This is my second time renting an EV. First time wasn’t too bad. We stayed local and only had to charge once.
This Thanksgiving we had to drive from Chicago to Omaha to Minneapolis and back to Chicago. It was approximately 1400 miles total. $289 in electric charges. (that feels a lot more expensive than gas). We had to stop every 2 hours to charge for an hour so it extended our trips by 50%. This was quite challenging when we were in a caravan of cars and the ICE ones beat us by several hours. A 6 hour drive turned into 10 hours. I shaved off a few hours by always running the car down to the last couple miles and charging it to 100%. One time was not by choice as we almost ran out due to a dead zone. We were then charged $50 to fill up 3/4 tank at an EA in the middle of Minnesota. That was kind of our breaking point.
Some positives are it was a smooth ride and felt great in the snow.
We wanted to buy an EV but wanted to see how they fair on road trips in the midwest. This experience may scare us away for a while as it was exhausting stressful and expensive. Wondering what we did wrong since so many enjoy EV.
Thanks for the honest review. That is quite expensive for the mileage you traveled. Even at a modest 3mi/kw, you should have only used about 467kw. Tesla Supercharger rates in my midwestern area are typically 0.37/kw, which would have cost you $173 for the trip.
As others have mentioned, stopping your charging at 80-90% might have saved you considerable time vs going all the way to 100%. That’s the nature of EV charging curves. In the end, if you need to “cannonball” a lot of distance in a limited number of hours, ICE may still be your best bet at this point.
I think you’re being generous here with the mileage. 3 mi/kwh isn’t modest for the EQB, much less in the frigid Midwest. I’m assuming OP was using heat generally with the kids and probably got close to 2 mi/kwh .
Right, the EQB is a brick. Going by OP number, it was $289 and assuming $0.43 per KW, that’s 672kWh. For 1400 miles that’s 2.0 miles/kwh.