Seal Beach, Where Electric is King!

Seal Beach, CA Eisenhower Park
900 Ocean Ave.
Seal Beach, CA Electric cars such as a Tesla Roadster that goes from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.7 seconds and gets nearly 250 miles on one charge, makes this limited production model's Long Beach owner happy. He drove his car to Seal Beach to try out their electric vehicle re-charging station.  "I love it," he said.

As the latest wave of electric cars arrives in California, Southern California is gearing up by fast-charging stations in places accessible to the public, such as stores, restaurants, government buildings and beaches.

San Francisco, the Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego have begun installing public charge stations. And now Seal Beach, home to Electric Avenue and the Pacific Electric Red Car Museum with an electric train car used in Southern California beginning in 1925, has re-installed electric vehicle re-charging stations.

This Orange County  beach destination used to have them but removed its first generation electric stations around the new millennium, replacing them 12 years later with a better system--standard electrical plugs! Mandates for having a percentage of electric vehicles on the road were rolled back around 2000 when lobbyists from the car and related industries got them removed.  It took 12 years, and slightly newer technologies to re-introduce the electric car, making  Seal Beach once again a leader in technology, and its beach parking electric-car friendly. It became the first Orange County beach city to offer electric vehicle charging stations when it launched several such stations at the beach parking lot in July 2011.

The City officially opened two electric vehicle charging stations at the 8th Street beach parking lot, a station at the Main Street parking. Each station can re-charge two vehicles at a time and if you plan to spend a full day at the beach, your car will be fully charged in 8 hours. You can use a credit card and systems such as ChargePoint to find stations and get data on your re-charge hours to examine your fuel efficiency with the new technologies.

Echo-friendly and a go-green attitude are what makes Seal Beach so friendly, says the city's mayor and locals who are proud of the green effort. Most electric vehicles have standardized plug-ins, and cost  less than a few dollars per hour to re-charge at  Seal Beach's stations.