Conversely, I think most Americans don't get how big the UK is, or how much longer it will take to get around than you think.
Look at a map of Scotland. If you start at Glasgow on the west coast about a third of the way up, and drive to Scrabster, the northern end of the A9, that will take you at least 9 hours too.
Driving time in Scotland is largely due to road size/design, not absolute distance. Once you get north of the Glasgow/Sterling/Edinburgh zone, you have a few “major” dual carriage ways and a lot of smaller roads. And the Highlands and Hebrides have single track, so if you’re going to a small coastal village or similar, you might be stopping every few miles to let somebody by in the other direction.
And let's not forget the weather. In some times of the year the North of BC might as well be on another planet considering how accessible it is.
Consider a San Diego - Boston route, which crosses pretty much the whole US (OK, not Alaska), is around 3000 miles and 45 hours net, give or take.
This compares surprisingly well to a route between Lisbon, Portugal and Tallinn, Estonia, which crosses pretty much the whole of Europe (OK, not the nordic countries, also not even the UK), is around 2700 miles and 44 hours net, give or take. And this is not even an extreme, for example a Gibraltar - Tromso, Norway route (South - North) is 3300 miles, and would take more than 55 hours!
It is also easy to forget that Europe (the continent) does not stop at the EU borders. But some might consider adding the Russian plains cheating!
I think most Europeans would have built high speed railways to get around in half the time to be honest.
So the train is approximately freeway speed.
10 hours via car at highway speed - 5 hours with train
For long distances you'll be using the TGV (300km/h) if you need to go to smaller cities the trains will go roughly at highway speed
But, just about every major and secondary city in the EU has high speed rail service. As you move into central and Eastern Europe, the speeds drop quite a bit, but are still faster than anything Amtrak offers (except the short section of Acela line that can actually go fast).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bf/Hi...
On the other hand just the province of British Columbia is the size of a good chunk of all of western Europe added together, in square km, and can take a very long time to get from Vancouver to somewhere in the far north (or a far off coastal location by combination of roads and ferries), due to its many mountain ranges and thousands of km of coastline.