Jon Guzik: Electric Vehicle's future in California
Q&A with Borrow’s Founder
Welcome to the first of many Q&A’s with Borrow’s founder, Jon Alain Guzik. Jon sat down with us to talk about the present and future of electric vehicles in Los Angeles, where Borrow is based.
Aside from founding Borrow, Jon is a longtime journalist and serial entrepreneur in the media and automotive spaces as well as an advisor and angel investor to quite a few startups and companies.
If you’d like a topic addressed in future Q&A’s or just want to talk about what we’re doing here at Borrow, shoot us an email (BLOG@JOINBORROW.COM)
Where are we now with EV usability in Los Angeles?
EV usability in Los Angeles is almost, almost there and it all comes down to charging as there are a lot more places to charge your car, which is great as there are a lot more electric cars on the road and a lot more people thinking about EVs.
There’s an ease of use with EVs in LA that wasn’t there in the past. You can just basically charge your car almost anywhere in town and that’s way different than even a few years ago. There used to be a really big problem of “Where do I charge my car?”, “Am I going to run out of charge?”, “What am I going to do?”
People had a lot of range anxiety and that range anxiety seems to have been eased by the fact that there’s a lot more charging stations — especially of the 6.6 kw variety.
Case in point, there’s a great charging station right by my office — about a mile and a half away. It’s a ChargePoint station run by the city of West Hollywood. It’s $1.50 per hour for 6.6 KWs of charging power. Usually I’ll take my dog Rosie with me to work (ed. Note: Rosie is the world’s cutest Goldendoodle), so I’ll charge my car and take my dog for a 45 minute long walk. That gives me about 15 miles of charge on my car for about a buck or so. It’s really fantastic.
Look at it this way: The more people realize that everywhere is your gas station — you can charge your car at your house, you can charge your car on the go, you can charge your car at the mall — it’s a different way to think about EVs and to think about how useful they are in Los Angeles in the long run.
Obviously there’s a lot of good things happening, like you said. But where can we improve?
So the regular level two charging, those 6.6 kw charging stations, they’re popping up everywhere. But the hard thing is to get a really good DC fast charge, which means your car goes from 0-80 percent of charge in 25 minutes or so. Most of those stations are buried in the deep dark depths of parking lots, usually at shopping centers or malls. I was looking through Twitter the other day and a woman said “I was trying to DC fast charge my car. Is there any way we don’t have to put all of these DC fast charging stations in the level 4 of a parking spot in a mall? I don’t feel safe.''
I agree with her, it’s a bad user experience. These stations need to be a more front and center. We need to make it that if you want to fast charge your car, you don’t have to go to a mall. Those stations need to pop up in more accessible and safer locations.
Pricing is flexible on these too. You can charge a little more if it’s a better location, a little less if it’s an out of the way location. If you really want to get a lot more people using DC fast charging stations put them in better locations.
You’re an EV owner. You’ve pointed out a couple of perks already, what’s the best part about driving an EV around LA?
It’s the silence of driving an EV. I’m driving a BMW i3 right now. The nice thing about Borrow is that we’ve got a fleet of about 80 cars, and if there’s something in the garage I haven’t driven, I’ll take one for a long drive or take one for a few days. We have the Kia Soul EV, the Hyundai Ioniq EV, the Fiat 500E, BMW i3s, Smart EVs, the Tesla Model S and the Nissan Leaf.
My commute is about 3, 3.5 miles, depending on which way I go from my house to the office and what I like most is the quiet and the solitude of being in the car and that’s a through line with all of the EVs in our fleet.
Most of the time, I’ll just drive around without turning on any music or a podcast. I’ll just kinda listen to the road and quietness of the EV. If you think about how loud a city is, how there’s such a cacophony of noises, the nice thing about having an EV is that it’s a respite from all those noises — especially if you are used to the grumble of an engine or the sound of a transmission clunking. EVs are quiet and silent and it makes for a very peaceful drive.
Moving on, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a stimulus package 2-3 weeks ago. And he committed about $1.5 billion to EV growth. How will that improve not only EV quality but also the usability of EVs in LA and California at large?
It’s a good start. A billion and a half dollars is a lot of money but these cars cost a lot of money. Getting gas cars off the road costs a lot of money. Building infrastructure, especially equitable infrastructure in areas that don’t have it — like communities of concern — is an expensive proposition. But anything that puts more electric cars on the road, anything that reduces greenhouse gas emissions, anything that lends itself to the decarbonization of the supply chain and the decarbonization of the daily commute is a big win to me.
At Borrow, our goal is to put more EVs on the road, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to decarbonize the daily commute and we support and we applaud Gov. Newsom for making this first step. Anything that makes driving more ecological and more emissions free and cleaner and quieter is something we wholeheartedly support. So, I can’t wait to see the final version of what that package says. I can’t wait to see what the federal government does for the clean tech economy too, that’s coming really soon.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
By Tom Hindle
Borrow is an electric vehicle subscription company with one goal: to make driving an EV as simple and accessible as possible. Borrow is the only electric vehicle subscription service of its kind with a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonizing the everyday drive.