What Getting In A Time Machine Feels Like
I don’t like to say I’m “moving back the US.” The last time I lived here, nearly 14 years ago, I was a different person and the country was a different place.
This is a whole new adventure, so my partner and I decided we want to take some time to explore and get to know how we fit in here. At first, we thought we would get a camper van and visit many of the great wild spaces of the American West. But, we’d be traveling in winter, with our infant son, and mostly trying to spend time with family and friends. So we needed a car for the city, an American Road Trip Machine.
So we got a Ford Mustang.
Not the two door muscle car of yesteryear, but the thoroughly modern Mustang Mach-E 4 door electric vehicle.
We were coming from a 2005 Nissan X-Trail. While roughly the same size and shape as the Mustang, the X-Trail feels just as much a fossil as the fuel it burned. It was dented. Scratched. The seats were worn out. The AC made rattling sounds and was only somewhat effective. Stepping into a 2021 Mach-E felt like getting into a time machine. It is magic on wheels to drive. Self driving on highways, energy consumption tracking, remote starts, self-parking, and electric instant torque!
The 2008 America we left felt just as ancient as the X-Trail. That America didn’t have on demand taxis in every town, craft beer everywhere, vegetarian meat substitutes on every menu, and daily package deliveries of yesterday’s online order. People who have lived in the US this whole time may not have felt these changes. But just like the shock we felt stepping into our Mustang, coming back to the new America whisked us forward through time.
In a conversation with some friends, who perhaps didn’t realize how much America has changed and how luxurious it is, I posed this question: where are the 2005 cars? There were hundreds of millions of cars then, yet the average age of a US car is 12.1 years and roughly half of all cars on the road are from the last 10 years. That march of progress is invisible year to year, but when you see it all at once, everything feels new.
It was into this totally new America that we set off in December. We started filming to save memories of the trip, and later realized we should be sharing those stories to help others see the future.
Since we were whisked through 13 years of American history in a moment, it feels like we have a clear sense of momentum and trajectory. Perhaps the other frogs in this pot don’t feel the temperature changing.
So we started off from day 1 of our road tip, putting our naivete on full display as we learn how to charge our EV for at fast chargers, and use public restrooms in the US for the first time in a long time. Here’s that day 1 video:
In that first day, we had to learn to charge the car at fast chargers. This new infrastructure is robust. There are chargers all over the place, and more are being installed every day. But people don’t see them. Most Americans don’t know.
It is easy to compare chargers to gas stations. And gas stations are everywhere. They occupy prime retail real estate as they need to be visible and easily accessible to attract customers. So everyone has a sense that there are a large number of gas stations, and where there are some near them.
Chargers are often hidden. Because the car will be parked there for 20 to 40 minutes, the chargers are put up at the lowest value parking spots. Most often in the back corner of a parking lot or behind a service station. So unless you are driving an EV, you might not know they are there. But they are.
All over America, there are charging stations on major highways and back roads. We drove all over the west: California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. Only at one single place did we find less changing infrastructure than we would hope for. It was New Mexico going up I-25 from Las Cruces to Albuquerque. But we wanted to drive the more scenic route via Flagstaff anyway.
Coming back to the US with fresh eyes, we can see as clear as day that the EV revolution is on. There are great cars out there, and the infrastructure to support them both as a every day car, but also a road trip machine. The first cars and charging solutions may have felt boring and inefficient. But the cool cars and great fast-charging locations are here. We got out of the time machine and it’s a whole new world.
