Going Electric: A 1500 Mile Road Trip (Premium)

When deciding to buy an electric car, we knew that for about 98% of our driving, our Model Y would be optimal – no gas, low maintenance, and a mostly comfortable ride. But there is one area that was a known point of potential friction, road trips.

The move to electricity means a lot of things change but one new item that comes with the ownership of an electron-swallowing automobile is range anxiety. Meaning, you are concerned that you will run out of juice in the middle of nowhere without a way to charge. In a gas car, this is not much of a concern as fuel stops are all over the place but with electric car charging, it’s easy but also complicated.

Technically, any place that has an outlet can be a place to charge your car but not all outlets are created equal and not all charging locations are created equal either. It is a bit confusing at first but once you figure out the networks and infrastructure, it’s not too bad but it’s different than stopping at Shell for a quick fill-up.

For our first road trip, because of a need to go down early and meet with George, the CEO of our company, I drove down by myself and on the way back, my wife and daughter would be with me.

As of the time of this post, there are a couple of universal truths that are the takeaways: It will take longer to reach your destination but it will also cost less to do so.

My journey started at home in Cincinnati and it is almost perfectly 750 miles, one way, to the destination in Orange Beach, Alabama. My car has a range of about 315 miles which means on paper, you could do it in two stops but in reality, it took five as I was approaching this trip conservatively.

Before heading out, it is quite easy to plan your route – at least with a Tesla. There are thousands of charging stations with the majority near highways. You get in the car, punch in your destination and it will route you with the fewest amount of stops on your journey. But fewest does not mean optimal.

There are sites like ABetterRoutePlanner.com that will provide optimal charging times and locations that can get you to your destination faster. Batteries do not charge at the same rate, when it is near 0, the car will charge much faster than when trying to charge from 80%-100%. This means that you can spend less time charging if your stops are in the 0-80 range of charging but this goes against Tesla’s method of getting you to stop less, Tesla would rather you charge to 100% to reduce stops, and thus, reduce congestion at their chargers.

The net result is that I used ABetterRoutePlanner to map my route and I ended up stopping at all of the chargers on my route for a couple of reasons.

First, I was driving by myself, this means that I was stopping about every 2hrs to charge and could take a mental break which is good for the 13hr trip. The second was that while I knew I should “trust the car”, I didn’t and wanted to stop at all the Superchargers (these are Tesla-bran...