The future is now: five electric-car road trips in North America and Europe for ethical tourists
- From chasing the northern lights in a Tesla X to cruising California’s Pacific coast, holidaymakers can experience the quiet pleasure of driving an electric car
- You’ll soon get ‘range confidence’ and stop worrying your battery will run down before you reach a charging station
Head out on a road trip in a far-flung destination, and after a few thousand miles you might start thinking: is it ethical to fly halfway around the world to pollute someone else’s air? Of course it is not, but there haven’t been many alternative options – until recently.
It may still be an emerging trend for now, but in not much more than 10 years’ time in some places, the electric-car road trip is destined to become the norm.
The first question likely to spring to mind before embarking on such a trip is whether you will have enough battery charge to get to the next charging point.
“That idea of ‘range anxiety’, of being too far from a charging point, is something you only worry about at the start,” says Tom Hall, travel editor at Lonely Planet, whose latest Best in Travel book identifies electric-car road trips as a top trend for 2019. “You can now get many hundreds of miles on one charge so you can be very ambitious, and it’s getting better all the time.”
Finding charging points can take you to places you wouldn't otherwise go, says Hall, who describes a recent tour in a Tesla electric car around the UK's national parks as an eye-opener to the wonders of e-road trips.
