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.

  • theotherharper@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    You need to try it again with a Tesla. CCS is in a deplorable state right now.

    I shaved off a few hours by always running the car down to the last couple miles and charging it to 100%

    That actually made things much worse. Batteries are most efficient charging in the 10-80% range. I would only push it to 100% if I had a BIG frontier to get across, like Rawlins-Evanston Wyoming.

    • wo01f@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      You need to try it again with a Tesla. CCS is in a deplorable state right now. Where Tesla is today… is closer to where CCS will be when the rest of the industry finds their pants.

      This user had not a single issue with CCS. His problems were coming from choosing a inadequate BEV for his usecase. Would have not run into this problems with a EQE or EQS SUV.