I received this guest post from one of my partners in government. Yvonne Hao is the Secretary of the Executive Office of Economic Development. She has had more than 25 years of executive business experience as a senior executive, including as Co-founder, Advisor, and Managing Director at investment firm Cove Hill Partners and as an Operating Partner at Pillar Ventures. She is also an EV owner and shared her most recent experiences and I look forward to working with her to fix it:

Hello Rep Roy! I am so grateful for you for many reasons, and one of them is this web site. This range anxiety is real!!! And my husband and I are glad that we are not alone!!!

Our old car died last year, and we had to get a new car. We looked at hybrids, but it seemed not that helpful to get a car that only had 30 or 40 miles of electric range. And we wanted to be good for the environment and to be leading on this issue. So we got an all electric vehicle. We had no idea of the challenges.

We live in Cambridge, and had been told that there should be no issues using the local city electric chargers in our neighborhood, so we would not need to install a charger. And we have chargers at our parking lot at the state house, so I could also charge when Im there.

The challenge with all of these chargers is that they are always always always full! And the charging is very slow, so we struggle to have the car charged just from being at home or at work.

The other challenge has been that even when it’s charged, the mileage the car shows is not the actual range. When it’s cold, or depending on conditions, the charge is used up much quicker.

In my job, I have to drive all over the state, and even with a full charge that should definitely be enough…there have been very very very stressful moments on days when I’m at an event in Lowell, and then have to drive to Bridgewater, and then visit a company in Waltham, and then have to drive back to the state house…and there’s just not enough charge.

And, it’s not reliable to find chargers at any of these places. Even when the app shows there are chargers, many times they are full…or even when they are empty, many of them require you to be an employee, so I can’t access them. And it’s still slow!

My husband has also had difficult experiences where he’s driving from Boston to our place in Western MA, and the car definitely shows enough miles to get there…but then, it depletes at a faster rate, and he’s stuck trying to find a charger along the way…and again it’s so slow, so he has to wait there forever. One time, he slept in the car at night while it charged somewhere in Central MA at a random charger he found. Definitely not ideal or that safe.

Why can’t we get a system of reliable chargers consistently throughout our state? We are not that big of a state, and we are trying to lead on fighting climate change!

It has now gotten to the point that we deeply regret buying an electric car. I only drive our other car- the gas guzzler- for work, as it is reliable and much less stressful, and I know I can always get to a gas station if we get stuck. It’s sad that this is the case.

I hope we can work together to fix this, at least in Massachusetts. Thank you!!!