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The wait for a Tesla dealership in Vancouver continues.

Company spokeswoman Shanna Hendriks told me earlier this week that while the California-based electric vehicle automaker looks forward to setting up shop in Metro Vancouver — in all likelihood in Oakridge Shopping Centre — “our expectation is that it will be in 2014.”

However, a new Tesla service shop on the corner of Powell and Commercial in Vancouver has been a beehive of activity these past few weeks, with car carrier after car carrier dropping off Model Ss to be prepped for customer delivery.

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Those new Model S owners, and for that matter all EV owners, owe a debt of gratitude to Vancouver-based Sun Country Highway, a company that has devoted itself to building a Canada-wide charging network.

It began in February 2012 on Vancouver Island.

“What we wanted to do is create a model that we could apply to the rest of the country,” explained company regional director Rob MacGregor. “And that was to populate strategic locations across the island with charging stations.”

Working with hotels and motels, Sun Country struck deals where they would provide the charging hardware and the hotels/motels would be responsible for installing it.

“We quickly discovered that many of these businesses were really keen to adopt this,” says MacGregor, and in a couple of months, two dozen charge stations were established on the island, “from top to bottom and side to side.”

Sun Country took that model and in May last year started at both coasts along the Trans-Canada Highway.

“And we almost met in the middle,” MacGregor says of the mid-November completion of the cross-country charging network (for a map, visit suncountryhighway.com).

The preferred distance between the Level 2 charging stations was based on the range of the Tesla Model S — approximately 300 to 350 kilometres — but as it turned out the average distance is 200 kilometres. Adds MacGregor, “And we did it with no external funding or subsidies.”

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