A 2,200 Mile EV Test Drive From Texas to Oregon
22nd December 2025
This isn’t my first long road trip in an EV, but some of the challenges I had in that first trip happened here. About half of the Electrify America stops had at least one broken charger. Few of the chargers delivered close to the 200kW max recharge rate of the Buzz, but that was probably due to VW’s battery limits in winter conditions.
One key difference between my 2022 trip and this 2025 trip is that thankfully almost every charger had a card reader on it so I could tap to pay and charge instantly. Back in 2022, I was forced to use an app for every charger network that required you to have an account attached to a credit card and that sometimes took 10 minutes to set up at each new charger I hadn’t been to before.
Twice on this trip, I got to a charging station only to find it was full and had a line of people waiting to charge, so I had to look elsewhere. My biggest blunder was seeing a fast Rivian charger in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, Price, Utah on Apple Maps. When I drove up to the location, I found out it wasn’t done being built yet. So I had to use a slower 75kW ChargePoint station that took almost an hour to charge the battery back up because I was on my last 20 miles of range. Oops.
Rory Sutherland (whom I respect a great deal) is of opinion that anyone who drives an electric car won’t return to a gas-powered car, and that ‘range anxiety’ with respect to electric cars is overblown. I have my doubts about both of those positions. My wife and I drive hybrids, and I doubt that I would be happy falling back to a gas-powered car, but the advantage of a hybrid over an all-electric car is that you take your charger with you.