Electric vehicle charging infrastructure has a long way to go, and one Redditor showed just how bad things can be with a story and photos in r/BadDesign.
"Worst EV charger placement I've experienced," they wrote. "Went to a winery and they had an EV charger placed in front of a handicap parking spot. Unfortunately, the EV parking spot is further away than the length of the cable so you have no choice but to park in the handicap walkway if you're an EV."
It sounds like the situation couldn't get worse, but the poster said this was in a huge parking lot, meaning the accessible parking spot or charging station could have been located elsewhere.
The Biden-Harris administration's focus on installing EV chargers has doubled the number of publicly available spots to nearly 200,000, with 1,000 being added every week, but it's not even close to the promised total of 500,000 new chargers (though the goal was to do that by 2030, and the timeline has been moved up to 2026).
EVs help reduce the amount of heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere, keeping planet-warming pollution to a minimum and boosting our health. They can also save consumers money, as there are tax credits available for those purchasing new or used EVs. The vehicles cost about as much as internal combustion engine cars, SUVs, and trucks, but they don't require expensive gasoline or maintenance.
Some EVs can even power your home during an outage, and battery technology is improving to bring down prices and pump up travel ranges.
That's all helping to make EVs gradually more popular than ever despite demand not quite meeting the supply some automakers expected — and EV use is still driving up demand for chargers, too.
A comment on the post offered an equally frustrating tale about the other side of the coin.
"I had the opposite (sorta) problem. The last handicap spot in a lot of a very large store had an EV charger," the user wrote. "I parked there with my mom's tag while I pushed her around the store in a wheelchair. Luckily, there was no damage or a ticket when we came back."
Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
Cool Picks
