional combustion engine.

Still, this didn’t initially discourage me.

I turned to all the garages in New York City that Tesla listed for charging stations. Manhattan Island was filled with welcoming little icons. When I clicked on those in my neighborhood, it was discouraging to see a lot of negative feedback from Tesla owners. Most of the complaints were in three categories: the garages didn’t really want to charge the cars (you’ll see why later); they tagged on the parking fee (which is usurious in this burg); or the station was out of order. The negative feedback outpaced the positive feedback by about three or four to one.

But I’m a sucker for new technology, and having been in a Tesla and went ga ga, I thought my next car should be forward thinking as far as carbon emissions go (I’d leased two Toyota Prius hybrids for the last six and a half years). So I went for the 2017 Prius Prime, reasonably priced and a plug-in hybrid. I bought it at the end of June, and I’ve only put 350 miles on it so far. Without dwelling on a lengthy review, I already like it a lot better than the two previous ones I’ve had. It’s more powerful; it gets better mileage (55 mph rather than 50 from conventional Priuses); it has a sexy 11.4-inch touch screen (ripped off from Tesla, and yes, you can talk to it); dynamic cruise control, collision avoidance, lane drift warning, and a host of high-tech features. The manual itself is about the same length as “War and Peace,” clocking in at 700-plus pages, and it doesn’t even include the screen functions (a separate manual, albeit much shorter). Woo hoo.

Now for my three-week old gripe, and it’s not about the car itself, but it is significant. While the car came with a full tank of gas, the dealer did not deliver it with a fully charged traction battery (the one that powers the EV-only mode for 25–100 miles per charge, depending on terrain, traffic, and type of driving). In short, the battery was dead. The conventional hybrid system is completely separate. The salesman should have known this (or he did and didn’t say anything) because when I hit the A/C button on the key fob nothing happened, and he was puzzled as well. I had ignorantly assumed that you could charge the EV mode by simply driving. Um, nope. And the advanced air conditioning on a hot day — kind of a nice little perk when its been in a hot parking lot all afternoon — only works on the traction battery.

I had signed up with ChargePoint, an online website that is promoting charge stations around the world, thinking this would at least get me going. Here’s what happened at the first three sites in my neighborhood. The first one, only a few blocks away, shooed me away from the garage saying the charger wasn’t working. He suggested I got to another place about 15 blocks away. I got there and there was a sign indeed with EV charging on the regular pricing schedule (very cheap, too). The attendant had no idea what I was talking about when I asked him if he could plug me in and pointed to the sign. He only parks cars, and I assume he faked not understanding English. The third site, only two blocks from my apartment, kind of hemmed and hawed when I asked for a charge. The attendants moved a few cars around, backed my Prius into the spot where they could plug me in, and just before doing so said I’d have to pay for parking. Four hours would easily be $45. I said no thanks (it only costs $20–23 to gas up a Prius). I called a public garage in Greenwich Village, which had some good reviews from EV owners, but nobody picked up the phone on Saturday afternoon.

Am I discouraged? Yes. Especially, after seeing plug-in parking spaces in Vence and Paris over a recent trip to France. It actually looks kind of futuristic to see all these cars on thoroughfares with hoses stretched from stations right on the sidewalks. All gratis, paid for by the cities.

There is a councilman in Queens who is proposing similar outlets in the five boroughs. So far, it’s gone nowhere. I don’t expect this to happen soon. If it did, the city’s tow trucks would be busier than ever hauling away poaching gas-powered cars, anyway.

Frankly, if I owned a garage in NYC, I would discourage charging as well. Space is at a premium on this island, and having watched the car jocks move four cars around just to accommodate a charge, I can see that there’s no real incentive to do it unless you can tag the EV owner for a big parking bill. Cars in Manhattan are parked like sardines in a can. Why bother doing all this extra work for five or ten bucks?

Right now, electric vehicles are perfect for suburbanites who are commuting 30–35 miles a day (or even more) to work. You come home, you park in your garage, and you plug it in.

But for an urbanite, not so much. At least right now.

Doug Garr

Written by

Author, sometime speechwriter, and general know-it-some.

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