Range anxiety is the fear of driving an electric car and running out of power without being able to find a charging point on time to replenish the battery. Thus you fear being left stranded. You worry about where you can charge on long trips, how long charging takes, whether the charger will be available when you get there, whether the charger is working, whether it is producing enough kilowatts, and how much will it slow you down on these cross-country trips. Indeed, range anxiety is considered to be one of the major psychological barriers to large-scale public adoption of electric cars.

Following an anxiety-filled trip from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and back, I’ve decided to catalog the good and the bad about EV charging and the range anxiety it produces. You’ll read about the bad experiences, and I’ll share the good ones as well.

The bottom line is that we need robust charging infrastructure in place to convince people to make the switch from internal combustion engines to EV’s.