In Germany you also have public transportation to fall back on and your stuff is far closer together.
As a kid, I drove from around Topeka Kansas to Denver Colorado at least every year or two to get to the mountains and to visit a friend’s family. That is not an uncommon drive!
That is a further driving distance than driving the furthest east and west points of Germany. Distances are simply a lot further in the rural US. Sure, sticking with cities is pretty easy for EVs, and that is great, but ignoring more than half of the continental US land mass that we have to drive through to get between major cities, much less visit rural towns, is glossing over a whole lot of context.
Yes, I wish we had better public transportation and more EV chargers, but the situation in the US is very different than Europe because of how people are clustered and the vast distances in rural areas.
While I appreciate that’s a great example of a regular long distance road trip through rural areas, have you actually looked? Looking at the Tesla Supercharger map, there seem to be plenty on the highway between the two cities, and of course there are other brand fast chargers that may be there and possible destination chargers at each end.
While I couldn’t claim such a trip is as convenient as gas, it doesn’t look at all bad for an EV. You might be surprised
I was making a point about relative scale pf travel using a personal example, not necessarily exact route. Europeans tend to forget we have rural areas with sparse populations (double or single digits per sq km) that are the size of even the largest European nations.
As EV ranges increase and chargers become more common this becomes less and less of an issue, but it is still in the “visiting rural relatives requires more planning with EV” phase just because of distances.
In Germany you also have public transportation to fall back on and your stuff is far closer together.
As a kid, I drove from around Topeka Kansas to Denver Colorado at least every year or two to get to the mountains and to visit a friend’s family. That is not an uncommon drive!
That is a further driving distance than driving the furthest east and west points of Germany. Distances are simply a lot further in the rural US. Sure, sticking with cities is pretty easy for EVs, and that is great, but ignoring more than half of the continental US land mass that we have to drive through to get between major cities, much less visit rural towns, is glossing over a whole lot of context.
Yes, I wish we had better public transportation and more EV chargers, but the situation in the US is very different than Europe because of how people are clustered and the vast distances in rural areas.
While I appreciate that’s a great example of a regular long distance road trip through rural areas, have you actually looked? Looking at the Tesla Supercharger map, there seem to be plenty on the highway between the two cities, and of course there are other brand fast chargers that may be there and possible destination chargers at each end.
While I couldn’t claim such a trip is as convenient as gas, it doesn’t look at all bad for an EV. You might be surprised
I was making a point about relative scale pf travel using a personal example, not necessarily exact route. Europeans tend to forget we have rural areas with sparse populations (double or single digits per sq km) that are the size of even the largest European nations.
As EV ranges increase and chargers become more common this becomes less and less of an issue, but it is still in the “visiting rural relatives requires more planning with EV” phase just because of distances.