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Kerouac, but cleaner?
W
here we going, man?”
asks the narrator,
Sal Paradise, in Jack
Kerouac’sOn the Road.
“I don’t know but
we gotta go,” replies his friend
Dean Moriarty.
The first rule of American road trips is
to be bored with wherever you come
from. Everything else is up for grabs.
You can have testosterone-fuelled
road trips (On the Road) or feminist ones
(Thelma & Louise). You can forget the
family (Hunter S Thompson), or take
them with you (Little Miss Sunshine).
You can escape corporate America
(Easy Rider), or try to redeem it (Mark
Zuckerberg’s 2017 apology tour). You
can praise Iowa (Kerouac: “the prettiest
girls in the world live in Des Moines”) or
be honest (Bill Bryson: “I come from Des
Moines. Somebody had to”).
Everything can happen on the road —
because, as Kerouac wrote, the road is
life. Over the past century, the road has
been carved into American life through
literature, politics and geography.
In October, it’ll be 50 years since Ker-
ouac died, alcoholic and miserable, but
his legacy remains the romantic vision
of endless driving. There is, however, a
complication. The cars of the future are
electric. Electric vehicles rely on plan-
ning and recharging. Road trips rely on
spontaneity and distance. Kerouac
never worried about running out of gas.
(He worried about running out of
money for gas, which is different.)
Can you criss-cross America without
gasoline? Technically, yes.Tesla, which
dominates the US’s electric car market,
has built a network of 1,533 Super-
charger stations, where you can
recharge a vehicle within an hour. It says
that you can drive from New York to San
Francisco with 21 strategically timedcombustion-engine cars now have an
average lifespan of more than 11 years.
For me, there is a personal motivation
to seeing electric cars take off. Living in
London, I have never felt the need to
own a car. But living temporarily in San
Francisco, I quickly found myself run-
ning out of better options. Journeys
often took twice as long by public trans-
port — if they were even possible. The
proposed high-speed train between San
Francisco and Los Angeles has been
downsized. In some places, Uber and
Lyft are replacing buses and trains.
After a night out, my acquaintances
seemed to think drink-driving was less
eccentric than walking home.
Millennials are just as keen on buying
cars as previous generations, once you
control for demographics and economic
factors, a recent academic paper found.
The endless hum of traffic beneath my
apartment window was the soundtrack
of climate catastrophe. Transportation
accounts for nearly 30 per cent of the
US’s greenhouse gas emissions. As oil
prices have gone down, car use has gone
up. Electric cars promised that even I —
a climate-worrier — could find a place
on the road.We are going to Reno, Nevada. Mainly
out of curiosity.
The city is often described as a poor
man’s Las Vegas — smaller and seedier.
It likes to call itself the Biggest Little
City in the World, which strikes me
as the Most Meaningless MeaningfulHow will the electric car measure up to the dream of driving across America?
Henry Manceplugged in, turned on and found out. Photographs byJason Henry
Henry Mance driving his rented Tesla past the Chevron oil refinery in Richmond, CaliforniaSlogan in the Solar System.
“Reno is the worst place I’ve ever
been,” says my colleague Yui. Five min-
utes later, he agrees to come. His two
young kids are in too, plus a photogra-
pher. That means there’s no room for
another colleague who also fancies the
trip. An investment banker would call
this outing significantly oversubscribed.
We hire a Tesla Model 3on a peer-to-
peer car hiring website. On pick-up, the
car immediately suggests that we install
a 25-minute software update. What is
this — the car of the future, or a four-
wheeled version of Adobe Acro-
bat? Even the glovebox is operated from
the touchscreen.
The Model 3 is the most basic Tesla,
though prices start at the far-from-basic
$40,000. The long-range version cantravel up to 310 miles, but charging it
fully shortens the battery life.
My dashboard says we have charge for
244 miles. I pick up Jason the photogra-
pher, Yui and the kids nearby, and
somehow we are down to 238. This still
should be OK, I think. Reno — via pic-
turesque Nevada City — is about 230
miles away. If things get tight, we can
recharge at Truckee, 30 miles nearer.
You know you have left Silicon Valley
when the billboards stop advertising
enterprise software and start advertis-
ing religion. I suppose they are both
forms of saving things in the cloud.
“Jesus said ALL THINGS are possible to
those that believe,” reads one billboard.
A nearby shop sells 35 flavours of wild-
game jerky.
Our first stop is the California State
Fair in Sacramento. The attractions
include dogs “long jumping” into a huge
tank of water. “You’re going to see some
crazy dogs jumping,” says an
announcer. “There is a technique to
this,” he adds, unconvincingly. Is this the
real America? The first dog throws itself
13ft 6in into the water. It’s some way
short of the world record — 35ft 3in, set
by an Ohio whippet named Slingshot.Continued on page 17Uh-oh. Computer says no.
The navigation predicts we
will run out of battery ona scenic mountain pass
recharges. But America has 100 filling
stations for every Tesla station. An
online calculator tells me I could drive a
Honda Civic from New York to San
Francisco with a mere five filling stops.
Electric vehicles’ added hassle
remains a major turn-off for many
potential car buyers. “It’s called range
anxiety, and yes you do have it. ‘Am I
going to get there?’” I was told by one
Tesla enthusiast, who had nonetheless
managed 13,000 miles in four months.
Partly as a result, the Tesla revolution
is fragile. Elon Musk’s companyis loss-making again, even though it mostly
sells expensive cars to rich US buyers.
Musk’s plan was to inspire other car-
makers to go electric; some, like Jaguar,
are only now testing the market seri-
ously. The jury is out.
Even California, home of the electric
car, is struggling to meet its target of five
million zero-emission vehicles on the
road by 2030. Los Angeles is almost cer-
tain to miss its goal of 80 per cent elec-
tric or zero-emission vehicles by 2035;
such cars currently account for just 1.
per cent of the market, and existingRacetothebottomThe submarine conquering the earth’s depths— PAGE 6
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