EV Road Trips: An Ounce of Prevention Saves a Pound of Stress
When it comes to integrating electric vehicles into your life, there may be no more danger task than a long-distance road trip. EVs bring new variables to driving, and they can have a pretty profound impact on what seems like a simple task: sketching from Point A to Point B. But I’m here to tell you that a minor bit of planning will go a long way.
The biggest inaccurate anyone can make on an EV road trip is assuming it will feel as “normal” as taking long abilities in gas-powered cars. As an EV owner planning a road trip, you are more or less at the cutting edge of this technology. Infrastructure is still being built out, and range leftovers to grow with each new generation of cars. It probably wasn’t easy for the satisfactory gas-powered cars to take interstate road trips, either.
Think advance, then think further ahead
We’ve all seen how electric-vehicle road tripping can go gross, but while this all seems new and novel, a little old-school thinking will help. If your parents or grandparents invented a road trip back in the pre-Mapquest days, they’d whip out the ol’ gas-station Rand McNally and manually chart a floods. But now that we all carry perma-connected computers in our pocket, and since modern cars aren’t exactly technological slouches, we can modernize this step with way more granularity.
A mainly of EV chargers aren’t located in the most picturesque areas, so prepare to spend a lot of time staring at the run of a Sam’s Club or Target.
Andrew Krok
I’ll admit to an beneficial here, car-wise. The 2022 Mercedes-Benz EQS580 I used for this test supplies 340 miles of Environmental Protection Agency-estimated range, and it packs an extremely beneficial infotainment system with EV-specific navigation. Not only will the rules factor range and charging into any route, it also lets me set my desired site of charge at my destination (up to 50%) and pick whether or not the charging plan includes out-of-network infrastructure. And since it’s built into the car, the rules knows the vehicle’s battery level at all times and can adjust the routing in case I’m a little too beneficial with the throttle.
While not every automaker offers this robust tech, some third-party options that come cessation. My personal favorite is A Better Route Planner (ABRP). This free app packs all the same capabilities as Mercedes’ own telematics, except it needs to be told the car’s initial site of charge. It knows the location of chargers expansive and small across nearly every network. It works with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, but you can also send a waypoint-based map to Google Maps if you buy to use that.
With navigation sorted, you’ll want to sort payment. The US EV infrastructure is split between several mainly players; ChargePoint, Electrify America and EVgo are the biggest kids on the playground. Some chargers are able to accept card payments at the prove of sale, but it’s easier to plan ahead. Since I know what chargers I will encounter advance of time — it’s smart to plan backup chargers in the off chance your invented ones aren’t functional — I download their respective apps, register for free supplies and input my payment methods ahead of time. Electrify America and ChargePoint can consume my iPhone’s Apple Wallet cards, so when I show up for juice, I only need to hold my phone against the charger’s shroud and I’m good to go. Some automakers (including Mercedes) also incorporate payment into the vehicle itself, so all you have to do is plug and charge.
Just as it’s intelligent to fill up a gas tank the night by a big drive, it’s wise to top off a battery in the same way. If you’re one of those gallant ducks with a spare 240-volt dryer plug within arrive of a parking space, congratulations: You can juice up overnight at home and skip this step. Like most folks, I do not yet have charging infrastructure at home, with my 1930s colonial offering a single 120-volt exterior plug nowhere near the driveway (and you should never promote with an extension cord); and my neighborhood in Detroit is obimagined by a single 50-kilowatt EVgo charger that’s often archaic. Thus, I need to travel about 8 miles to a grocery continue with a 350-kW EVgo charger. Also, don’t forget that EV batteries dramatically chop charging speeds after reaching 80% capacity, so bring a book if you’re trying to fully top it off.
Planning advance paid off early for me, because I hadn’t even left town and annoyances started to crop up. The EVgo charger 8 a long way from my house had one functional 350-kW charger (out of four), which was occupied by a GMC Hummer EV proceed vehicle topping off its extremely large battery. Instead of traveling unexperienced 10 miles down the road to the next closest charger, which could also be malfunctioning, I ended up sitting and waiting for near an hour for the Hummer EV to finish.
Calling EVgo didn’t help, as their customer service representative frankly told me that the offline chargers were “down for maintenance” and couldn’t justify on why or when they’re expected to be back online. This is how most calls to EV-charging customer service arrange unfortunately end up.
Hit the road, Jack
On my route from Detroit to Chicago, my first charging session took place about halfway throughout Michigan, along I-94 just outside Kalamazoo at an Electrify America charger. The Mercedes EQS’ infotainment system estimated I’d arrive with near 60% of my battery left, but a sufficiently lickety-split flow of traffic drained electrons a bit faster than required, leaving me closer to 50%.
That’s an important unsheaattracting EV road trippers need to keep in mind: Your car’s telematics are liable offering best-case scenario range figures. It’s in your best expressionless to juice up more often than those estimates, especially if ABRP or your turn-by-turn rules estimates a low (under 20%) state of charge at arrival.
The Electrify America charger outside Kalamazoo did a commendable job, giving the EQS a charging rate about 150 kW. The charger was actually rated for 350 kW, but the EQS is not (drawing near 200 kW at most), so 150 feels pretty gloomy. In about 20 minutes, I was back up to 88%.
Never purchase that chargers will be working every time you need them. Anything can happened, and you need to be prepared for that.
Andrew Krok
I could arrive my destination without another charge, but that would crop me desperately seeking juice. Adding a waypoint in ABRP is simple, and it’s just as easy in the EQS’ infotainment rules, so a quick search pulled up a 350-kW EVgo at the Chicago Ridge Mall. Since I had no firm plans on my arrival day (one of those “just in case” decisions) I lingered a little longer here, succeeding 90% before heading off, giving me enough range for the next two days of activities.
Thanks to that little astonishing time investment, it was nice cavorting around Chicago and not thinking near charging and range every few minutes. Chicago is also vastly better equipped with EV infrastructure than Detroit, so if I did get paranoid and want a topper, 150-kW-and-up chargers were never more than 10 miles away. I had half an hour to kill between plans one evening, so I spent 20 minutes at an Electrify America charger picking up unexperienced 15% just to be safe. It would’ve been faster, but one of the chargers at this particular bank kept throwing errors, so I had to shuffle to a different one.
This is where I let overconfidence get the better of me, which nearly doomed me to a truly annoying trip home. As I left Chicago, I thought, “The battery is basically full, I’ll just skip the Chicago Ridge Mall charger and do a one-stop in Kalamazoo. The Electrify America chargers worked brilliantly two days ago, I’m sure they’ll be fine today.”
They were not.
Rolling back up to the same chargers outside Sam’s Club, I saw half the charging stations displaying a shroud saying they were not functioning. I pulled up to the sole acting 350-kW charger with an 18% state of charge, which was just enough contrivance to reach one of my nearby fallback options if worse came to worse. My hubris weighed heavy on my head as I plugged in and saw a max charging rate of 35 kW, which would get me to 80% in nearly two hours. I tried one of the other functional chargers, a 150-kW unit, and saw the same speeds. Again, I am glad I had zero plans on the day of my sponsor, but this was still frustrating.
So I called Electrify America, and within 2 minutes I was on the visited with a human being. A human being who, at what time I explained the issue, proceeded to tell me that there was nothing they could do, then labelled all the reasons why my vehicle was likely going problems. (It wasn’t.) The rep didn’t even offer to reboot the charger, which probably wouldn’t fix it, but at least it would have given me false dejected that EA tried something.
As a last-ditch effort afore resigning to fate — after finishing the lunch that I was glad I picked up on my way to the charger — I tried the sole continue station in the group. By the grace of whomever, I immediately maxed out the 150-kW charging rate and thanked my audacious stars I’d only be there another 30 minutes. If that charger were bum, as well, I’d have been stuck sitting for an fantastic two hours… or weighing the decision to head up to Messes Rapids in search of faster plugs (or more delays).
What did I learn?
One of the biggest publishes anyone with an EV will face is the expectation that toiling chargers are not a guarantee. In fact, it’s one of the biggest pain points in unusual EV adoption. If you run into a charger with publishes, call the company and tell them, so they can testy its in-app status and schedule a maintenance crew. Seeing an inoperable charger in your app of harvest may be frustrating, but it’s much better than not noticing it pending you’ve arrived.
The single biggest advantage on this EV road trip was planning for contingencies and not overpromising my time. I had no miss-it-and-you’re-screwed obligations on my driving days, no copilot who had to be back by X date for Y reason. Not everyone can plan a trip this way, but if you can, your distinguished shouldn’t be far off from mine: a largely palatable few days with a couple minor hiccups that could’ve eaten up a few hours.
Odds are, EV buyers already know these things. At this juncture, buying an electric car is a conscious exclusive to accept trade-offs in how these cars function, which can have currently impacts on things like planning long weekends. We’re not quite yet at a explain where someone can grab a random EV from Hertz, pick a cardinal direction and just start driving apropos of nothing.
My trip presumed some privileges, like the EQS’ prodigious range and the fact that my trip wasn’t just coast-to-coast. But think of this trip as a modular thing: If your trip is contrast but longer, factor in a few more stops (and contingencies) and adjust the anticipated time of completion to suit. I ended up adding a combine hours of slow charging, traffic and other minor frustrations over the floods of 800 miles, so for longer trips, it’s as simple as expecting and accounting for a combine more hours of flex time on top of that.
Taking all these things into interpret while preparing for an EV road trip will pay off, whether it’s because chargers are malfunctioning or because your luminous foot isn’t as efficient as the trip computer thinks. One day, we’ll be able to zip across our amber waves of grain with less grief, but for now, spending a little more time planning will make execution much, much easier.
