> We would have to drill/ replace/ rip up thousands of sidewalks to add chargers to every parking spot (or even most).

We do all of that every day as a matter of "natural" maintenance cycles, most roads last only a few years between necessary resurfacing, normal activities like construction/reconstruction, utility maintenance, etc continually shift/replace/rip up sidewalks as just the organic life cycle of a city.

Of course it sounds daunting to think about doing it all at once in a major upgrade. But we already have continual processes happening that would benefit from adding electric requirements, and in which adding electric requirements isn't much different from existing zoning laws and regulations (modest modifications to existing street lamp requirements and parking space requirements).

> so you need large batteries, higher watt charging, and more stations all over

No, so you/we think you/we need those things. I don't think America's issue is even that political at this point, it's (a sad) mixture of a failure of imagination, the resistive momentum of the status quo, and the love of outliers/passion for the tales of "Spiders McGee" equivalents.

The old weird anecdote that the average person each 3 spiders a year turning out that that mean was hugely biased by a single "Spiders McGee" that supposedly ate 10,000 spiders a year. The median and mode were both zero. The average person, by two of the three average forms ate zero spiders. Whenever we define "average" we need to remember how exactly we count those averages and stop falling in love with excusing weirdos like "Spiders McGee" at the expense of the median/mode.

Right now the EVs sold in America have the battery size to more than meet the median/mode of American travel even taking into account America's love affairs with suburbs and long, high speed highways. The existing distribution of stations can already handle the median/mode of American long distance travel. (In terms of raw highway coverage at least, if not yet some weird idea of theoretical "full capacity", and yes that will only get scaled out as people start to use them.) Even the the current "low watt charging" ("trickle") in most homes can easily meet the median/mode of day-to-day/week-to-week driving of the "average" American.

We're letting visions of some "perfect" EV that can travel 500 miles on a charge, recharge in 3 minutes, in any random American neighborhood gas station cloud the reality that statistically no one needs 500 miles on a charge, recharging a full 500 miles in anything less than 30 minutes, or recharging "everywhere" that traditional gas is sold. The vast majority of American trips are 40 miles or less. Trips of 300 miles or more in a single run are already suggested to take half-hour breaks every so often to stretch/eat/relieve bladders and avoid driving problems such as driving when too tired, driving without enough human fuel, driving while damaging bladders and important muscle groups. Even just trickle charging at boring American wall outlet power at home or at work or at anywhere else our car is parked for long stretches of time (and by far most cars spend a lot more time parked than driving) greatly changes the economic game versus traditional much more "centralized" models of gas stations.

Sure, nearly every American we all have our tales of those 12 hour straight drives with nothing but the wind to our backs, the snacks in packs, the bottles we eventually grossly pee in, but those trips as oddly romanticly as we recall them are outliers. We shouldn't be using such visions as such big forces in our cost analysis of what constitutes a viable EV today, shouldn't just keep relying on "well I might want to do that once or twice a year" as some sort of resolute line in a sand driving us to large batteries with capacity rarely used, higher watt charging for charge times rarely needed, and more stations "all over" for trips rarely taken.

If America "won't do it for a long time", it isn't because the country is vastly "different", it's because the country is so vastly and weirdly disillusioned, drastically underestimating the economic distinction/difference of trickle/at home charging, and in love with its own weird stories of being "different" over practical reality where it isn't as different as it thinks it is statistically or that cannot be improved.

(America once had the greatest passenger rail network in the world. That was a story that Americans told ourselves made us great. It was told just as romanticly as we culturally give to our tellings of those 12 hour highway trips in cars. A lot of the suburbs that "require owning a car" were still planned and started being built when it was expected they'd be served by rail/light rail/trolley. We've forgotten, but the bones are still there.)