We got home Friday night after a seven day tour of Eastern Oregon in the van. It was superb, exceeding our expectations every day thanks to perfect mild fall weather, Oregon’s endless tapestry of mountains, deserts, lakes, and hot springs, and the comforts of the Promaster van. I will try to get up a bit of a travelogue in the next few days; today I was pretty tied up cleaning out a layer of very fine dust that accumulated on every surface in the van thanks to many miles of back country dirt roads.
But I had to share this with you, which occurred on our first morning after a serene night somewhere off a forest road in the Ochoco mountains, in Central Oregon. We spotted the charming little hamlet of Mitchell on the other side of a stream off highway 26, and decided to pull in and stretch our legs. I noticed (but failed to shoot) the former gas station, which was now a rock shop. And a few more buildings down, I spotted this little…whole in the wall, and took a shot. I was framing my shot and didn’t even notice the Tesla sign, which Stephanie pointed out. What the…? A joke, surely. But then I walked around to the side of the building…
There on a recently built kiosk were a pair of chargers. For real?
Yes, for real. And I specifically noted the junction box and conduit that fed them. Wow; I would never have expected this.
Curiously, I now went to Tesla’s charging location map, and Mitchell (in the center of this screen shot) does not show up as a destination charger location. These are lower power charging station being installed in an ever larger number of hotels and such. More mystery. But there it is, and it’s not a fake.
Looks like that’s the brand new meter box that feeds it too, via an underground conduit.
And I did notice this Halloween decoration in front of the Tiger Town Brewery, which is clearly catering to visitors from the Bend area, about 85 miles to the east. So maybe the charging station is an effort to cater to the rapidly growing number of Teslas to be seen in upscale Bend. In fact, the only other car we saw at one trail head up on Mt. Paulina on our last trip was a dusty Tesla. Offer them juice, and they will come, hopefully.
As a parting shot, here’s the heart of Mitchell, about four buildings up from the Whole In The Wall.
Elon’s warped sense of humor strikes again….
Definitely a shocking find.
Excellent material for an Easter Egg hunt…find the Tesla charger in each town during a cross country trip.
The local regional shopping mall in my Ontario town installed Tesla charging stations over the summer. There are 19 of them. I didn’t think they’d get much use but I have been surprised to see quite a lot of people stopping there to charge. There are more Teslas on the road in Ontario than I imagined. I suppose it makes sense since we’re about halfway between Toronto and Montreal.
Musk is his own worst enemy. He should take his million$ and disappear to a tropical island, never to be seen or heard from again. We’d all be better off IMO.
Sorry, but how is introducing totally new automotive and ground breaking rocket technology a bad thing?
Just creating a car company from scratch is an amazing accomplishment.
Wow, I thought the one I saw in Tonopah, Nevada a few years ago was out of place, but Tonopah is a veritable metropolis (pop 2500) compared to Mitchell.
We stayed at the Skyhook Motel in Mitchell last year when we visited the John Day Fossil Beds. It’s an old and worn out but charming little town.
Electric power is practically everywhere with a paved road in the US, not something you can say about gasoline.
This is very cool to see.
I grew up in the country in Southeastern Ontario. We had engineers and managers who lived in the region, who commuted several hours a day to jobs at place like the National Research Council in Ottawa, or Atomic Energy of Canada in Chalk River. Some of these people being exposed daily to advanced technologies and progressive science were among the first in the area to install solar panels on their homes in the 1970s, insulate their homes to the latest standards, or build solar farms. In a region otherwise very isolated geographically, typically dominated by farms and forest.
Often, this can be influenced by one, two, or a small handful of progressive individuals who live in the area. I suspect if the charging station wasn’t there, it wouldn’t necessarily mean a gas station would ever be their either.
I have no idea, I’m just speculating that a local resident(s) spearheaded this installation. If a corporation the size of Tesla felt there was enough customers to rationalize a remote charging station, they would have built it to their specs, including branding. There certainly would never be a homemade sign for their brand. 🙂
I agree. Looks like they’re off-the-shelf Level 2 Tesla Wall Connectors. With a homemade sign and not showing up on the Tesla map, I think it’s a DIY, not corporate, charging station. I didn’t see it when we were there last year.
Maybe somebody at Tesla will see this post and send them a real sign. Although the homemade sign is pretty charming.
So Whole in theWall pays for the electricity to charge your Tesla? Well, i guess it’s an interesting approach for encouraging some well-heeled travelers to drop by your little “curiosities” shack…
Maybe there’s a switch inside the shop….
I’m going to guess that the proprietor of ‘Hole in the Wall’ drives a Tesla.
I’ve seen these kinds of quasi-public EV charger installations before, and my theory is that someone figured out a way to get a big incentive (likely a state or federal income tax break) if they install a ‘public’ charge station at their place of business. So, they obtain an EV (surely a lease) and get a free charger for it. The tell-tale on this one is the hand-written TESLA sign. I’m sure if it had been a complete factory-authorized installation, there would have been a much more professional sign. And I seriously doubt Tesla would have installed one in the booming metropolis of Mitchell, OR. But I would imagine Tesla ‘did’ provide the charger.
I actually saw a similar situation at a local lawyer’s office, except the charger was shrink wrapped with signs saying it was inoperable. That’s the trade-off when the lease of the EV runs out and the location now has a public charger they don’t need and certainly don’t want people with their EVs showing up and plugging-in.
The catch is who gets to use the charger, and at what price. The people who had the charger installed probably aren’t required to do any kind of significant advertising about its availability and, if anyone asks to use the charger, I guess they could tell them just about anything.
Considering the dilapidated appearance of the business, I could even believe that someone bought the place as a front for the sole purpose of justifying the charger installation.
Chargers for electric vehicles are springing up in unlikely places here too the one on hwy 5 just north of the Mohaka bridge is one its the only thing for miles around and yesterday it got used, A Tesla overtook me very slowly a few miles before it climbing Mt Taurangakuma hi first low split in a DAF weighing 45,000kg isnt fast trust me, about 21kmh so that was a very slow Tesla and at the bottom of the other side he pulled into the charging station, he must have been driving gently so as to get there.
I stopped in Mitchell on a motorcycle trip in August (Vstrom 650) to see if anything had changed in the 20 or so years since I’d been there. I was pleasantly surprised to see the Tiger Town Brewery, where I had a nice beer in their outdoor seating area. I wondered why the brewery didn’t advertise on the the main highway–as Mitchell is on a “business loop” off the highway, the proprietor said he had too much business, and didn’t need anymore! Another unexpected Eastern Oregon sighting for me was the Chevrolet dealership in Fossil (population 473), is it the worlds smallest?
Mitchell is a damn fine little town. They went all out for the total solar eclipse, seeing as they were smack dab in the middle of the path of totality. Madras got the press trucks but Mitchell was the place to be for it.