Driving Across America in an EV Doesn't Suck!

NH to Los Angeles in an EV, Three Years Later...

Fair warning, same as back in 2023: this is an EV ramble. But give it a try, there is some interesting stuff here.

And lots of videos!

Three years ago, I wrote here about driving a Volkswagen ID.4 from central New Hampshire to Los Angeles, and about the charging network that made my trip a bit of an adventure sport. (That one is here, if you missed it.) The short version? Crossing the country the long way in a non-Tesla EV, without access to Tesla’s pioneering charging network, was doable but came with challenges. Nothing compared to taking a Conestoga wagon, mind you. But I did spend thirty minutes drenched in a Walmart parking lot in Erie, Pennsylvania at midnight during a lightning storm, on the phone with an Electrify America technician, trying to convince a jammed charger nozzle to let go of my car. There was a similar escapade in Cleveland, where a ten-block square local power failure locked me into a charger for twenty minutes.

That was then. This week I did it again — New Hampshire to Los Angeles, the long way, diagonally, about 3,000 miles — and the pesky kids at EVs for All America talked me into filming the whole thing. Daily video diary, charging stops, factories, the works. The whole playlist is here.

Here is the headline: it was a gas. And without any gas at all.

I did it for two reasons: to show how easy (and fun) it is to go on an EV road trip with modern EVs and America’s vastly improved charging network and to stop along the way at a few locations that tell the huge and important industrial story about EV manufacturing in the U.S.

The Car, Briefly

I cheated a little. I took the EV equivalent of an F-22 Raptor, the Porsche Cayenne EV — not the hybrid, the full battery version. Brand new in the U.S. market, it runs an 800-volt architecture with a serious thermal management system, which in plain English means it can gulp electricity at a rate that would have been science fiction in 2023. It is at the cutting edge of Free World Automotive Tech and, in my view (and that of a lot of other EV nerds) it is the most capable road-tripping EV there is. (It is also so shamelessly expensive that if he knew about it, I’m sure Bernie would try to confiscate it in the Name of the People for the Politburo’s VIP motor pool.)

I should say that I am a motorhead with a lifetime average of about six miles per gallon, so I did not come to EVs through virtue. I came through horsepower and a miserly attitude toward expensive gas pumps. I stayed for the manufacturing story, with cleaner air thrown in. Video: Why a motorhead bought an electric Porsche

That is the last you will hear about the Porsche, because with all its excellence it is beside the point. The market is now full of faster-charging, longer-range EVs with software good enough to plan a cross-country trip for you. In the $35–48K range, look at the Chevy Equinox, the updated Ford Mustang Mach-E, and the new Nissan Leaf. For family cars, the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and the updated Tesla Model Y. Further up, the Rivian R2 is fantastic, and the high-end tech-heavy Lucid Gravity is another superb road-tripper. Shortly, both BMW and Mercedes will be selling next-gen EVs in the U.S. as well, and both cars are amazing. Plus, the used market is full of bargains coming off lease.

What Changed at the Plug

In my 2023 piece, I made a production out of finding a rare Tesla “Magic Dock” charging station in upstate New York — one of a literal handful in existence — that had a special nozzle device that would allow a non-Tesla EV driver like me (with the CCS style nozzle all other OEMs were using as a charge port) to actually charge at a Tesla Supercharger station… a privilege back then that was reserved for Tesla owners only. It felt like sneaking into a members-only club. But soon after my trip Club Tesla Charging started opening up to new members.

In May 2023, CEO Jim Farley of Ford and Elon Musk got on a call together and announced that Ford EVs would get access to the Supercharger network and that Ford would switch to Tesla’s connector — NACS, the North American Charging Standard — abandoning CCS, the bulkier plug the rest of the industry had standardized on. Even more important, Tesla would start accepting Ford EVs (with a snap-on adaptor to fit Tesla nozzles). Within about eighteen months, essentially every automaker selling here had followed Ford’s lead and soon, many were converting to native Tesla style charging ports. My 2026 Porsche now has a native NACS port. So does the new Rivian. The plug war is over, and the consumer won it.

Meanwhile everyone else got serious about fast charging on the highways. IONNA — the network jointly owned by eight automakers: BMW, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — crossed a thousand charging stalls this year and is aiming at 30,000 by 2030. Every IONNA stall carries both a NACS and a CCS nozzle, so nobody even needs an adapter.

Mercedes-Benz is building its own high-power network on the side; I stopped at one in Ohio, and it is the fanciest gas station you will ever see, with no gas in it. Walmart, which has hosted Electrify America chargers since 2018, now builds and operates its own 400-kilowatt network — across a footprint where roughly 90% of Americans live within ten miles of a store. EVgo and Electrify America are replacing their own shaky older hardware.

The number that stopped me cold on Day 1 was 399 kilowatts. At an IONNA station in New York, with the battery already at 55%. In 2023 I spent the entire trip hunting 150-kilowatt units that would de-rate themselves to 68 kilowatts while I stood in a parking lot inventing small talk. This time I was back on the highway in twelve to fourteen minutes. Video: 399 kW at an IONNA station

You also no longer need my old sermon about always charging to 80%, because the car computer (or a handy smartphone app) does the math now. The route planner told me to take 69% at one stop and 41% at the next, having weighed charging time curves, battery physics, car port specifics, and the distance between well-rated fast-charging stations and then calculated the fastest way to get from point A to B. Every instinct from forty years of gas stations says top it off. Ignore the instinct and trust the computer if you want to save maximum time. Video: Trust the computer

Then, outside Oklahoma City, a Francis Energy station.

Francis is a Tulsa based outfit, one of the first companies in America to build a statewide fast-charging network, and it has since pushed across the South and into Florida. Like other first-generation charge point operators, its original hardware was spotty. That 2019 equipment has been badly outrun by what the industry can do now, so they are replacing it. The twist is they are using Tesla’s well-developed Supercharger hardware, bought through Tesla’s new Supercharger for Business program, white-labeled as Francis, open to every car on the road. Around a hundred stalls across Oklahoma so far. This is a big deal because Tesla used to keep its charging iron proprietary; now local businesses from mom-and-pop coffee shops to big players like Francis and EVgo are buying Tesla’s proven hardware turnkey.

One more piece of fairness, owed to Electrify America, which I roasted a bit in 2023: even then, their equipment worked fine at roughly 90% of my stops. Erie and Las Vegas were the exceptions, and exceptions make the better story. The difference now is that the good outcome is boring and the bad one is rare.

So: charging is solved, or close enough that I am no longer willing to be interesting about it.

Which brings me to what I went across America looking for.

EV Related Auto Plants

South Buffalo. I drove past the old Bethlehem Lackawanna steel works, closed since the 1980s, still throwing a shadow across the neighborhood. It reminded me powerfully of the east side of Detroit, where I grew up — that specific quality of a place built around one enormous thing that is no longer there. A mile down the highway, a well-kept and modern Ford stamping plant rises out of nowhere. Two buildings, one mile apart, one dead and one being born. That contrast is the entire trip in a single windshield.

A few miles further on is the Tesla gigafactory in Buffalo, which builds solar panels and Supercharger hardware. Solar panels are a business we had essentially conceded to China before somebody decided not to.

The chargers I used behind an Arby’s a few exits later were Autel units. Autel builds them in Greensboro, North Carolina, in a 200,000-square-foot plant — up to 5,000 units a year, with a plan for 400 jobs. Video: a fast charger behind an Arby’s

Charging infrastructure is a jobs story before it is anything else. Video: The Tesla gigafactory that builds America’s chargers

Marysville, Ohio. The first Honda plant built outside Japan, opened in 1982, birthplace of the American Accord, anchor of a manufacturing operation that today builds more cars in the United States than Honda builds in Japan. In 2022 Honda committed more than a billion dollars to retool Marysville, East Liberty, and its Anna engine plant into what it called the Ohio EV Hub. The engineering ambition was real: gas, hybrid, and electric vehicles coming down the same line at the same cadence, designed that way specifically so that no EV line could ever become a stranded asset.

In March of this year, facing predatory tariffs imposed by White House whim and a relentless war by said President against all support for EVs, Honda canceled it. All three of the vehicles meant for those lines — the 0 SUV, the 0 Saloon, and the Acura RSX — are gone, along with a charge of roughly $15.7 billion and what will likely be Honda’s first annual loss in about seventy years.

I want to be fair about this, because Honda is not a company that does things carelessly and the flexible-line design was smart precisely because it anticipated the risk. Demand did not show up the way anyone forecast, and the federal purchase credit went away. A company that builds cars here, employing tens of thousands of Americans, made a defensible call about its own balance sheet.

But defensible is not the same as good, and it is worth saying plainly what got canceled: the next generation of American-built Honda electric vehicles. Honda gets to make that call. The trouble is that nobody in the system is responsible for what happens after it. Video: Honda promised $1B for EVs in Ohio. Then they pulled the plug.

Jeffersonville, Ohio. Down the road, the Honda–LG battery joint venture is going up anyway: about $4.4 billion, roughly twenty-four football fields of floor space, around two thousand jobs. With Honda pulling back, some of that capacity is being redirected toward grid storage for wind power and data-center backup. Which is fine — batteries are the future either way, and I would rather this building be full and humming than empty. But it is not what it was supposed to be. Video: inside a $4 billion battery plant

Warsaw, Indiana. And then the one that cheered me up. A startup called Slate Auto is building a $24,950 electric pickup inside a 1.4-million-square-foot former RR Donnelley plant — at its peak one of the largest rotogravure printing operations on earth, the place those hefty Sears, JCPenney, and Radio Shack catalogs came out of for decades. It closed in September 2023 and put 525 people out of work.

Slate is putting roughly $400 million into the site and projects more than two thousand jobs. They got the truck’s price down by taking things out: no paint shop, color-injected composite panels, wrap kits if you want a color, crank windows, no touchscreen, fewer than half the parts of a normal truck. More than 180,000 reservations, first deliveries due at the end of this year. Video: the $25,000 electric pickup being built in Indiana

There are other new plants springing up that were not on my route that I didn’t reach: Rivian is building a $4.5 billion plant in Stanton Springs North, Georgia. And Scout Motors — the old off-road brand, backed by Volkswagen — is putting $2 billion into a plant in Blythewood, just outside Columbia, South Carolina, to build the Traveler SUV and the Terra pickup.

(Note to future presidential aspirants heading into 2027: the largest BMW plant in the German company’s entire global footprint is in Spartanburg, South Carolina. That state is now a serious car- and EV-building state, and Democrats have just put it first on their 2028 calendar. Add Michigan and Nevada, and you have three of the most important stops on the primary calendar.)

There were two other American factories I would have liked to reach and did not. Rivian’s R2 is now coming off the line in Normal, Illinois; the version you can buy today is the Performance trim just under $58,000, and the roughly $45,000 base model is not due until 2027. I like it better than the pricier R1. And Casa Grande, Arizona, where Lucid builds its tech-heavy cars, was too far south of I-40 for a man who had to get home.

I also detoured to a Rivian Adventure Network station on purpose. Rivian built its solid charging network as an owners-only perk, the way Tesla did and has since opened most sites to everybody — the same arc Tesla and Mercedes both ran.

The Road in Between

You cannot drive six days across this country and only look at factories, and I did not.

Tucumcari, New Mexico. The car told me to charge there, right on I-40 past the Texas line, at a beautiful IONNA station and I took a full charge in fifteen minutes. Then I drove the back way through town to get to the interstate, and I am glad I did.

Tucumcari was an essential stop on Route 66, back when the way to California was a two-lane road. That stretch is still there: a couple of miles of mid-century motels, diners, and bars, the neon and the signage and the whole postwar American automotive romance, mostly abandoned, a few hanging on, almost all of it semi-intact.

You know what happened. The interstate came through, and the traffic stopped turning off. That is all it takes.

I want to be careful here, because people live and work in Tucumcari and it is not my business to write a town’s obituary from a charging stall. But it was hard to miss: what brought me to that street was the electricity requirement of a car nobody in the glory days of Route 66 could have imagined. New infrastructure emptied that town out seventy years ago. Newer infrastructure is what put me back on it.

Amarillo, Texas. Day 5, hot as hell, and I brought an electric car to Buc-ee’s — a zillion gas pumps, a convenience store the size of a steroid-pumped Walmart, the largest gasoline station in the world, and it is not close. Sitting right in the middle of it… is a big Tesla Supercharger station.

That is why I stopped. Here is a company whose entire business is selling gasoline and brisket to people driving internal combustion engines, and it has decided that EV charging is not a novelty amenity but a fuel type. Tesla is now at more than half of Buc-ee’s locations, Mercedes-Benz is building hubs at more than thirty, and the Oklahoma store I hit the day before had both.

You can argue about federal charging policy all day. Buc-ee’s is not installing chargers because of a subsidy or a mandate. Buc-ee’s has looked at the next twenty years of people pulling off Interstate 40 and drawn a conclusion.

Crossing the Colorado

We crossed the river into California, which is the American EV capital — roughly a third of every EV sold in this country is sold here, and it is the only state at anything like European adoption levels.

Here is where it stands globally. Nearly 22 million electric cars were built worldwide last year, up more than 25% in a single year. China built about 16 million of them — close to three-quarters of the global total. Chinese production ran roughly 20% past Chinese demand, so exports doubled to a record of more than 2.5 million cars, landing in Asia, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Australia. Not here, for now, because of tariffs. Everywhere else, yes.

Meanwhile, on this side: American companies announced the cancellation of about $22 billion in EV and battery manufacturing projects last year, against roughly $17 billion in new announcements. For the first time, we are unbuilding faster than we are building.

Jim Farley put it about as starkly as it can be put: if Ford and the rest of the free world’s automakers cannot compete globally in EVs, there is no future for them in this business. He is right and has been consistently honest about it.

There Can Be a Good Ending, With Great Cars and Trucks

I think we can compete. The United States, Europe, Japan, and Korea can absolutely build cars that will compete with anything coming out of China, and I want a big open global market with fair competition where we do exactly that. But we have to be in the game. The Chinese are playing strong subsidy cards, and if our own government is not on the side of our own auto industry, we will not have much of one in ten years. I don’t think China’s subsidies can last forever. They have overbuilt their auto industry, there is a big supply glut and a vicious price war at home, so very few Chinese auto companies make any profits at all. But that situation only fuels their ambition to flood foreign markets. And the political leaders of the PRC are just fine with using low-priced, high-quality export cars to lay waste to rival nations’ auto industries. Deindustrializing the competition is an attractive geopolitical strategy for them. And that’s the big difference this time. The Japanese in the 1970’s were tough (needed) competition, but they were political allies. The Chinese are rivals and not allies.

In the short term, the U.S. and other free-world governments have a choice: invest and step up to eventually compete from strength or let the Chinese prevail. And while China’s deep government subsidies cannot last forever, in their best scenario they will not have to… as there will be no meaningful competition left to worry about.

Here is a number to remember: in 2020 China exported about a million cars, EV and gas together. This year they are on track to export twelve million. Japan at its peak — the years that terrified Detroit — was half that. That’s faster than any country has ever scaled car exports. The trend is clear. Whether the U.S. has the strategic vision to act, is not. To date this administration has been a disaster for EVs and America’s long term auto making chances.

So Why Did I Do This Trip? Four Reasons.

It’s fun. I love driving across this country. It is a hell of a country, and you should go look at it.

Nobody should be afraid of EV road-trip charging anymore. The cars are better, the hardware is better, the networks are multiplying.

The factories. There are good stories out there and genuinely depressing ones, and we are dropping the ball in places where we do not have to — mostly because we now squabble politically over everything, including cars.

It moved me to drive through proud auto towns like Marysville, Ohio, and see the social fabric that would be torn apart if auto manufacturing is squeezed out of America and towns like that die.

And finally: politics. We have an open-seat presidential contest coming in both parties. That is when the future of this country actually gets decided, and this belongs in that argument. If you want to help put it there, come find us at evsforallamerica.org and get on the list. That is the education side of this; our advocacy affiliate, the American EV Jobs Alliance, does the arguing in the places where arguing is what’s called for.

And if you do nothing else: go test drive an EV. The overwhelming majority of people who switch to EVs are glad they did and don’t go back. You just have to get over the first hump of charging fear (hint: the big answer will be a box in your garage or by your driveway that will charge your car cheaply overnight at home every few days).

In 2023 I wrote that EV road trips were “not easy, but pretty easily doable.” I would revise that. They are now just easy. The charging is solved on every interstate I touched, and I never once worried about range — which is the single thing I would have found hardest to believe three years ago.

The hard part isn’t whether you can drive across America anymore in an EV. It’s whether the EVs that will own the future of transportation will be made in the free world anymore.

Watch the whole trip: YouTube Playlist.

Day-by-day diary, route map, and the sign-up: evsforallamerica.org/great-ev-journey

Everything else we’re up to: evsforallamerica.org

Thanks for coming along. Still Saudi-petroleum-free.