48 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022
life, Ford recommends unplugging be-
fore eighty per cent, to avoid overheat-
ing the battery cells.
Having driven the route hundreds of
times, I knew the filling stations and
fast-food places by heart. Along I-95, I
was used to seeing the Tesla Supercharg-
ers at the back of the service areas I fre-
quent, but, owing to the terms of Tesla’s
onerous patent, its charging stations aren’t
compatible with Ford E.V.s and other
electric vehicles. The Ford-friendly char-
gers have no Ford signage, and are dis-
coverable only with the car’s navigation
system or the FordPass app; many aren’t
near the highway.
The first leg of the trip was spent in
the familiar anxiety of afternoon rush-
hour New York traffic, which seems worse
than ever since the pandemic. It finally
eased at Stamford, and I was able to test
out the torque. Electric cars can’t main-
tain horsepower as long as gas cars can,
because it’s hard to dissipate the heat
that builds up in electric motors. But the
motors can deliver microbursts of accel-
eration, without cycling through gears,
in the way that an electric egg beater can
go directly to the high-speed setting,
skipping low and medium. My driver’s
brain was far more engaged by these
torquey sprints than by a steady rate of
high speed. I’m pretty sure Cousin Char-
lie would have dug it. But the torque
wasn’t truly satisfying until I turned on
the “propulsion sound” in the “unbridled”
mode (it’s a Mustang, remember), so that
I heard the speed. Harry shook his head.
O.K., Vroomer.
The navigation system correctly cal-
culated that if we drove to the Electrify
America direct-current chargers in the
Chicopee Marketplace mall, in western
Massachusetts, we would have twenty-
four per cent of battery life remaining.
We arrived after nine, so the vast park-
ing lot was mostly empty. The Mach-E’s
G.P.S. led us to the chargers—four plugs
in green-glowing, gas-pump-like stations
next to a Home Depot. Could this be
right? No one else was using them.
We plugged in. The display on thecharger said that it would take thirty-two
minutes to reach seventy-four per cent,
which would put us at the farm, still a
hundred and nineteen miles north, with
twenty-four per cent left. We walked to-
ward the distant light of an Applebee’s,
and had a father-son chat while I mon-
itored the battery’s progress on my phone
and ate ribs. This felt more like the op-
posite of range anxiety.
But as we drove north the tempera-
ture quickly fell into the forties, and,
as it did, our projected range kept di-
minishing. The navigation system ap-
parently hadn’t figured this change in
weather in its original calculation, which,
at least to me, seemed neither seamless
nor delightful. It began to rain. We were
both showing signs of range anxiety by
the time we arrived, at 11:30 p.m., near-
ing empty. We plugged into a regular
outlet in the barn, in the dark.
The Mustang didn’t charge much
overnight on my 120-volt outlet. The
car’s navigation system—or the spotty
rural cell coverage—failed to route me
to the closest Electrify America char-
gers, across the state border in New
Hampshire, and, for safety reasons, I
couldn’t use the FordPass app on my
phone to navigate while the car was mov-
ing. Ford’s charging infrastructure will
inevitably improve as more E.V.s hit the
road. Today wasn’t my day. I finally found
the charging stations in the West Leb-
anon Walmart parking lot, but they
weren’t working properly, and angry driv-
ers were on the phone with customer
service. It was still raining; puddles had
formed in the depressions around the
chargers, and my feet got wet while I
was trying to get a hundred and fifty
kilowatts flowing into my car, which isn’t
as unsafe as it sounds.
Back in Brooklyn, I asked Harry if
he thought that his first car would be an
E.V. “I think that being a city boy has
shielded me from the utility of cars,” he
replied. He got an e-bike instead.E
rich Merkle, a Ford sales analyst, told
me that during the past fifty years,
as boomers have aged and prospered,
“they have basically expanded and col-
lapsed entire vehicle segments.” In the
seventies, he explained, “they were just
coming out of school, without a lot of
money, looking for an economical and
affordable vehicle.” That’s how the Jap-“This will make the man in your life wonder where you went.”