Introduction & Context

Image by: Janne Iivonen

As gas prices skyrocketed across the country these past few months, so has the conversation surrounding electric vehicles (EVs). Congress recently passed the 1.7 trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, with nearly 7.5 billion of it allocated towards building out America’s sparse EV charging network. With this increased buzz surrounding EVs, there is still a lot of hesitation and varied opinion about EV adoption nationwide.

We turned our attention to California specifically for our spatial analysis to visualize the change of EV charging infrastructure over time. Former California governor, Jerry Brown passed a benchmark initiative in 2014 titled the Charge Ahead California, that promised a lofty goal of putting 1 million EVs on the roads within the next ten years, while also providing some economic relief for consumers at the pump. At the time, this type of legistalate was the first in the nation to promote and encourage the purchase and use of electric cars, buses, and trucks on California roads. It is no secret that Califonia has since passed numerous laws, regulations, and intitivates that has spearheaded EV infrastutuere deployment throughout the state. We position Governors Brown initiative as a benchmark for our spatial analysis and explore ev charging stations before and after the passing of the Charge Ahead California.

Additionally, this project explores how EV sentiments have changed over time in the U.S, by web scraping twitter data and extracting search words like “evs, electric vehicles or tesla car”. With all the buzz surrounding Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, we hoped to extract some interesting results and polarizing sentiments about EVs over the past few years.