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.

  • gtg465x2@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    You had a bunch of things going against you:

    1. EQB is a fairly low range EV.
    2. EQB only has mediocre charging speed.
    3. You charged to 100%. Charging slows down drastically above 80% in pretty much all EVs, so the fastest way to road trip is to drain the battery down to 10% and only charge to 60-80%, making more frequent, but much shorter stops. It requires a different mindset than filling up your gas car completely, but it works.
    4. It was probably very cold, which is the worst case for EV efficiency.

    If you were in a longer range EV with faster charging and didn’t charge so high, charging probably would have only added an hour to your 6 hour trip in cold weather, and maybe 30-40 minutes in warmer weather, which can be offset by eating and using the restroom during those charging breaks.