Everyone has their own type of learning style that works best for them, and mine just happens to be the hands-on kind. As a new team member of Floshare, my very first assignment was to take one of the 2020 Chevy Bolts home with me to drive around for at least a week. The purpose of this was to help me experience the service that our members are getting when they reserve a car, so I got to learn a lot about electric vehicles and the lifestyle that comes with using them.

The day I picked up the car from one of the stations in Rochester, I drove it home, to the gym, and to the movies. The rides were smooth, the interior was sleek, and the sound of the speakers was solid. During my time spent in the theater, the darkness of night had crept up on the city. I’m not a big fan of driving at night for this very reason, so I was a bit nervous. However, after I hopped back in the car, the headlights came on automatically, brightly illuminating just about everything my vision was capable of seeing in the distance. Since I’m not used to seeing so well in the car at night, I checked the dashboard a few times, thinking the high-beams must have been turned on. I was pleasantly mistaken.

Another thing I appreciated was the overall quietness of the car. I genuinely thought something was wrong when I first turned it off and the radio was still playing-an assumption that occurred due to the fact that there’s hardly any sound when the vehicle is running. In my moment of humility, I Googled how to turn off the car, only to realize that I already had. The secret is opening the car door afterwards.

Another huge difference between my little Toyota Yaris and the Chevy Bolt is just how efficiently the electric car accelerates. I never thought I’d say this, but getting stuck at red lights was fun. As soon as the light would turn green, I had no problem taking off at a prompt pace. With 200 horsepower, nearly twice as much as my car, the Bolt speeds up 0-60 in just 6.5 seconds; truly living up to its name.

Despite the enjoyment I got out of my week, new challenges arose that I had never dealt with before. I happened to be busy almost all day every day that I had the car, in the more desolate parts of the outer Rochester area. I had no trouble using the PlugShare app to find the nearest charging stations, but they were all at least ten minutes out of the way from wherever I needed to be. Because of this, I kept pushing off going to one of them to charge the car, leading me to have anxiety that could have been avoided.

One week after receiving the EV, I finally took the car to my local library and plugged it into one of the two charging stations in the parking lot. I spent almost an hour inside getting some work done, but after leaving the building, I noticed the car did not charge as much as I had hoped. I really should have figured that would happen and prepared for it, considering how long I had gone without charging the vehicle at all.

I ended up feeling so silly when I drove the car to work the next day with a quickly draining battery during my 23 minute commute. I feared there was a chance I’d end up broken down on the road somewhere. Returning the car later that day felt like a race against the clock, as the battery had fallen out of the positive green zone and into the warning orange. Surprisingly, I made it to the home station without issue, and I thanked my lucky stars that I would not be needing a tow truck to rescue me. I learned that day just how crucial it is to make sure the vehicles get frequent chances to charge.

Since I know life happens, and I’m likely not the only one who has gone through something like this, I think it would be a great idea to add more EV charging stations around Rochester. There are already many scattered throughout downtown, but it would be helpful to add more to the suburbs and surrounding parts of the city. Floshare members should be able to enjoy their trips without having any worry during their journeys.

I’ve come to the conclusion based on my one week of electric car ownership that if you can manage to go to a charging station often enough, and you want to reduce your carbon footprint, then switching to electric is 100% worth the potential obstacles. I believe the problems I ran into will not last for long. As we invest into improving electric cars and building more charging stations over the next few years, the experience of driving electric will get better for everyone. It will also feel so valuable once we start to really see the beneficial impacts of our contributions on the Earth. I had some doubts before, but after my time spent utilizing one of these environmentally friendly vehicles, I’m very excited to see more people switching over from gas to electric as EVs continue to develop.