PungoteagueDave
Well-known member
Yeah, you could probably get to Fairbanks, painfully. But you could not make it to Deadhorse. There is no electrical power on the gravel/dirt Dalton Highway, 495 miles from Fairbanks to Deadhorse, except at Coldfoot camp, which is provided by local generator source. The first leg is 253 miles. Each leg includes mountain passes and it is almost entirely unpaved. No way you could make either leg even in a totally empty Lightning with no passengers, assuming you could find a way to charge at Coldfoot camp.
When motorcycling that road we have to strategize fueling for bikes with smaller tanks. I ride a bike with a 7.4 gallon tank, so can make it, but have ridden with others who only have 200 mile range, and we carry supplement fuel cans.
Those of us who live in the US or EU have a fantasy view of travel. Having motorcycled the world and purchased illegal Jerry can gas from shady guys in mud road Ugandan villages standing at a shuttered gas station, closed due to both fuel outage and no electricity, with similar experiences in Mongolia, Siberia, the Andes, rural China and even New Zealand and Eastern Europe, it is safe to say it will be a VERY long time before EV travel is ubiquitous. The vast majority of the world’s roads remain unpaved, and half the people in China have never flushed a toilet in their lives.
Our infrastructure is only a dream elsewhere. My wife and I are flying in September to meet our motorcycle in Antofagasta, Chile for a two-month ride through Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina, going places on unpaved roads where trying to use an EV will be impossible for the foreseeable future. I love EV driving, but expect to have ICE vehicles for the rest of our lives, especially for adventure travel. We just returned last week from two months riding from Heidelberg, where we store a motorcycle, to a ferry to England, another ferry to the Shetlands, another ferry to the Orkneys, another to Scotland, where we rode Skye and most of Scotland and the UK’s National parks. We saw lots of EVs in England, but for most of the 4,700 miles we rode on the motorcycle, much on one-lane sheep paths, an EV would have been nearly impossible, and will remain so - even though we stayed at inns or b&bs every night, and rode fairly short distances each day compared to our norm - and that’s arguably the first world, included a stop in London near the end to see Hamilton for our 45th anniversary. Just the escape day from London to my sister’s place in Strasbourg France via the Folkestone Chunnel train would have been a logistics and speed-limited impossibility, but completely reasonable on BMW motorcycle using the autobahn’s high speed opportunities, which destroy range in an EV.
When motorcycling that road we have to strategize fueling for bikes with smaller tanks. I ride a bike with a 7.4 gallon tank, so can make it, but have ridden with others who only have 200 mile range, and we carry supplement fuel cans.
Those of us who live in the US or EU have a fantasy view of travel. Having motorcycled the world and purchased illegal Jerry can gas from shady guys in mud road Ugandan villages standing at a shuttered gas station, closed due to both fuel outage and no electricity, with similar experiences in Mongolia, Siberia, the Andes, rural China and even New Zealand and Eastern Europe, it is safe to say it will be a VERY long time before EV travel is ubiquitous. The vast majority of the world’s roads remain unpaved, and half the people in China have never flushed a toilet in their lives.
Our infrastructure is only a dream elsewhere. My wife and I are flying in September to meet our motorcycle in Antofagasta, Chile for a two-month ride through Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina, going places on unpaved roads where trying to use an EV will be impossible for the foreseeable future. I love EV driving, but expect to have ICE vehicles for the rest of our lives, especially for adventure travel. We just returned last week from two months riding from Heidelberg, where we store a motorcycle, to a ferry to England, another ferry to the Shetlands, another ferry to the Orkneys, another to Scotland, where we rode Skye and most of Scotland and the UK’s National parks. We saw lots of EVs in England, but for most of the 4,700 miles we rode on the motorcycle, much on one-lane sheep paths, an EV would have been nearly impossible, and will remain so - even though we stayed at inns or b&bs every night, and rode fairly short distances each day compared to our norm - and that’s arguably the first world, included a stop in London near the end to see Hamilton for our 45th anniversary. Just the escape day from London to my sister’s place in Strasbourg France via the Folkestone Chunnel train would have been a logistics and speed-limited impossibility, but completely reasonable on BMW motorcycle using the autobahn’s high speed opportunities, which destroy range in an EV.
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