Driving a Mustang EV on I- 5, but charging up at Tesla station. Is that a thing?

I’m Russ Mitchell, climate and transportation reporter, filling in for Sammy Roth this week. He’s out reporting, and taking Thanksgiving Day off. Look for the next Boiling Point on Dec. 3.

Regular readers of Boiling Point know my opinion of the electric vehicle public charging network that runs up and down Interstate 5: Unreliable. Frustrating. Sad.

Broken chargers, software issues, unreliable apps, long lines for service. One trip between my Berkeley home and Los Angeles, which should take about six and a half hours, took nearly 10, with plenty of range anxiety along the way, another took nine.

The EVs themselves were no problem — a Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck and a Cadillac Lyriq, both fine motor vehicles. The problem was the public charging system, financed in part by the state of California, that serves cars not named Tesla.

Chargepoint, Electrify America, EVgo and others can’t match the reliability of Tesla’s Supercharger system. But until recently, non-Tesla drivers couldn’t use Tesla Superchargers, in part because Tesla nozzles don’t fit into non-Tesla cars, and in part because Elon Musk wouldn’t let them.

But things have changed. Recently I made the same trip in a Ford Mustang Mach E equipped with an adapter that allowed me to use Tesla’s Supercharger network. The experience? Smooth and trouble free.

That’s good news for Californians thinking about buying an electric car and not wanting to be seen driving a Tesla, lest they be mistaken as a political supporter of Elon Musk.

Musk’s reasons for cooperation are likely pecuniary. When the federal government said in 2023 it would hand out $7.5 billion to public charger companies, Tesla wanted in on the action. It agreed to open up a percentage of its extensive charging network to other EV makes and models. Automakers, frustrated by the unreliability of the public chargers their customers used, were enthusiastic.

Early this year, Ford was the first to sign up with Tesla and order adapters that could be clicked into the nozzle end of a Tesla charging cable to fit the Ford’s differently configured charging port.

Other automakers followed, with GM, Kia, Hyundai, Nissan, Lucid, Volvo and Polestar announcing similar deals starting this year or early next year. Some like Ford give their adapters away. Some like GM charge about $225. Some of them plan to switch their charging ports over to accommodate the lighter, easier-to-handle Tesla standard in future model years.

As usual with Elon Musk, there are complaints that Tesla is moving slowly on his promises, raising suspicions that he might renege. Musk had announced that not only would Supercharger stations accept adapters, the company would also be providing what it calls a Magic Dock, a charger equipped with its own adapter for non-Tesla cars. Only a handful exist in California, clustered near Sacramento, where the politicians are.

But on to the journey: My wife and I headed out from Berkeley and drove 160 miles to Harris Ranch, the popular I-5 pit stop near Coalinga.

Tesla recently opened a new Supercharger station there, and it’s massive. I counted at least 80 chargers, most of them open and available. And they worked!

I pulled up to one and got out of the car holding the adapter, a bit bigger than my hand. I grabbed the Tesla power cable and snapped the adapter onto the end. Then I plugged it into the Mach E. Effortless.

Ford’s software includes something called Plug & Charge, a new industry standard that allows a driver to plug in the charger and then do nothing else — no fiddling with payment apps, credit cards, it’s all automatic.

My wife and I had lunched on Harris Ranch’s famous sandwiches — I had brisket, she had tri-tip. By the time lunch was done 40 minutes later, the Mach E battery had gone from nearly empty to nearly full. (Even with our other car, an SUV hybrid, we stop at Harris Ranch for lunch, and that figures into the six-and-a-half-hour trip time.

If I had been driving the Mach E Extended Range version, advertised to go 300 miles without a charge, we could have made it all the way to L.A. without another fill-up. Alas, this older model maxed out at 220 miles, so we had to stop once more, this time in Buttonwillow, to top off. But no problem, no crowds at this spot either.

A Tesla Model 3 driver walked over to the Mach E curious about the charging adapter. He introduced himself as Lefteris Padavos, a photographer from the Mount Washington neighborhood in Los Angeles. He told me his next car will not be a Tesla — he said his wife can’t stand Musk — but he’s waiting until the other car makers incorporate the Tesla-standard charging port into their own cars. “That will be a game changer for so many who for one reason or another don’t want to go Tesla.”

He did wonder whether Musk was truly committed to expanding the Supercharger system. While this L.A. trip was hassle free, even Tesla drivers will tell you there’s no charging nirvana. On the way home we stopped at the outlet mall in Livermore to shop for bargains. It was Sunday night before the Veterans Day holiday, and the Tesla station there was jammed, with long lines of cars. It looked more like a scrum than a queue. Most were Teslas, one was a Mach E. Drivers jockeyed for position with facial expressions that said, “I’m losing my mind.” Luckily, we still had enough range to make it home without further charging.

How crowded Tesla stations will become as they become more popular with non-Tesla drivers, and how Tesla drivers might react to that, is yet to be determined.

But a carefree trip in an EV up and down the state on Interstate 5 in a non-Tesla car? That’s a real milestone.

SOLAR FLARE-UP

California considers itself a leader in solar energy development. So many solar farms have been built here now they’re sometimes forced to shut down when supply exceeds demand. When they can’t shut down, California pays other states to take the excess energy off its hands.

Who pays? Not the utilities, not the solar farm operators, not the energy traders and hedge fund managers who use sophisticated computer programs to take advantage of market imbalances. The bill is paid by those who use electric power. In other words, you.

My colleague Melody Petersen exposed this problem in her recent front page story, “Solar power glut boosts California electric bills. Other states reap the benefits.”

Her story raises important questions about how Gov. Gavin Newsom, the agencies he runs, and the regulators whose board members he’s appointed are managing the state’s transition to cleaner energy — and about the role the state’s Legislature plays, for better and for worse.

People complain about inflation, up 17% in the last three years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but in that same period of time, Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison customers have seen their bills rise by 51% — and over 10 years, 110% and 90%, respectively.

That’s not all caused by solar power overbuilding, of course. The California Public Advocates office tags wildfire mitigation as the No. 1 contributor, followed by transmission and distribution investment (in part to pay to connect solar farms to the grid) and rooftop solar incentives.

Wildfires are made worse by an overheating planet, of course, but state government has played an outsized role in failing to mitigate matters early on, when the California Public Utilities Commission ignored warnings about poor utility maintenance presenting catastrophic fire risk. Those interested in that chronicle of woeful mismanagement might want to read the excellent book “California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric — and What It Means for America’s Power Grid,” by Katherine Blunt.

For her solar story, Petersen asked to interview Newsom or someone else in his office, but was turned down. Instead, the governor’s media team issued a prepared statement. The statement’s main point: battery technology is falling in price and scaling up in volume, and eventually will be able to capture and store any solar overflow for later use. If she’d been granted an interview, I’m assuming she’d ask how much that will add to ratepayer bills.

Global warming is real. Global calamity could well result if the problem’s not sufficiently addressed. California contributes more than half a percentage point of the Earth’s greenhouse gas emissions. The state is making a dent by helping to finance the move to cleaner energy.

It will be expensive, but may be worth the monetary cost if current and future generations aren’t to suffer.

But Californians, I believe, want that transition to be competently managed. They want political leaders to be straightforward about the costs. Electricity and gasoline prices are rising as a result of state policy, while Silicon Valley, Wall Street and other big political donors are making bank.

Trust in institutions continues to erode. When political leaders raise consumer prices, try to hide the costs, and refuse to explain themselves to taxpayers and ratepayers, the political winds sometimes stop blowing in their direction.

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