Ford Lists Top 25 EV Cities, Highlights Pacific Coast Corridor for Future EV Road Trips

With the average price of gasoline reaching almost $4 a gallon nationwide, it’s safe to say a lot of people are curious about the all-electric vehicles (EV) that many automakers have been showing off lately.

Still, it’s hard to justify the $100,000-plus sticker price for a Tesla Roadster or the $33,000 price of a Nissan Leaf if the only EV charging station for hundreds of miles is in your own garage.

So Dearborn, MI-based Ford Motor, which plans to roll out its Focus EV later this year, has been studying which U.S. cities have gotten the farthest down the road, in terms of developing the infrastructure needed to support EVs. The company has listed what it calls the 25 “most electric vehicle-ready cities in the U.S.,” based on Ford’s own research and available public information.

While no metropolis is really EV ready today, the study notes the Interstate 5 corridor that runs from Seattle through Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to San Diego “is probably the most advanced in terms of planning for EVs,” according to Mike Tinskey, Ford’s manager of global vehicle electrification and infrastructure. That’s not a green light for EV owners to begin planning road trips this Memorial Day weekend, but such trips might be possible in another year or two.

The corridor stands out largely because of the “EV Project,” a modern-day federal public works project made possible by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The U.S. Department of Energy is providing almost $115 million to install more than 14,000 commercial and residential EV charging stations in 18 major cities—including eight along the I-5 corridor. With matching funds from utilities, automakers, and other companies, total funding for the EV Project is about $230 million, which is intended to build the charging stations and other infrastructure needed to support at least 8,300 EVs.

San Francisco-based Ecotality, which is overseeing the EV Project, said last week it had installed 1,000 of its Blink Level 2 residential charging stations so far, passing a significant milestone in the deployment of plug-in vehicle chargers. A spokeswoman says most of the charging stations installed so far have been in residential units, but the company plans to accelerate the installation of publicly available charging stations in coming weeks.

It’s also worth noting that Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced earlier this week that the Obama Administration plans to buy 101 Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrids and 15 all-electric vehicles, the government’s first EV purchase, and to install

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.