Sustainable Tip: A Tale of Two Chargers

Associated has a new addition: our first Electric Vehicle! Our Sustainability Manager, Jay Ashworth, took it out for a test trip last weekend and shared his experience below:

A Tale of Two Chargers; Our Company's First Electric Vehicle!

New technologies are not always intuitive and can be great conversation starters or laughing points! 

There was no exception when we received our first electric vehicle. There is a story circulating of someone thinking the battery was dead and recruited help in pushing it. They later found out you have to push the brake to start the vehicle. 

My ignorance came the day before a 215km road trip to Seattle. We are waiting for our level 2 charging station to be installed and there was only 60km range left. I naively thought that I could just plug into a 110v outlet overnight to get by. Then I searched that it takes 2.5 days to charge a vehicle this way!

The search was on, I knew there were supercharging stations somewhere. After a quick search, I was heading down to get juiced up. After 40 minutes of free charging, I was back up to 80% and ready to make the border crossing the next morning. This was to be my first long-distance road trip in an electric vehicle. My partner came along for moral support, and the experience couldn't have been more enjoyable!

There are plenty of charging stations along the way and we cruised along to a workshop which coincidentally was about Regenerative Business. I would smile every time I went down a hill and cranked up the "regenerative braking" to gain a couple of kilometers back.

We are so happy with our new Electric Vehicle; it has been a great discussion point for our employees, customers, and suppliers. We will make additions to our electric fleet in the future and would highly encourage other companies to take advantage of the many incentives available. 

Currently, the province of British Columbia and Canadian federal government provide a combined $8,000 in incentives for electric vehicles. BC Hydro offers an additional $2,000 rebate per charging station for companies. If you can manage it, now is the time!