Lee and I recently purchased an electric vehicle, a Chevy Volt. A friend and fellow Volt owner (Hi Chelsi!) had told me that there are electric vehicle charging stations in the Mickey & Friends parking garage, so I checked that out before the Volt’s first (of many, I’m sure) trips to Disneyland. I found this information on the Disney Parks Blog. There are 20 of them on the first floor of the garage in the Chip and Dale section. They are not free – you must have a Chargepoint account to use them.

Now…getting to the Mickey and Friends garage is often a challenge for us these days, because we come from the south, and access the garage by turning left from Ball Road onto Disneyland Drive. More often than not of late, the entrance to the garage from there is closed and we get re-routed to a parking area a couple of miles away. Grumble. To avoid that this time we went further north on I5, then exited and turned back south so we could use the elevated ramp that goes straight to the parking garage.

There’s a sign on the parking booths that says “Ask about Electric Vehicle Charging”. So we did. The cast member placed a colored tag on our windshield, and told us the parking attendants would direct us accordingly. We had entered via one of the parking lanes over toward the right, so we had a brief wait while the attendant stopped traffic so that we could go to the left.

From there we were in the correct part of the garage, but we were kind of on our own to find the charging stations. The charging stations are in row 7, and we should’ve turned left a little sooner. Eventually we managed to get ourselves parked. At that point, about 10:00 in the morning, there were at least 12 charging stations still available.

To use the station, you either need a Chargepoint smart card or their phone app. I had just signed up so don’t have a card yet, but I was able to use the app quite easily. I identified which charge station I was using, but the charger “nozzle” was locked into place until I authorized a payment from my account. (There’s a $1.50 minimum.) Then we plugged it into the car, and both the app and the car indicated that it was charging.

Throughout the day I was able to use the app to check on the progress, and at 3:21 p.m. I received an email that charging was complete. Fortunately the Disneyland Resort does not require that vehicle owners return to the garage to move their car when finished charging. For EV owners traveling to the resort, the app indicates how many charging stations are available.

We returned to the car about 8:20 that evening. ALL of the EV spaces were full by then, and it looked like all of the stations were in use. There was an interesting variety of EVs along the row. While I didn’t take an inventory I saw several Volts, a couple of Teslas and a Hyundai. I did not see any Nissan Leafs, though.

I had to use the app (since I didn’t have a card) to terminate our charging session. My phone was getting low on battery, but it worked ok. Worst case I could’ve plugged the phone into the car to charge it so that I could unplug the car! 🙂 I almost immediately received an email receipt from Chargepoint indicating how much power we had used and how much we were charged for it. (It was plugged in longer than 5 hours but it only drew power for 5 hours.) As it turned out it would have been cheaper for us to just use the Volt’s gas engine for the entire trip home (since it gets ~40 mpg), but it was interesting to try out the charging station on our car’s first lengthy trip from home.