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I tasted the future of EV charging and it was delicious.

Electrify America’s newest, indoor charging concept reimagines the electric vehicle experience for the better. And I love it.

Carter Gibson
8 min readFeb 9, 2024
Rivian R1T charging inside of EA’s latest charging concept, a coverted auto garage with many chargers and lougnes

Earlier this week I drove from Breckenridge back to San Francisco over the course of two days. Earlier this month, I did the same drive but in the other direction. The weather and traffic was variable—as was the quality of the innumerable podcasts I listened to—but there was one constant: I cursed Electrify America the whole way.

To be clear, EA got me where I needed to go. I never once wasn’t able to charge and, while one charger did break the chip on my credit card (note: how this even happened I will never know), I didn’t experience the mass outages or broken chargers EA is infamous for. Even though there were only four fast chargers every 150mi or so — an unnerving fact even if you have the utmost confidence in “the system”—I didn’t have to wait and I didn’t get stranded.

However, I very quickly grew tired of Walmart parking lots, getting soaked in the rain, or parking at the end of a massive parking lot where the chargers were. At one point near Tahoe I got caught in a snowstorm. Other times while charging I sat in my Rivian R1T to do work, hotspotting off my phone and propping my laptop…

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Carter Gibson
Carter Gibson

Written by Carter Gibson

Community Management strategist & Program Manager | Internal Community Programs Lead @ Google | Excitable Geek | Lover of spectacle | I write about my passions

Responses (115)

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You used words like "luxury charging", "positively utopian"...my spidey senses are tingling...hard!
That is a big building, which is costly. Not to mention recurring costs for maintenance, repairs, security, janitorial services, taxes, insurance…

If there was infrastructure like this all over the country, even out in the boonies on I40 or I 10 I would for sures think about getting a used EV. Never ever a new car for me in my lifetime. Way out of my SSA limited budget. Bought a few new cars…

This center is a thoughtful contribution that recognizes charging does take time and that you don’t always want to go into Walmart. It doesn’t try to hide that, yeah, sometimes you just...

THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS times a million! I got genuinely giddy reading this because I love my electric car, but I just can't understand why these infrastructure companies have kept trying to treat charging like a gas station - it's much closer to a…