Electric
They call it range anxiety, and every Leaf, Tesla, and Volt driver suffers from it. Always lurking in the rear view mirror is the unshakable fear of your electric car running out its charge, most likely when you’re far from home or a friendly samaritan who wants to lend you his 220v outlet for an hour while you charge your car’s lithium battery. But range anxiety is rapidly becoming as outdated a fear as polio and nuclear winter. Some of the credit goes to the thousands of new charging stations around the country (Tesla added more than a thousand charging stations this year alone) and to the distance that’s being closed between stations. But it’s also due to longer ranges as cars and batteries rapidly improve. Together, they’re slowly but surely closing those scary gaps and lonely deserts in the vast grid of EV charging. See for yourself.
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As battery range grows and the distance between charging stations continues to drop, the EV revolution is hitting a landmark: you can now drive across the contiguous USA using only public charging stations. We’ve got the maps to prove it.
Words by Mark Healy
Design by Martin Flores
Chargers State By State
Every state in the country now has at least one public EV charging station. And that includes fossil-fuel loving holdouts like Oklahoma and West Virginia, which has charge points at each of its ten state parks. Perhaps more crucially, some of the least densely populated states now have a handful or more stations, cutting down on the EV charging deserts and closing the gaps between stations. In the summer of 2012, you could drive every inch of Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota and never encounter a single public charging station. Now, there are more than 200 between them.
More stations, closer together
The greatest distance between any two stations across the contiguous USA is between Rawlins, Wyoming and Casper, Wyoming. It used to be longer. In September Rawlins Supercharger opened on Meadow Street, significantly closing the gap. So it goes in rural America. Even in the most sparsely populated states chargers are popping up at truck stops, RV parks, and Walmarts, whose parking lots are the site of Charge America’s ambitious expansion plans. The Volkswagen-subsidiary has only opened 79 of their fast-charging stations so far, but there are thousands to come.
Tesla Model S: 275-337 miles
Tesla Model 3: 310 miles
Tesla Model X: 238-295 miles
Chevrolet Bolt EV: 238 miles
Nissan Leaf: 150 miles
While Battery Ranges Gets Longer
America’s Last EV Deserts
86.5 miles to next station
Rawlins, WY
80.9 miles to next station
Broadus, MT
77.3 miles to next station
Bemidji, MN
71.9 miles to next station
McDermitt, NV
71.2 miles to next station
Great Falls, MT
69.9 miles to next station
Woodward, OK
69.8 miles to next station
Watertown, SD
67 miles to
next station
Hurley, WI
60.53 miles to next station
Truth or Consequences, NM
60.51 miles to next station
Beulah, ND
In the unlikely event that you should find yourself driving a 2018 Nissan Leaf across central Wyoming, you would be experiencing a perfect storm of suboptimal EV conditions. And yet you’d still make it. The Nissan Leaf ranks only fifth among new electric models for range—150 miles on a full charge—and it’s still enough to bridge the longest driving distance between EV stations anywhere in the lower 48 states—the 119 miles between the Tesla Supercharger in Rawlins, Wyoming and the one in Casper. This is a victory for the US electric vehicle program. It’s an ugly, nerve-fraying victory on a lonely stretch of Western asphalt, but a victory nonetheless. These other four vehicles would bridge that distance while causing considerably less stress. These are the Top 5 2018 EV cars by range:
5 Longest Range EVs
Roll over a state to see how many public EV charging outlets each state has.
There may be more than one charge point at each station.
There’s not another station within many miles of these EV outposts.
* mileage calculated by radius, not by driving on accessible roadways.