Most people who drive electric cars charge them at home overnight and drive them short distances. This group tends to have few if any range anxiety nightmares. But long-distance EV drivers often have to endure long queues for charging stations, especially in countries whose public charging infrastructure lags far behind demand, i.e. countries not called Norway. And there’s a subset of this group with reason to feel especially aggrieved: renters handed the keys to an EV as a surprise. The Atlantic, which is not institutionally against electric cars, has a first-person account by Saahil Desai of a road trip to upstate New York which should be read by every car hire firm and jurisdiction keen to accelerate the great phase-out of internal combustion. “These are great, potentially planet-saving machines,” Desai writes, “but the ordeal made me want to wage a slash-and-burn campaign against all of them.” Mel Giedroyc met some similarly-minded people on her electric adventure. The solution is to build more charging stations.
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