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-branded chargers and are the fastest way to charge and only work with Tesla vehicles) to make sure that running out of juice would never be a problem.

In my car, when you punch in a destination using the built-in navigation (which is quite good) it will tell you what battery % you will have when you arrive at the chargers. In all cases, this estimate was accurate with the largest deviation being about 3% over (meaning I had more juice than anticipated) when I arrived…again, trust the car is something I needed to embrace but years of technology failing me left me a bit anxious.

Supercharging locations vary widely but the majority of them are near the highway and easily accessible. I didn’t have too many issues finding them as the car gets you close enough to them but some are tucked far away at the end of a parking lot. Also, many of them were in Meijer (a large grocery chain in the US) parking lots and I am here to tell you that I spent more money at a Meijer on this road trip than during the past 5 years of my life.

Because of my choice to stop frequently, on the drive down at least, at most stops I only needed to charge for about 10 minutes. If I would have gone with Tesla’s route, it would have been fewer stops but durations closer to 30 minutes. But during my stops, I would go into Meijer’s, buy a small snack, water, use the restroom and be on my way. There were also a few stops that were in hotel parking lots and would be a preferred choice if I needed to stay somewhere overnight.

I am sure more places will add charging to their parking lots in the future – after seeing how many people were flowing through these charges on my one trip, it would appear that places like Meijer are seeing increased foot traffic from people like me. Considering that all you need is electricity, I hope that one day every hotel will also be a charging spot, not the exception to the rule right now.

I did not pay for “Full Self Driving” which costs $10,000 but what my car does have is “Autopilot” and I am here to tell you that it made driving by myself incredibly easy. Yes, you have to pay attention all the time but you are more co-pilot than pilot. The car will stay in its lane, steer, and take over all the driving controls and I had several stretches where autopilot was engaged for more than 100 miles.

There are other cars that have features like LKAS (lane keep assist) and TACC (traffic-aware cruise control) but I am here to tell you that this is not the same thing. Autopilot from Tesla is not perfect and Joe User is ruining it for the rest of us by trying to take a nap with the feature engaged but when used as intended, it made my trip significantly easier.

Autopilot worked well enough that I would consider a cross-country solo journey, it really is a game-changer in terms of long-haul road trips.

When it comes to charging, as I noted above, not all chargers are created equal, and doing a road trip in an electric car that is not a Tesla would be exponentially more difficult. But Tesla chargers have varying degrees of functionality that can make your charging experience better or worse (foreshadowing).

The short version is that there are two versions of Superchargers, those that charge at 125KW and those that charge at 250KW. The ideal charger is getting a 250KW (this is known as a V3 charger) and it can charge your car at a rate of up to 1000 miles in an hour – this means much shorter stops; V1 chargers will charge at around 500 miles in an hour. Keep in mind that it’s not a linear charging scale, the closer you get to 100%, the slower it will charge – V2 chargers are the optimal way to go for now.

But there are other types of chargers and charger networks including Electrify America (thank VW for this as part of Dieselgate settlement) and tons of third-party charges that are often called level 2 chargers.

As a rough breakdown, there are three types of chargers, level 1 is your standard wall outlet, level 2 is what I have in my garage and typically tops out around 60 miles per hour charging rate and level 3 which is Tesla Superchargers and some Electrify America/Third party networks that charge at higher rates. But each charger can be different, I already noted how Tesla’s own Superchargers are not all created equal and the third-party networks are a mess of understanding their capabilities and are more expensive to use than Tesla’s.

One of the charging challenges with Tesla’s or any car today is finding a charger at your destination. If your hotel doesn’t have a charger or there isn’t a Supercharger nearby, it can be a bit stressful. Thankfully, our destinations did have Level 2 chargers nearby at restaurants and in our condo complex that allowed me to charge as needed.

But again, not all destination chargers are created equal – Tesla sells a Level 2 charger that many locations use but if they use a 30A breaker instead of the optimal 60A breaker, your charging rate will be much slower and can extend the length needed for your car to stay charging.

And that is if there is room at the charger. For Tesla Superchargers, you can see how many stalls are open ahead of arriving which is quite helpful for cities that have multiple locations. In any major city, you will have a couple of options to choose from for charging a Tesla but the 250KW stations will be more popular.

The complexity doesn’t end there, though, as older Superchargers often share lines with two chargers. Meaning, your car can charge at up to 125KW on a V2 charger but if a car is parked next to you charging, then your rate is split between the two cars(there is a max of two chargers on a single line so it will never be cut by more than 50%). The newer V3 chargers do not do this but again, not all chargers are created equal.

Tesla’s are good at telling you what amenities are available at each charger (food, bathroom, hotel, etc) but it’s only that type of listing, the details of the names of the establishments are missing. I would recommend if you are traveling via electrons to download the PlugShare app. This app will tell you where all available chargers (Tesla and non-Tesla) on your route and at each stop, it tells you restaurant names, reviews, etc (it is a social network but explicitly for what’s around charging stations and reviewing charging stations).

And it is that review of charging stations that’s important. On occasion, a Supercharger will have a few bays that are offline and this is the best way to discover that before you arrive. If a Supercharging station is offline for maintenance, and I did see this happen on my trip, the car will not offer it as a possible location to stop. This is a good thing as it means you should not end up at a charger that’s offline but that doesn’t mean specific bays are offline – this isn’t any different than a single gas pump being turned off at a gas station.

That’s a lot of details about charging but the reality is for the majority of the time, the complexity won’t impact you. But it’s worth knowing about and paints a picture of how moving to electricity is different than using gasoline.

There are other considerations too – a gasoline car is typically less feature-rich than an electric car when parked. What I mean is that my Tesla can always be ‘on’ while parked but a gas car is not really ‘on’ unless the engine is running.

This being ‘on’ has a couple of advantages as my car has Sentry mode that if the car detects movement near the car, the cameras will record the person. This is helpful because if someone dings your car or tries to break in, the cameras on the car will capture the person and hopefully you can track them down to get them to pay for the damage or get your stolen goods back.

The other feature is “cabin overheat protection” which, as the name states, will keep your car from getting too hot in the direct sun when parked. When the car reaches 115F, the AC will turn on, cool the car off, and keep it from damaging any of the interior components.

The downside to these features, especially when parked in a busy parking lot in the direct Gulf coast sunlight, is that the battery will drain when you are not driving the car. In one day where my car was parked in a high-traffic location, the battery drained 30 miles in a day and my storage drive filled up with Sentry mode events from people walking or driving by. Thankfully our complex had a charging station within walking distance so it was easy to charge and these features can be turned off manually – they will also automatically turn off if your battery is below 20%.

The reason I bring this up is that for locations where charging options are not as plentiful as my location, you will likely want to either factor in the battery drain with these features or turn them off to avoid the stress of running low on juice.

The return journey home with the family, while the drive was easy, the journey was much longer. We hit multiple storms on the drive home that brought traffic to a stop and a couple of accidents slowed us down frequently. While nothing was wrong with the car, the more frequent charging stops and traffic put a strain on the good vibes of the vacation.

And at what was supposed to be our very last stop, we landed at a V2 station that was busy and our charging time was doubled. We ended up leaving this location early, to go to another V3 station to get the rest of the juice we needed to make it home.

After driving 1500 miles in the car there are a couple of takeaways from the adventure. The first is that if you are driving solo, Tesla’s autopilot is game-changing but other vendors like Ford’s Blue Cruise or Chevy Supercruise also have similar features but they are much less proven than Tesla’s product. Yes, there are people who have soured the Autopilot name because they tried to take naps but when used as intended, it’s fantastic.

The second big takeaway is that the Tesla is great if running solo but the way our family does road trips, it’s not optimal. With my wife’s car, when we road trip, we typically drive 3 hrs, fill up, switch drivers, 3hrs again, etc. This is the fastest way for us to travel and when a road trip starts getting past 5 or 6 hrs, the Tesla is less appealing when we are traveling together.

A few short years ago, driving across the US in an electric car was an adventure because charging was sparse and electric vehicles did not have the range to make it more than 150 miles. Thus, range anxiety was a real thing. Following this road trip, there really is no longer range anxiety in my car; the Tesla software has enough fail-safes in place that if you run out of juice, it’s because you ignored multiple warnings. By the end of the trip, I am ready to ‘trust the car’.

One thing to consider as well, if I were to pay for this trip using the Supercharger network, it would have cost me around $40 round trip (I had 2500 miles of “free” charging available for referrals) but for this trip, it was free. If I was driving my wife’s gas car, it would have cost about $225 in fuel.

The reality is that electric cars are the future as every manufacture is now selling or will soon be selling vehicles in this category. And as more manufactures sell more cars, more charging locations will come online and it will become even easier to drive long distances as technology improves for charging and range.

While on the one or two 1000 mile road trips each year, we may not take the electric car as it simply isn’t the fastest way to get to our destination but the fact that it’s possible without any real planning or makeshift charging stops is fantastic. The rate of change from gas to electric is quickly ramping up and seeing charging locations, while still rare when compared to gas stations, is becoming more common.

Electric vehicles aren’t for everyone, yet, especially if you love long road trips and take more than a handful per year. Then you are better served with an ICE car, for now, but I don’t think we are too far off from reaching a point where electric vehicles are not just an option, but the best choice for all drivers.