EV Road Trips Are Doable, But They Need to Get Easier

Part 3 of our EV road trip chronicles, in which I offer 6 tips for your EV road trip, plus 5 improvements we need in the U.S.

There’s no EV in this photo, but we made it to the Grand Canyon in our EV!

Can you do an EV road trip in the U.S.?

Yes.

Is it as easy as it should be?

No. No, it’s not. But it will get better, and I think that will happen very soon.

In the meantime, I’ve compiled some tips for those who want to attempt such a trip — followed by improvements we need to make EV road trips easier.

Tips for EV road trips

Rafael and I made it home from our EV road trip on Saturday evening, with no serious mishaps along the way. We even fit in a quick (and totally worthwhile!) side trip to the Grand Canyon. But it wasn’t as easy as some make it out to be. As we push for more EV adoption (along with much better biking and public transit infrastructure, please!), it’s important to be realistic about the situation so that people know what they’re getting into. That includes providing a few tips to make your EV road trip go more smoothly.

Special thanks to Russ Mitchell of the LA Times and Nathan Wyeth of Link for some of these tips.

1. Pick the right car

Okay, this is not an easy one. Most of us drive the car we can afford, and for us it’s not a Tesla. I’m used to flying coach instead of first class, but the EV driving experience makes you very aware of how much more is available to those who can drive “first class.” Some places where we stopped had 20 or more Tesla fast chargers, which we couldn’t use, compared to four to six “coach” chargers for people like us. At our last stop, all four were working — which I mention because it was so rare. Typically, only half of the chargers were operational. Meanwhile, we only ever saw a few Teslas at their ample charging stations.

You can’t even see all the Tesla chargers in this photo, and many Tesla stations had fewer cars charging than this one at the Harris Ranch in California, a state with way more Teslas than any other. By the way, this is a very nice, comfortable lunch stop that we highly recommend.

A friend with a 2016 Nissan Leaf has pointed out that he only gets 50–100 miles on a full charge — not to mention that the type of charger his car uses is less common than others. Thanks, Greg, for being an early adopter! But the sad reality is that Leaf drivers like Greg, who helped move the EV industry forward, are going to have a much harder time undertaking a long EV road trip.

I’ve been seeing articles about future EVs that will have a 600-mile range, which will be amazing. But for now, cars like the Chevy Bolt provide a happy medium for many of us.

2. Plan ahead

At every stage of our trip, even when we encountered difficulties (see part 2 of our chronicles), I felt like we experienced a lot of good luck. But as Rafael reminded me, at least some portion of our luck was based on solid preparation. 

You might not create a detailed spreadsheet like we did — though I highly recommend it for a multi-day drive (see download link at the end of this post). But at the very least, download all the charging apps you expect to use on your trip. Some of them require signing up and entering your payment information, something that’s best done in advance.

We didn’t have all the apps we needed, so we did have to download a couple on the spot; doing this ahead of time will prevent any downloading issues if you’re in an area with bad reception or are running out of data.

All the EV charging apps that are now on my phone, including a couple I’d never heard of before our trip.

We used A Better Routeplanner (ABRP), PlugShare, and Chargeway to plan our route and the others to get more details on specific networks or to activate charging. I recommend ABRP for your main planning, but we had to triangulate a bit using the others, and ABRP sometimes led us astray in terms of what route to take, which charging stations were available, and how long we’d need to charge. The world of EV charging apps is not perfect.

When we arrived in Mojave, the chargers we had planned to use were roped off in an area that was under construction. We probably could have used an app to find an alternate charger nearby, but I’d already made a note of one on our spreadsheet, making it quick and easy to change course. 

We didn’t have issues with credit card readers, but one tip I got was to ensure that your credit card chip and magnetic stripe are working before you head out. Apparently, some EV charger credit card readers are finicky. You can also order charging cards from networks like ChargePoint and EVgo that work with their chargers.

3. Use large charging networks and look for clusters

We had the best luck using established fast-charger networks like Electrify America, many of which are located at large retail centers. I don’t love Walmart, but I visited more Walmarts on this trip than I have in my whole life (not an exaggeration). They often had the only chargers for miles around, and with four to six chargers at each site, at least some were likely to be working.

Charging at a Walmart in Winslow, Arizona.

In addition to picking sites with multiple chargers, it’s a good idea to plan your charging stops in locations that have clusters of charging sites. Good-sized cities like Albuquerque and Bakersfield provide many options, while smaller towns might have none. Some locations, like Taos, have only slow chargers, which could take all night to charge your car fully. 

We visited the Earthship community outside of Taos, New Mexico. You can tour some of these water- and energy-sufficient houses made of rammed earth and tires. Wouldn’t this be the perfect site for fast chargers?

4. Stay at hotels and parks with chargers

It’s not always an option to charge where you sleep, but more hotels are providing chargers — and at the moment, there isn’t heavy competition to use them. Some charge you for using the chargers, and others are free. 

We were pleasantly surprised to find plenty of free slow chargers at the Grand Canyon; many national parks are now featuring chargers. Slow charging isn’t a problem if you’re spending the night or going on a long hike while you charge. 

Gratuitous photo of the Grand Canyon, where we arrived just in time to see a rainbow.

We did stay at one hotel that didn’t have a charger; in that instance, we stopped at a nearby Walmart to charge up on our way out of town while enjoying muffins and coffee.

5. Pack an umbrella

I know, this sounds weird. But most outdoor chargers are unprotected from the sun, making glare a serious issue when you’re trying to follow instructions on a screen. Umbrellas came in handy more than once on our trip.

6. Allow enough time — and check road conditions

It could be tempting to test the limits of your EV’s range. There may be times when you have no choice, if charging stations aren’t plentiful. But when you can, it’s a good idea to stop more often and ensure you’re charging enough for the next leg of your journey. For me, sufficient charging meant having enough minimum mileage to cover the distance needed with a bit of a buffer. You might get better mileage if the road is flat and all other conditions are right, but why push it?

Our starting mileage for the trip after charging fully at home; I’d go by the 192 minimum shown to ensure arriving at the next stop with enough juice.

It’s generally recommended to charge up to 80% when on the road, because after that, charging slows down. But we found that it didn’t slow down as much as we’d expected at the fast chargers, and sometimes it was worth it to charge for a bit longer when we were about to embark on a long uphill stretch. 

I was glad we’d done that when one part of Route 40 heading into Gallup was closed, forcing us to take a longer detour. Checking your GPS in advance to see if there are any issues on the next part of your trip can help you decide how much to charge.

Whatever your risk-taking comfort level, there’s no doubt that all charging stops will add time to your EV road trip (much less time, of course, if you drive a Tesla). We found that about six hours of driving made for a full day, and some days our total driving time was less than five hours. Charging could take two to three hours, but we used the time well by eating lunch, doing a bit of work, or shopping. Sometimes we ended up charging more than we needed because we took our time doing those things.

Improving the EV road trip experience

Although Rafael and I felt like EV pioneers, we did meet other drivers taking long road trips. Some of them had done little planning and relied solely on their apps. Some had encountered major problems and delays; others seemed blithely unaware of any potential issues.

It was good to see that we were not alone. But EV road-trippers are still a minority, and as long as people keep taking road trips, that needs to change. (I did daydream a bit about what it would be like to take a trip like ours on a train; we’d need a better train system and better public transit at our destinations to make that workable for most of us.)

What will make EV road trips more accessible and less nerve-wracking?

1. More working chargers

If we’re going to meet the EV goals of the Biden administration, California, and let’s hope many other states, we need a robust charging infrastructure. That means many, many more chargers — and those chargers need to be in working order. 

Luckily, the Biden administration has set in motion a plan to install EV chargers every 50 miles along interstate highways over the next five years. By 2030, we should have 500,000 charging stations, compared to the 47,000 in place now. Some of the funding for this project is allocated to operating costs, so we can hope that will mean reliable maintenance. Five years from now, you won’t need articles like this one.

Less of this, please!

2. Fast chargers that everyone can use

We really need one charging system that works for all cars. The Bolt can use J1772 and CCS chargers but not Tesla or CHAdeMO chargers. Why do all but the Tesla charger types have these weird names, you ask? I’ll let you do the research if you really care (start here and here), but that would be a good thing to change along with standardizing all chargers to work for all EVs.

You can purchase various adapters that will work for some situations; an adapter for Tesla destination chargers might let you charge at those, but not at the more ubiquitous Tesla fast chargers. You have to do a fair amount of research just to determine which adapters you can use. The system needs to be much simpler — and Tesla needs to open up its chargers to everyone, as the company has been claiming it will do.

3. Shaded chargers

A charging improvement you don’t hear about a lot would be providing shade so that you could more easily read the charger display — and not have to charge in the blazing sun or pouring rain. Solar carports are the obvious solution, as they would also provide energy for charging. While these installations are becoming more common, we didn’t encounter a single one on our journey.

4. One app to rule them all

Having to switch constantly from one app to another doesn’t make for an easy EV charging or road-trip-planning experience. If anyone wants to develop a robust, reliable app that will work for all charging, I’m telling you there’s a market for it. Of course, that would require cooperation among the various charging companies, so I’m not holding my breath. But I can dream, can’t I?

5. Longer battery range and ability to charge fast

Whatever you think of Tesla, they’ve done a great job at making charging super fast. Bruce Hodge of Carbon Free Palo Alto pointed out that according to the ABRP app, our route to Albuquerque would have involved just two and a half total charging hours in a Tesla, compared to seven and a half in our Bolt. This has to do with both the charger speeds and the capacity of the cars to accept a charge.

I got slightly different results from Bruce’s when I mapped out our route with ABRP as if I had a Tesla, but that was likely due to the specific Tesla settings I entered; charging times were still much shorter than in our Bolt.

When those 600-mile-range cars arrive and become more accessible, charging speed won’t be as much of an issue (researchers are also working on speeding up battery charging speeds). The combination of more chargers, longer-range cars, and faster charging will, I hope, soon make this post look quaint.

• Part 1 of our EV road trip chronicles: EV Pioneers

• Part 2: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the EV Road Trip

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EV Route Planning OAK – ABQ

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For details on our planning, driving time, charging costs, and charging times, see this spreadsheet.

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