Electric vehicles might have great acceleration and look quite cool. However, the poor range many of their batteries have, a problem exacerbated by lengthy charging times and range variability when climactic and geographical conditions are adverse, makes them hardly the best decision for a road trip, particularly through dangerous terrain.
Such is what Hollywood TV host and Golden Globes anchor Marc Malkin found out the hard way on January 5th as he returned to Los Angeles from the Palm Springs Film Festival and found himself stranded on the side of the road in the desert when the battery on his electric vehicle died. Mr. Malkin had to call a tow truck and try to recharge at a charging station it towed him to.
There, Page Six reports, he met Sean Penn and Mara Buxbaum, both of whom were charging their electric vehicles, but things took a turn for the worse when he realized that his EV would not hold a charge, which presented a major problem for him, as he needed to make it across the desert.
After he called the car dealer who sold him the electric vehicle, he was told that the car was having trouble charging because he had let the battery drain all the way to zero. So, he decided to try pushing the car to a different type of charger to see if that would work, something that Penn and Buxbaum helped him do as he struggled to push it into the charging stall by himself.
Eventually, that worked out for him. The new stall had enough juice to get the car to charge, and after it was finally charged up, he was able to drive it home and make it into town for pre-Golden Globes parties starting on Friday night. He then co-hosted the show, which struggled to attract an audience, on Sunday.
Describing the incident, a source spoke to Page Six about Malkin showing up at the charging station and seeing Penn and Buxbaum, saying, “Marc looked to one side, and Sean Penn was charging his car – and he looked to his other side and saw Mara Buxbaum (Penn’s longtime publicist) charging her car.”
Another source spoke to Page Six from the perspective of those two, saying that they had also forgotten to charge their EVs: “All of a sudden, they saw a little flatbed tow truck with a car on it. They all forgot to charge overnight.”
The source also said that Buxbaum was the one who first came over and offered to help Malkin push the dead EV to the new charger: “Mara came up to him and asked if he needed his car pushed,” said a source. “She said, ‘You need someone to push your car?’” Penn joined in as well, with the source saying, “It was the funniest thing ever. was a real-life hero.”
Hopefully all involved learned that electric vehicles, even if they have certain interesting aspects and upsides, also have serious downsides that need to be taken into account by those driving them, particularly when headed through dangerous terrain, such as a desert.
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