Having driven from Bucharest, Romania, all the way to Switzerland in electric vehicles this past week with zero charging snags, I’ve had an epiphany. If you live in Europe and what’s holding you back from buying an EV is a fear that you won’t have a place to charge, that no longer applies, especially if you live anywhere near a decent-sized city.
Taking part in the Eurocharge by Schaeffler—a giant EV road trip through the Alpine passes and some of Europe’s best roads—has shown me that you can drive long distances in an EV, knowing that wherever you decide to stop, you’re not too far from a fast charging station.
Here’s how I proved that range anxiety is a thing of the past on my side of the Atlantic.
We started in my home base of Romania, whose charging infrastructure isn’t as good as in some Western European countries, yet we had plenty of leeway when it came to stopping to top up. We even skipped a couple of planned charging stops in the Volkswagen ID.4 on the first day because we had enough battery to keep going.
Eurocharge 2025 Transfagarasan
Photo by: Autocritica
It was really easy, even if we only had charging stops planned at OMV eMotion stations (in the countries where they were available), which is the tour’s charging partner. But there are several other good networks that you can use—the biggest and best one is Ionity—and all an EV road trip needs now is for you to take a few minutes to plan your trip.
Sure, having to plan your trip isn’t as easy as getting into your combustion car and just driving, knowing that there will inevitably be a gas station somewhere along the way. However, you can use your EV’s navigation system to plan your route, and it will plot all charging stops along the way for you. Some will even tell you what the state of charge will be as you approach each station, give you alternatives if a charger is offline, and will even tell you how many charging stalls are available.
Eurocharge 2025 Transfagarasan
Photo by: Autocritica
So on the first two days, we mostly did highway driving at 81 mph (130 km/h), which meant falling short of the electric vehicles’ claimed WLTP range numbers. This ended up not being an issue because there were enough fast chargers in Romania, Hungary and Austria (again, only OMV eMotion was used for this trip) that even the Hyundai Inster, which has the tour’s smallest battery and lowest claimed range, was perfectly acceptable to drive hundreds of miles per day.
Late on the second day, we arrived in the Austrian Alps, and our hotel was located near the small town of Saalbach, which was a great starting position to explore some of the most famous local mountain passes. The most famous (and impressive) was the Grossglockner pass, which offers both spectacular scenery and a wide range of corners that will quickly reveal a car’s bad handling habits.
The first time over the Grossglockner, I drove the Audi A6 E-Tron Quattro, which is the first non-crossover vehicle built on the VW Group’s 800-volt PPE platform shared with the Audi Q6 E-Tron and the electric Porsche Macan. It was a great mountain road companion with plenty of power, sharp handling that hid its length and weight and a very good adaptive air suspension setup keeping body roll in check around the bends.
Eurocharge 2025 Transfagarasan
Photo by: Autocritica
But I expected the electric A6 to be good. I didn’t expect the Hyundai Inster, which I drove the second time up Grossglockner, to be as good as it was. Even though it looks like a character from Cars—all it’s missing are eyes on the windshield—and you expect it to feel a bit top-heavy around the corners, it’s actually really planted, has surprisingly positive steering, and has just about enough punch to get a little bit of wheel spin out of corners.
Photo by: Autocritica
It was a great companion around the famed twisty road, and the tall windshield gave me the best possible look at the stunning snow-capped mountain peaks and glaciers in the distance. I didn’t for a second want to be in another car while driving the Inster on that road, which wasn’t something I expected to feel before actually getting to drive it. It’s getting a dedicated review soon.
Photo by: Autocritica
Next, I drove the Mazda 6e, which is a rear-wheel-drive electric sedan closely related to the Changan Deepal 07. Our tester had the smaller 66 kWh battery pack and a single 254 hp motor driving the rear wheels. It’s relatively light for a sedan its size—4,303 lbs or 1,952 kg—and drives really well, as you’d expect from a Mazda.
It’s fairly efficient too, and on the day I drove it, which included going over the Furka and then Grimsel passes in the Swiss Alps, it showed an average consumption figure of 3.5 miles/kWh (17.8 miles/kWh), featuring a lot of spirited driving around the mountain roads, including the fantastic 12-mile (20 km) winding ribbon of tarmac up to the overnight stay in the small town of Arosa.
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Source: Autocritica
If only the 6e’s driving position was lower and the reach adjustment for the steering wheel allowed you to bring it closer to the driver. This was my biggest gripe with the car, which is otherwise pretty impressive, and it draws a lot of looks. We were even asked by people on the mountain passes about the car, which didn’t happen in any of the other EVs we drove on this trip.
Throughout all six days of the trip so far, charging was never an issue. Even driving these EVs quicker than the average driver might on some of the mountain roads and using up more electrons than we should have, we never got range anxiety. Even though the cars used more juice going up the mountain, they recovered a significant chunk of range going down, and charging at one of the plentiful 300+ kW stations dotted along major roads, topping them up to 80%, was quick, and it never felt like we were waiting around for them to charge.
Photo by: Autocritica
My takeaway so far is that you can drive an EV, even one with a relatively small battery like the Inster, up a mountain pass (or two) and hardly even think about when you’ll have to charge. Before this trip, I thought the pressure to plan for a charger would loom over and spoil the fun of such a long drive, but I got none of that over the past week. You do have to scout out charging locations beforehand, but otherwise it’s just like a road trip in any car, regardless of what powers it.
So if you can go across the Alps in an EV, have fun around some breathtaking roads, and not have it ruined by the pressure to charge, it means you can replace your current combustion car with an electric one, regardless of how many miles you do every day, week or year.
Holding on to your old combustion car is also a sensible and eco-conscious thing to do—don’t scrap it if it still runs fine—but when it does conk out, getting something electric brings far fewer compromises than you might think, and plenty of advantages too.
Photo by: Autocritica
For instance, the day I spent in the Mazda 6e, when we covered 306 miles (493 km), cost between €40 and €79 euros depending on the electricity rate, which varies from station to station (even within the same network sometimes). We only charged once for 17 minutes (at a 300 kW Ionity station because OMV is not present in Switzerland), which was just enough time to get it to 81%, grab a quick bite and stretch out after many hours behind the wheel.
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Source: Autocritica
It is worth noting that the range of temperatures we encountered was between 50°F (10°C) and 77°F (25°C), which means the EVs were operating mostly in their ideal temperature window. Doing a trip like this in the height of summer when it’s scorching out or in the freezing depths of winter can reduce the range by more than 30%, but if you plan accordingly, it shouldn’t really be an issue. Winter road tripping across Europe could be a topic for a future edition of the Eurocharge trip up into the frozen north of the continent.
For now, at least, this trip was proof that the future can be electric—no excuses. At least, that’s the case in much of Europe these days. Now, we all get to wait for the rest of the world to catch up.
