This past summer, my family attempted our first-ever cross-country road trip in an electric car—from our home in Houston to Los Angeles. The backstory is a bit complicated and there were some logistical reasons why it was necessary. But, if I’m being honest, we did it mostly to face our fears. We moved to Houston as a two-fossil fuel car household in 2009 and gradually morphed into a one-electric-car household over the following decade. But I could count on one hand the number of times we took our EV—a 2017 Chevrolet Bolt—outside the inner 610 loop. We had passed on opportunities to travel to places as close as Austin because of what is commonly known as “range anxiety.” Maybe “range ignorance” would have been the better word. We really didn’t know very much about the logistics of taking an EV on a long road trip. And “range guilt” was building, since there was plenty of information available about long-distance EV travel on the Internet. Our coping mechanism was telling ourselves that the technology was new and none of us were really technophiles. But that flew in the face of our self-imagination as climate communicators and activists. We fancied ourselves early adopters trying to raise awareness of transitioning to EVs as a public good. But it was hard to convince skeptical friends and family about the benefits of electric automobility if we didn’t even go more than twenty miles away from our home charger. So, the time had come.

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