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There’s a very classic kind of appeal to road trips. The open road, blasting some tunes, taking in sweet views and exploring new places. That’s the life, isn’t it?
The new era of road trips, however, promises to be slightly different to before. Petrol and diesel cars are falling out of favour fast, and electric vehicles (EVs) are on the up. Which means your future road trips will be increasingly dictated by places with enough charging points to keep things on track.
If you’re ahead of the curve and already own an EV – or fancy hiring one for a road-trip break – then you’ll want to check this out: rental car company Hertz has come up with a list of the top 10 road trips in Europe for electric cars.
The company has ranked a number of routes by the number of EV charging points per mile, ensuring that drivers won’t spend their trips worrying about being stranded without juice in the middle of nowhere – the phenomenon known as ‘range anxiety’.
Top of Hertz’s list is a tour of the Netherlands. Starting and ending in Amsterdam, the route visits the likes of The Hague, Rotterdam, Eindhoven and Utrecht, visiting windmills and dikes aplenty. Importantly, however, the tour features 2,559 EV chargers along the way, which averages out at a whopping 14.6 chargers per mile. You’re literally never going to not be able to recharge.
The Dutch route is way ahead of any other drives on the list, but it’s impressive just how many top driving tours feature plenty of charging points. Second comes a route in northern Italy which heads from Turin and Milan over to Lake Como and Lake Iseo, which boasts 596 chargers (4.73 per mile), and third is a Cannes-Monaco drive on the French Riviera that has 138 EV chargers – or 4.06 per mile.
It’s worth noting that even the road trip routes with lower EV charging point counts still have quite a number of them. Routes in the French Alps and Catalonia, for instance, still have on average a charging point ever other mile.
Here is Hertz’s full top ten list of the best EV road trips in Europe, alongside the number of charging points per mile.
- Netherlands tour, 14.62 chargers per mile
- Northern Italy and the lakes, 4.73
- Côte d’Azur, 4.06
- Emilia-Romagna to Bologna, 3.55
- Belgium and Luxembourg ‘chocolate and castles’ tour, 3.23
- Rome and the Amalfi Coast, 2.68
- Bern to Lucerne, 1.47
- Valencia and the Costa Blanca, 0.73
- French Alps, 0.55
- = Catalonia, 0.55
You can find out more details about each of Hertz’s top Euro road trips here.
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