An EV Roadtrip in 2023 — Watts on Watts

I used to spend a lot of time driving long distances in EVs. At Tesla, I traveled up and down the eastern seaboard to scout charging locations, negotiate with property owners, and represent Tesla at planning and zoning board meetings. In those days, between 2016 and 2019, there really weren’t third-party fast chargers to speak of. I relied exclusively on the Supercharger network to get me where I needed to go.

I haven’t done a long trip in an EV since the pandemic, so when a friend asked me if I’d be interested in joining her on a drive from Florida to New York to bring her dog back home, I figured it would be a good opportunity to evaluate the EV charging state of the union. To that end, I decided to rent an EV and make the drive from NYC to Orlando and back in six days.

Because the Tesla Supercharger network is a known quantity–the chargers are plentiful, reliable, and seamless to use–and my goal was to understand what the charging experience is like for the rest of the EVs on the road, I initially sought to rent the fastest charging, most reasonably priced, non-Tesla EV available. Right now that means one of the Hyundai/Kia offerings: the Ioniq 5, Ioniq 6, or EV6. Unfortunately those are not currently available from Avis, Hertz or Enterprise, and for an interstate road trip, Turo rentals are impractically expensive. Instead I rented a Tesla Model 3 Long Range from Hertz and resolved to utilize third-party chargers wherever possible. So I purchased a third-party CCS to Tesla Adapter on Amazon (ordering one from Tesla wasn’t an option because the company requires a Tesla VIN number). Just before leaving, I was also able to get hold of an official Tesla adapter from a friend.

This turned out to be an enlightening trip in ways I couldn't have expected. All in all, I drove 2669 miles in six days. I compared the charging experience at eighteen DCFC chargers and four L2 chargers across three networks. I experienced the sinking feeling that comes with experiencing charging failure with my vehicle at a single-digit state of charge (SoC), and the latent anxiety of wondering how much my range would drop overnight in the cold. I realized the challenges of route planning outside the Tesla network, and in particular, the importance of topography to the accuracy of range estimates. I learned the very real difference between having a long range versus medium range EV. I learned how resilient an EV can be in the case of an accident, as well as some of the pitfalls of renting one in these early days where it’s still perceived as somewhat exotic. And I was impressed by how cost-effective EV driving can be, even when using the relatively expensive electricity offered by public charging stations.

Charging Networks

Electrify America. The single biggest change to EV charging since 2019 is undoubtedly the rapid expansion of the Electrify America (“EA”) network. The first EA stations were just going live when I left Tesla, but now they are relatively ubiquitous, at least along the I-95 corridor that made up most of my southbound trip. These stations are spaced every 80 miles or so along major highways, and typically offer between four and ten relatively fast DC fast chargers, generally a mix of 150kW and 350kW posts. The overwhelming majority of my non-Supercharger charging was done at EA stations and I had a largely positive experience, with some minor snafus.

EA: The Good. In the plus category, I found the EA stations relatively reliable and usually placed in sensible locations. The chargers more or less worked as advertised, and while I did always spot at least one other car during my stops, I never had to wait to charge. I signed up for the monthly subscription for a very reasonable billing rate of$.36/kWh or $.29/min. I also very much appreciated the real-time availability data accessible not only in EA’s own app, but on Plugshare as well. While the stations were never full, a few times the sole 350kW charger was in use, and it was nice to be able to know that ahead of time. EA’s biggest advantage was the density of its network. I was generally able to plan a stop around an upcoming station without compromising my charging strategy too much. In fact, often they were located on the same highway exit as a Tesla Supercharger, allowing me to trick my car into preconditioning the battery by inputting the Supercharger as the destination, and simply going to the EA station instead.

EA: The Bad. But EA had a few issues. On the software side, though I appreciated the real-time availability data in the app and on Plugshare, that data wasn’t always accurate. Sometimes a charger would show up as “in-use” on my phone, when it clearly was not in use. This wouldn’t be too big a deal, if not for the fact that initiating the charge session in the app was the most reliable way to start charging, and that can’t be done if the app thinks the charger is “in use.” The other method, the “tap phone to initiate” function, had glitches. Some posts simply refused to acknowledge the phone, others beeped but failed to start the session.

There were also general hardware reliability issues. Some were minor, like a charger that made slightly unnerving rattling noises when plugged in, or CCS connectors that were missing superficial covers or had suffered other obvious external damage. Other issues were more serious: at about a third of the EA stations, at least one post or pair of posts was out of service altogether. Luckily, because there were multiple posts at every site this was only a minor inconvenience, but given all EA stations are relatively new, it was discouraging to see such a high failure rate. It also made me wonder how fast EA does repairs. As I write this, two weeks after I experienced a completely down charger, it remains listed as “under repair” on Plugshare, with second pair of chargers, a third of those available at the site, now broken as well. The NEVI guidelines require a 97% uptime for each port, which means 11 total days of downtime per year, so I’d imagine this may be a problem for EA soon if they want to take advantage of this federal funding.

EVgo. The only other third-party DCFC stations I tried were EVgo, but I quickly learned to avoid these. That wasn’t hard; EVgo stations are pretty much exclusively located in and around cities anyway. This meant that along I-95, there were zero EVgo stations in Delaware, North Carolina, South Carolina, or Georgia. EVgo hasn’t yet truly built a charging network; what it offers are standalone charging stations that may be useful to those who happen to live near them and provide very little utility to those traveling through. I did go out of my way to try one EVgo station that was listed as 200kW on Plugshare, and found myself sorely disappointed. This station boasted a ‘100kW’ Tesla connector, two ‘100kW’ CHAdeMO connectors, as well as two ‘200kW’ CCS connectors between two posts. Unfortunately, despite that 200kW rating, the system must be limited to 175A, because whether I was using the Tesla connector or CCS with an adapter, my charge was capped at around 70kW. As I’ve written previously, this discrepancy between the advertised charging rate and the actual rate is a function of the misleading way hardware can be rated: note that these chargers are actually fully compliant with the 150kW NEVI standard, notwithstanding how slow I found them in practice.

Tesla. The Tesla network proved to be as reliable as I remembered, and far faster. When I left Tesla in 2019, the 250kW V3 superchargers were just being deployed, and the 2170 cells in the Model 3 and Y (which charge significantly faster) were just rolling out as well. This combination, along with the mile per kW efficiency of the Model 3, makes for a pretty incredible charging experience. On V3 superchargers I routinely saw 250kW at low states of charge, which meant getting from 15% to 35%, adding 72 miles of range, in 5 minutes. Ultimately the only minor disappointment was arriving at a Supercharger to find it was an older V2 station, capped at 150kW (and charging at full speed also required not parking next to a neighbor).

Other DCFC Networks. I was unable to use any other DCFC networks during the trip. Even with a relatively low power filter of 70kW, it became clear that most of the other providers have almost no corridor charging presence, even along I-95. ChargePoint, which ostensibly has the second-most DCFC locations nationwide after Tesla, had a single station between NYC and Orlando. Blink had none. There are a number of non-networked DCFCs dotting the I-95 corridor, often located at Nissan, VW, Ford and Chevy dealerships, but they typically feature only one charger, and trying my luck at one of these at a low SoC seemed too much like tempting fate.

L2 Networks. I charged at L2 chargers only four times on this trip, and most of those experiences were positive. The first and last sessions were at the curbside Flo chargers under the Brooklyn Queens Expressway near my apartment. These are part of a city-sponsored program and have been reasonably successful in bringing L2 charging to the curb. Other than some peculiarities with the Flo app, which failed to display the real-time charging speed, everything worked seamlessly, though it was a bit expensive at an effective $.52/kWh (Flo actually bills per minute). I also charged overnight at a friend’s home and once for free at a hotel. I tried and failed to charge at a public parking garage in Charleston, but there the problem wasn’t the charger but the fact that after a minor road accident (more on this below), Hertz had given me a second Model 3 that was missing its Tesla J1772 adapter. I returned to my hotel with 10% SoC, grabbed my spare adapter, and attempted to use the L2 charger at an adjacent car dealership–only to have an automated security system loudly warn me that I was trespassing. I hoped the car wouldn’t lose too much energy overnight, and arrived the next morning at the nearest Supercharger with 4% SoC, or 10 miles of range to spare. This felt more like the EV ownership experience I remembered from 2016…

Trip Planning

Tesla. The other somewhat tricky part of the road trip was trip planning. With a Tesla, this is pretty straightforward if you plan on using the Supercharger network. You simply input your destination, and the car plans your charging stops for you (only at Superchargers), telling you when and where to charge, and how long you need to stay there. I do think the trip planner trends conservative, in that it doesn’t seem to take into account how much faster cars charge at a low SoC, but that makes some sense, given the high downside risk of owners not making it to their destination.

Third-Party Trip Planners. There are third-party trip planners like evnavigation and abetterrouteplanner that do an admirable job of replicating Tesla’s planner solution using data about the locations and availability of public charging networks. But they are not fully integrated into the car, which presents two difficulties. The first is that you find yourself fooling around with your phone while driving to use them, which is not very safe. The second is that if you find that you are using a bit more energy than expected (because, say, you’re driving over the speed limit), you will need to adjust your plans mid-trip. For Tesla vehicles, at least, abetterrouteplanner has a solution to the route-adjustment problem: it allows you to pass real-time vehicle data to the app through your Tesla account (a feature I could not use while renting from Hertz). Hyundai also added charging stop planning to their navigation UI a little over a week ago, but I have not yet been able to use it.

Most of the time, trip planning isn’t crucial–you can simply look at the car display for how many miles of range you have left and find a charging station within that range. Occasionally, however, your route may take you through some high elevation change, which can have a pretty dramatic effect on range. I first noticed this the day I drove from Charlotte to Asheville. During a stop in Spartanburg SC, I noticed the Tesla trip planner was indicating that I needed to charge to nearly 100%, for roughly 250 miles of range, though my destination was only 150 miles away. Having been to Asheville before, I knew this was likely because the road passes through the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sure enough, the car estimate proved to be reasonably accurate and this leg of the trip used around 30% more energy per mile than the trip average, even though I traveled at slower speeds. This also happened to be a stretch where the only DCFC chargers available were at EVgo stations that were capped at ~70kW for 400V cars. It’s easy to see how a driver not using a trip planner could get in a tough spot–at best, experiencing a much longer trip than expected, thanks to slow charging, and at worst, getting unexpectedly stranded. While I didn’t experience it on this April/May trip, cold weather can have a similar effect on range, so it is wise to leave a significant buffer when traveling in the winter months.

Medium vs Long Range EVs. After I took a hit from a flyaway truck bed cap (more on that in the next section), I was forced to trade in my Long Range for a Standard Range Model 3. On the bright side, this gave me a chance to directly compare the two on trip planning and charging. The Long Range Model 3 has an 82kWh battery and a rated range of 358 miles, while the Standard Range has a 50kWh battery and a rated range of 272 miles. For 99% of the driving most people do, the Standard Range is more than sufficient. Long road trips represent a tiny fraction of journeys; more than half of American car trips are less than six miles and only 5% run over 30 miles. It takes an extreme situation, like driving 2700 miles in six days, to really notice the difference in range.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the biggest difference I felt between the Standard and Long Range cars isn’t ultimate range, but charging speed. As I’ve written elsewere, EVs don’t charge at a constant rate. The battery is generally the limiting factor on speed, and lithium batteries charge faster at lower SoC. Charging speed is also proportional to the size of the battery, with larger batteries able to take on more energy in a given time than smaller ones. This is why I saw as high as 252kW in the Long Range Model 3, but never more than 170kW in the Standard car.

Most people tend to stop every 3 hours (200 miles) or so on long journeys, especially when there are children or animals along for the ride. Without accounting for charging speed, one might think that both vehicles would perform similarly under these constraints. In practice, the Long Range car arriving at 10% SoC would need to charge to 66%, a task that takes as little as 15 minutes, while the Standard Range would need to charge to 84% to cover the same 200 miles between stops, which takes twice as long due to the battery charging slower at higher SoC. Again, an extra 15 minutes for distances that represent less than 1% of trips taken is not a big deal for most users, but it does add up when covering nearly 1000 miles in a day. What might be more meaningful to owners is the effect of a medium range car on charging options along secondary roads like the aforementioned Charlotte to Asheville route, where there are 100+ mile stretches with zero DCFC options.

The EV Accident Experience

I count myself lucky in that I have never been in a car crash. That’s still true after this trip, but I did experience an incident that highlighted some of the advantages and inconveniences of EVs.

While driving through South Carolina, I was horrified to see the folding truck bed cap of the GMC Sierra in front of me fly into the air and tumble, spinning like a leaf, towards me. Knowing there was a car in the lane to my right and that I could not entirely avoid the errant panel, I slammed on the brakes to give myself the chance to run over it rather than have it come through the windshield. Ultimately the car didn’t quite slow enough, and the cap managed to wedge itself in the narrow grille of my Model 3.

Luckily, the driver of the truck realized what happened and pulled over. I called the police so they could file a report, then called Hertz for next steps. Hertz informed me that the nearest facility where I could bring the car and exchange it for another EV was 200 miles south, in Jacksonville. I know from experience how hard it is to get a single tow truck to travel that far, and so did the Hertz operator. She asked me whether the car was driveable. I confirmed that it was for the moment, but that the radiator was leaking, and there was a good chance it would not make the full distance.

I decided to get as far as I could. The HVAC system blew hot, the sound system had been disabled (because of damage to an external speaker/horn wire), and the undertray had been partially torn from the front of the car, but I was more or less good to go. After the operator reassured me that Hertz was okay with me making the attempt, I used an extra shoelace to tie the undertray to the bumper to keep it from dragging on the ground and started on my journey.

The Good: Driving without a Cooling System. After about five minutes, the car registered that it was low on coolant and capped my speed to 65 miles per hour, then 60, but my top speed remained stable for a half an hour. As the outside temperature increased, the allowable speed decreased to 55, then 54. The car display confirmed that the car was “Safe to drive,” and it appeared to be regulating its power output to ensure the motors and battery did not overheat. I made it 150 miles before I needed to stop to charge, by which point my speed had dropped to 50 mph.

Because charging puts as much (or more) heat into the battery as driving, I suspected that topping off to reach my destination might result in the car locking up. So I waited until the last possible moment to charge–when I was under 10% SoC–to shorten the likely tow to Jacksonville as much as possible. That prediction proved accurate. Though the car charged normally, I made it only about 200 feet from the charging station before the car flashed the “PULL OVER SAFELY” message and promptly shut down. Eventually it did allow itself to be moved again, but it was unclear how far I’d make it. Four hours later, I was towed the last 50 miles to Jacksonville, where I was able to quickly exchange the damaged Model 3 for a new one (but unfortunately only Standard Range cars were available).

While this might seem like a failure, the experience was significantly better than what would have happened in any ICE vehicle. The fact that I was able to travel 150 miles after damage to my EV’s radiator speaks to a distinct advantage of an EV over an ICE vehicle. Any ICE vehicle’s cooling system requires high pressure and is absolutely critical to the vehicle’s basic function. Driving an ICE vehicle even a few miles with such a badly damaged radiator would have resulted in overheating and even permanent engine failure if ignored. Meanwhile, some EVs (like early Nissan Leafs) have no cooling system at all, and the ones that do operate at relatively low temperatures and pressures. Though these systems serve a function–they increase the amount of power that can be put into or removed from the EV motor and batteries–without them, the cars can still operate at reduced load.

The Bad: Beware the “Exotic” EV Insurance Policy Carve-out. Renting an EV does come with a potential downside, which did not become clear to me until later. Because my Chase Sapphire credit card includes rental damage coverage, I declined Hertz insurance on my Tesla rental. The Chase coverage is known to be good and reduced the rental cost by about a quarter. But it was a close call: only after the accident, when I googled “Chase Sapphire rental insurance,” to learn the process for filing a claim did I see the alarming fine print. Chase Sapphire Preferred excludes “high value or exotic” vehicles from the rental coverage policy: these are defined as “Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Bentley, Corvette, Ferrari, Jaguar, Lamborghini, Lotus, Maserati, Maybach, McLaren, Porsche, Rolls Royce, and Tesla.” To be clear, one of these things is not like the others. The Tesla Model 3 and Model Y, which represent an overwhelming majority of Tesla sales, are hardly “high value” as far as cars go; they are just above the average price of a new car in the US. It was stunning to me that they were excluded, especially given that Hertz had just bought 100,000 of them. Fortunately, after stressing for the remainder of my road trip at the prospect of being on the hook for the repair costs of the Model 3, I realized that my card, the Chase Sapphire Reserve, offers a flat $75,000 of coverage, with no specific car brand exclusions. I got lucky, but the Reddit forums on this subject make clear that others have been burned by this seemingly arbitrary policy.

Cost

Cost was not a factor on my last significant EV road trip because I was in a company Model S with free supercharging for life. This time around I was interested to see how the trip would work out financially, on everything from the rental experience to charging at the public fast charging networks.

Rental Cost. All in (excluding insurance coverage), renting a Long Range Model 3 for a week with unlimited miles cost $341. That made it the cheapest possible rental by a pretty significant margin. An ‘economy’ rental of a Chevy Spark or similar ICE vehicle for the same period would have cost me $564. Surprised by the difference, I happily booked the Tesla. (Hertz’s favorable rental rates for Teslas might have something to do with the lower maintenance costs.)

Driving Cost. As for the cost of driving, in total I spent $180 (including two free charges) to drive 2669 miles. Even factoring in prevailing rates for those two free charges, the total would have been under $200. On the other hand, if I had driven my personal 2017 Subaru Outback, which gets a respectable 27 mpg on the highway, the trip would have cost $352 in fuel alone (at the $3.57 national average regular fuel price). It is somewhat hard to believe that renting a brand new car and driving it 2700 miles came out to only $200 more than just the fuel cost of driving my own vehicle.

Conclusions

On long journeys, EVs still require a bit more ‘savvy’ than ICE cars. On this trip, I occasionally applied the ‘Mom Test’: Would I reasonably expect my mom, who is more tech savvy than most, to do this? For a road trip in a Tesla, the answer is yes. The process of navigation and trip planning is sufficiently simple and automated that I’m confident she could handle it. Would I send her out in a Hyundai armed with Plugshare and abetterrouteplanner? Absolutely not. There is still significant work to be done on network density and integrating the user experience if we want road trips to be as easy in an EV as in an ICE vehicle.

But all in all, this was a fantastic trip. Before this, I already had 50,000 EV miles under my belt, but it’s clear to me that a lot has changed in the four years since I last regularly relied on public charging networks. As I mentioned, my personal car is currently an ICE vehicle, largely because I street-park in Brooklyn and I use my car mostly for my 250-mile trips to Vermont. I thought that having an EV(especially a non-Tesla) without dedicated charging here in NYC would be too big a hassle, adding too much time to an already long weekly drive. As it turns out, that view is a little dated for a few reasons.

The non-Tesla charging networks have gotten much better since 2019. EA, while not without its problems, never let me down on my trip and provided cost effective, truly fast charging every time.
Curbside L2 charging is really convenient, and the experience reinforced for me how critical they will be for widespread urban adoption of EVs. The stations I used near my apartment worked well, if a little pricey. I just hope the city doesn’t stop building them, as they were sometimes completely full.
Modern EVs charge fast enough. The Model 3 Long Range isn’t even the fastest charging car on the market, but the ability to acquire 200 miles of range in about 15 minutes is more than sufficient for long trips. I’m sure cars will continue to get faster, but for the first time this felt more or less the same as ICE pitstops, which is a significant milestone.

This trip convinced me that it’s time to trade in my personal vehicle, so expect a future article on the used EV buying experience.