My brother lives in Maine and has two electric cars. I have one and travel in Maine a few times a year. It's a particularly bad state for charging. I'm not sure why that is.
That's in spite of the range issue, and is due to the Norwegian government carrot-and-sticking heavily towards electric. Maine has no such incentives, and is sparsely populated, which doesn't play to the strengths of electric cars.
Makes it much easier if there's already infrastructure.
Norway shows that you can have EVs in a place that is very cold if you shovel cash at buyers. It doesn't prove that weather wouldn't be a central factor in a place like Maine.
1: https://www.oecd.org/climate-action/ipac/practices/norway-s-...
Bar Harbor, the destination of most of the out-of-state Teslas, has almost nowhere to charge. I went to a hotel once which promised to have 4 level-2 Tesla chargers. All of the spots were occupied by ICE trucks. I went in to point out this problem to the clerk. She shrugged her shoulders and said, "they're probably our customers." Apparently the chargers were just there to lure in suckers. "Yes, we have chargers, but good luck using one. They tend to be parked in by ICE pickup trucks. We're helpless to do anything about this." I failed to check to see whether the trucks had Maine plates. They didn't look like typical customers of this hotel.
Around Portland things are a bit better. And new stations are being put it. It's just behind neighboring states.
- It's a cold state in winter and there's at least the perception that you don't want an EV in places with cold winters. (I see few enough Teslas in the wild in exurban Boston.)
- It's a relatively poor state.
- I imagine pickups and the like are disproportionately represented.
- It's big and sparsely populated as you say.
A friend of mine who lives in Boston but owns a house on a bunch of land in northern Vermont finally got a Tesla when he convinced himself there was sufficient buffer for weekly trips between the two places.