California EV Driver Winds Up on Front Page of Rural Montana Newspaper for Plugging in Car Without Permission
Editor’s Note: Our readers responded strongly to this story when it originally ran; we’re reposting it here in case you missed it.
If you’ve ended up on the front page of the local newspaper, you’ve probably either done something really good or really bad.
For Chad Lauterbach, the answer is the latter — although one might concede it was a slow news day in Carter County, Montana, when he managed to do it.
Lauterbach is, according to the online news site the Montana Free Press, “a nationally prominent taxidermist.” (Their words, not mine; you could attach any name to the words “nationally prominent taxidermist,” including Carrot Top’s, and I’d have no grounds to argue with you.)
The stuffing of animals is apparently a job that requires a lot of off-road work, because the Los Angeles-based Lauterbach’s main vehicle is a gas-guzzling 1989 Toyota Land Cruiser, which gets 10 miles per gallon.
Thus, when he was invited to a dinosaur festival at the Carter County Museum in the county seat of Ekalaka, population roughly 400, he and girlfriend Allis Markham thought they’d take his Tesla Model Y instead to save on gas money.
This turned out to be a huge mistake. While the Model Y is indeed efficient, it also doesn’t run directly on dinosaur juice and getting power into the car fast isn’t as easy as just taking it to the corner gas station.
According to United States Department of Agriculture data, Carter County is in one of the most remote parts of the United States. Thus, charging a Tesla via a Level 2 or Level 3 fast-charger is likely to be out of the question.
It’s bad enough that, according to Lauterbach, the car tried to warn the couple that they were heading into what’s known as a “charging desert” on their way up from Gillette, Wyoming.
“It kept throwing warnings and red banners and stuff,” Lauterbach said, according to the Montana Free Press. “It was trying to protect me from doing something stupid.”
Lauterbach apparently declined this protection: “If push came to shove, Lauterbach said, he figured he’d be able to plug the car into a standard 120-volt outlet in someone’s garage, even though charging that way would have taken days,” the Montana Free Press reported.
Well, Lauterbach thought it was his lucky day — as he got into town, he found an electrical outlet attached to a utility pole on Main Street that had been left unlocked.
“It was just sitting there, so I plugged in,” he said, according to the Free Press. He did consult with the museum director about the move after his girlfriend, not incorrectly, thought locals might perceive that he was “just some jerk from California, doing what jerks from California do,” according to the Free Press.
However, he thought, after the consultation, that things would be OK. Turns out, not so much:
A Los Angeles couple, a Tesla Model Y and an unattended utility outlet energized the 400-person eastern Montana town’s gossip mill last week. #mtnews https://t.co/9IUlobEdkL
— Montana Free Press (@mtfreepress) July 27, 2023
“A UEV (unidentified electric vehicle) was spotted plugged into one of the power poles on Main Street in Ekalaka Tuesday afternoon,” read the July 21 front page of the weekly newspaper The Ekalaka Eagle.
“As of press time on Wednesday, it was unknown whether or not the owner of the vehicle payed [sic] for the electricity used. The sighting could perhaps be the very first electric vehicle charging station in town.”
According to Lauterbach, one of the locals in a Subaru told him to check the front page of the paper — and there he was!
To be fair, all’s well that mostly ends well. Markham said she visited the local power co-op and told them she was “here to pay for the crimes of the UEV,” where the staff had a hearty laugh and told her not to worry about it.
A bit of negotiating and they ended up paying $60 for access to the charger on Main Street — which, as it turns out, is mostly used for bands and vendors during town events. It was left unlocked between events, said Tye Williams, manager of the co-op.
As for a real charger for EVs in Ekalaka? The Montana Free Press described Lauterbach as “bullish” on the prospect. However, the manager of the co-op didn’t sound that way, even though he acknowledged the town was “going to have to do something in the next decade, or some amount of time.”
However, he said the state’s grant money for fast chargers likely wasn’t going to be spent on small towns that are a long ways from anywhere.
This is a fun human interest story that highlights a more serious problem: President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to implement national fuel economy standards that would effectively make 67 percent of new vehicle sales zero-emission by 2032, according to NPR.
That means small towns and rural areas are going to increasingly be left behind — and even in large conurbations where there’s been significant uptake of EVs, like California’s Bay Area, there are still problems with the public fast-charging system as it is.
Are we to expect that America can overhaul how it fills up its vehicles in less than 10 years? Given that the most reasonable way to make cars, trucks and SUVs zero-emission is to make them electric, are we going to put the future in the hands of a technology where a vehicle’s range can drop by a quarter if it has a full payload, or up to 40 percent in cold weather?
Because, make no mistake, that’s the ask from the federal government. In order to appease the Greta Thunbergs of the world, privileged sorts who have managed to schedule their lives so that major travel can be done via sailboat, we’re going to tell the residents of all America’s Ekalakas to pony up for fast chargers and/or have everyone who wants to slow-charge their Tesla haggle things out down at the electric co-op.
Mind you, Mr. Lauterbach probably should have wised up and taken the Land Cruiser; while he only paid $300 total in electricity from Los Angeles to Ekalaka and back, he ended up with a honking bill in the town itself and a front-page newspaper story, to boot. I’ve never done animal-stuffing as a career, but I’m assuming that being a “nationally renowned taxidermist” means you bring home SUV gas money, at the very least.
At least he found a place to charge it, which he wouldn’t have had otherwise, at least publicly. Furthermore, gas-guzzler though it may be, the Land Cruiser isn’t going to warn you that you’re heading into a “gas desert.” That’s because you’re not going to head into one unless you really try.
As it turns out, it’s a regular enough problem for the Tesla that it had to display big, blaring warnings for Lauterbach not to do it — much too late for him to turn back, alas.
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