The long queues of electric cars waiting their turn, with stops of more than two hours, to plug into a Tesla supercharge point seen this Easter in Albacete or Conca are the worst propaganda for this emerging automotive sector. Mainly among those drivers prone to suffering from what is known as range anxiety or range anxiety, which is nothing more than the fear of running out of battery. A fear, as the surveys indicate, expressed by many of the drivers who have considered switching to an electric vehicle. It’s all based on a belief – still widespread today, despite the advances in the industry – about a lack of charging points or the insufficient capacity of batteries for long journeys.
So photos of cars, mostly Tesla-branded, lined up and stopped at charging stations have done this business a disservice. These scenes went viral on social networks with messages that invited nothing less than to imagine those drivers stuck hours later on the road, in the middle of Easter, due to the impossibility of recharging the batteries. And the obligatory question. Is there a general problem with the electric charging of these vehicles or are the photos just the reflection of a particular moment in a few days of a lot of mobility?
The answers are disparate. If you pay attention to some of the messages – the most belligerent – published on the networks by drivers stuck in those stations, you might think that there are hundreds of charging points missing in Spain, that many exits from the stations are inoperative or that the power in the electricity dispensers is usually less than advertised, which makes the load last forever.
On the contrary, from the Business Association for the Development and Promotion of Electric Mobility (Aedive) it is affirmed, in relation to what happened in Conca or Albacete, that “there was no such collapse due to lack of charging points, but poor planning on the part of some electric vehicle users, in a traffic operation on a holiday, who were stupid to go to charge at a station that was saturated, even though there were other charging points high-power recharging nearby along the N-3 and without queuing problems”.
This is confirmed by the director general of this employers’ association, Arturo Pérez de Lucia, who does not hide his strangeness (not to say discomfort) by the information that has spread through the networks, “when the vehicle of the people who complained (the most of them are Tesla) allows the driver to know dynamically the state of use of the supercharger network, and therefore could know before arriving at the station if it was jammed and opt for another point”.
Gustavo Ruiz de Villa, industrial engineer, is one of the Tesla drivers who uploaded the photo accompanying this information to X, taken last Saturday at a station in Albacete. It was his turn to wait after the supercharge point collapsed. Ruiz de Villa affirmed yesterday in La Vanguardia that his intention when he published that scene “was not to imply that there is widespread chaos and collapse when recharging the batteries”, as was implied in dozens of messages that then commented on the photos. Yes, there were, this Holy Week, “problems at these stations in Conca and Albacete – he admits – but this is not the norm”. This engineer wanted to alert Tesla that in those stations, already old, “these collapses can occur, if it is not guaranteed that all the outputs work and that the charging power is not distributed between different electrical suppliers when they are all plugged in “. And nothing more, he insists.
Ruiz de Villa is, however, more critical when reporting that “at the moment there are charging points in Spain ready to operate, but they are not operational due to bureaucratic obstacles”. He repeats that the administrations, which are so fond of boasting about this clean mobility, “must guarantee, after the announcements, the largest possible supply of charging points”.
Regarding autonomy anxiety, this driver with 150,000 kilometers with Tesla in the last 7 years does not deny that it exists, but he assures that this “evil” is cured immediately when “the reliability of the batteries is checked and you learn to schedule top-ups on long trips”. And he confesses that he “would never go back to the thermal car”.
Arturo Pérez de Lucia affirms, on this subject, that “the most worrying problem in Spain, around electric mobility, is not the anxiety of autonomy, but the ignorance and misinformation surrounding the reality of the electric vehicle and the its ecosystem”. Here, he acknowledges, there is still a lot of work to be done.
And about the queues that could be generated by an offer at a specific point with reductions in the cost of electricity, the general manager of Aedive remembers that “this also happens at cheap gas stations, but these waits are not news” .
