As Biden’s Transportation Secretary, it should be no surprise that Pete Buttigieg is all for electric vehicles. Neither should it shock you that he’s willing to spend millions of your hard-earned money on fixing the oh-so-many problems with them.
If you’re anything like me, you think EVs aren’t necessarily a bad idea. However, some issues with them clearly make a massive switch from fossil fuel next to impossible and definitely disastrous at this point.
One of those is that charging stations are 1) not all that reliable and 2) not all that prevalent yet.
In fact, this is something that even Mayor Pete has realized recently.
As he told The Wall Street Journal, he was recently trying to charge his hybrid minivan at a park in town. But the only available charger wasn’t working.
I know, the horror.
And so, he’s since decided that the US government should take about $100 million in taxpayer dollars and put it towards making EV charging stations more reliable.
According to the plan, the first step will be to replace thousands of old or broken chargers with new and working ones if they can’t be fixed. The next will be to put more chargers throughout the nation.
Now, to be sure, if EVs are going to overtake the transportation industry, this whole lack of working chargers is definitely a problem that needs to be fixed. As a study taken in August by J.D. Power found, about one in five charging stations don’t actually work.
And that’s when you can even find a charging station. A July report by WILX-TV in Michigan reported that most of the country is vastly without charging stations, particularly in more rural areas.
Naturally, this means that working chargers are few and far between, and that statistic will need to change if fossil fuels are to be nixed eventually.
Buttigieg, as a proud supporter of a gas-free world, clearly wants to put as much effort and your money into this as possible.
