plugged in our Kona, and a message appeared
on the dash: Charging would take nearly six
hours. Leaving the car for the night, we hiked,
foreheads tucked in against the gritty breeze,
almost a mile to the nearest motel.
THE AMERICAN ROAD TRIP began with a bet. In
1903, before interstates and filling stations, a
patron in a California private club wagered $50
that Horatio Jackson, a physician, couldn’t drive
an automobile to the East Coast. Four days later,
according to Horatio’s Drive: America’s First Road
Trip, a 2003 film and book by Dayton Duncan and
Ken Burns, Jackson and a mechanic bounced out
of San Francisco in a 20-horsepower Winton tour-
ing carriage. They adopted a bulldog named Bud
and fitted him with goggles to protect his eyes
from dust. They roared up mountain
passes on unpaved tracks, splashed
through streams, broke down and got
towed by horses, and waited for spare
parts to arrive by train. Jackson hit
New York 63 days later, completing the
nation’s first cross-country car journey.
The road trip is now woven into the
American psyche—as a vehicle for dis-
covery; as a chance to remember, for-
get, move on, or get lost. Guttenfelder
and I, both Midwesterners—he’s from
Iowa, I’m from Kansas—had taken our
own cross-country journeys as young
men. Mine introduced me, at 21, to
the craggy landscapes of the West:
the Tetons, the Olympics, the Sierras,
the Grand Canyon. It changed my
life. Less than a year later I moved to
Wyoming. I’ve lived less than an hour’s drive from
mountains ever since.
For now, cross-country travel by electric car
requires retooling expectations. Fully charging
can take an hour—or up to 24, depending on the
battery and the charger. With the exception of
Tesla’s more than 750 proprietary supercharg-
ing locations, there are few places in the U.S.
to juice up quickly, whereas there are close to
150,000 gas stations. But most electric vehicles
can charge at night, at home. And Tesla, with the
country’s most robust fast-charging network,
also has around 3,800 slower charging stations.
After Mojave, we blew past salt flats and glided
into the narrow Panamint Valley. Under ideal
conditions, our Kona could travel about 260 miles
on a charge. But we were chugging up mountain
passes and cranking the air-conditioning against
hot winds that rattled the doors. I’d read that each
could undercut battery life, which sparked our
first of several bouts of “range anxiety.” It ended
uneventfully in Death Valley, where we found a
lavish lodge with a charger.
The next day we topped off in the lot at the
World’s Tallest Thermometer, a towering pillar
commemorating the global temperature record:
134 degrees Fahrenheit, set in 1913. Killing time
in the gift shop among the T-shirts and ball caps,
I thought back to the hut on the Santa Monica
Pier where road trippers got their Route 66 mem-
orabilia. Ian Bowen, the manager, told me he
had grown up “the bored kid in the back seat,” as
his family blitzed across Nebraska and Iowa on
vacations, whizzing past roadside temptations.“I never understood as a kid why we would drive
if we weren’t going to take our time,” Bowen said.
To him, road trips are for slowing down and
exploring. For now, extended stints at charging
stations “really fit into that.”
Pushing cars and trucks onto the grid is a cen-
tral part of the strategy for getting America and
the world off fossil fuels. In the coming decades
it will dramatically increase demand for electric-
ity. Once, the market would have responded with
more coal-fired power plants, but no more. The
new 8minute project, for example, will deliver
energy to Los Angeles for less than two cents a
kilowatt-hour—much cheaper than coal.WE CAME UPON RUSSELL BENALLY one evening as
he was checking on his horse on a rocky overlookCAN SOLAR POWER SPREAD
FAST ENOUGH? EXPERTS HAVE
UNDERESTIMATED ITS POTENTIAL
BEFORE, AND TECHNOLOGY CAN
BRING RAPID CHANGE.THE ROAD TO 2070 55