Dear fellow car enthusiasts, firstly a Happy New Year, I sincerely hope that 2025 will be a healthy and successful year for you all! That’s certainly not what’s happening in LA as I write this and my thoughts are with any of you who may be directly or indirectly affected, sincerely hoping the fires get under control soon and that 2025 improves from there!

As we set off on a new year in the wonderful world of cars, I’m thinking about a few changes to the format of the blog that you may discover during the year. One thing you’ll see me do is become a bit more flexible in the format and perhaps also the regularity of posts. The idea is not to drive less, but rather to do so in a variation of long and short, such as to be able to better “seize the moment” when for once, I get my phone up quickly enough to catch that wonderful car just passing. We’ll see how the year develops, but before that, we’ll start it off in the spirit of what we’re seeing in various areas right now and that you could call reality catching up. In this case, it’s yet another illustration of the wonders of electric mobility, but here in the form of an example I had trouble believing myself.

The non-Swedes among you will most probably never have heard of Malung, an unspectacular small town in the middle of the country. That would probably go for many Swedes as well if it weren’t for the fact that it’s located about 350 km north of Stockholm, on the way to some of Sweden’s leading ski resorts. 350 km is obviously close to the true (not claimed) range of EV’s with large battery packs in winter (best case really, since there’s no motorway leading to Malung and the traffic typically rolls at 80-90 km/h, otherwise they wouldn’t even get this far), and what the picture below shows is a part of the very long waiting line to one of Malung’s two Tesla charging stations last weekend.

What you can’t see from the picture is on one hand the full length of the line (you’ll have to resort to this link for that, scrolling down a bit in the article) but also that the outside temperature was -20C, and that at one point more than 150 cars were waiting up to 3-4 hours. The issue is not only that the EV range falls even quicker at -20C, but also that EV’s don’t heat up in the same way as an ICE does, meaning the interior cools down much quicker. So in other words, you had dozens of families waiting for hours in sub-zero temperatures to charge their Tesla. What a pleasant way to start or end your vacation!

I can easily imagine some “why on earth did you say we should buy an EV??” going in that line in the cold, but If you think this has led to a big re-think on electric mobility in Sweden and the realisation that EV’s may have their place, but not as a viable transportation for long winter journeys, then think again. Tesla has an ongoing conflict with a labour union in the country, so the debate is instead focused on the company’s unwillingness to come to an agreement with the union, and that being the cause of the issue. To put this in context, around 10.000 people live in Malung, so conflict or not, I think it’s rather improbable that Tesla would build another few charging stations in a small city in Sweden for a few hundred cars when demand is at its peek, three-four weeks per year, don’t you?

The issue is of course another. If it took 30 minutes to fill up an ICE and you needed to do so every 350 km, then we’d see lines at petrol stations as well during the holidays. This is thus another fundamental downside of EV’s, to add to an already long list. This particular weekend is one of a handful of similar outliers per year in terms of peak demand, but they will continue to happen, and as the number of EV’s increase, charging stations will not do so exponentially, as that is not economical. In other words, expect waiting times to become worse, not better.

The local who filmed this whole thing didn’t queue up with the rest as he drives a diesel and according to the interview in the article, has no plans to change to an EV anytime soon. The title of the article reads “the kids are cold”. I would think that goes for the driver’s love of the recently acquired Teslas as well…