Gordon Chaffin: Road trips tough with an electric vehicle

The most important thing you need to know about electric cars is that they’re now sufficient for the overwhelming majority of instances Americans drive. Their batteries hold enough energy for multiple days’ worth of commutes and around-town errands. They charge quickly enough to replenish overnight from the same kind of outlet that powers washers and dryers. There’s one area where today’s electric vehicles fail, however: road trips.

I needed a weekend away last month, so I rented a Chevy Bolt to visit my parents in Michigan. The Bolt belongs to a Sterling, Virginia, family that lets people borrow their car via the Turo car-sharing app. Most of the EVs available through the app are Teslas, at a higher daily price. I wanted something that would be more affordable for me to rent and for the average American family to buy. The 2017 Chevy Bolt with a fast-charging port, at around $44K sticker minus a federal tax credit of $7,500 at the time of sale, is that.

After using Metro and then Uber to get to the house in Sterling, I picked up the keys from the owner and headed out. I planned a route via Plugshare, which uses Google Maps with a layer identifying public charging points.

I was prepared for my journey, but several factors transformed what should have been a 10-hour drive into one lasting 24 hours (each way):

• Fast-charging points (50 kW) are rare across the country. You’ll find a dense collection of the slow-charging stations (6-8 kW). Maryland, Pennsylvania and Ohio have hundreds of the slow chargers — but only dozens of the fast-charging variety.

• Fast-charging points aren’t necessarily along major roads — I found them in rare and remote places, like the parking lots of universities and Walmarts, and at malls that were empty at 4 a.m. To get to such spots, I had to go out of my way, making the route 25 percent longer. The more miles you cover, the more charging you need to do, so the longer your trip.

• You get much less than the advertised charging speed. Electric vehicles are available now with a range of more than 200 miles from a 50 kW charge. The 2019 and 2020 models go up to 80 kW, but America’s fast-chargers tend to max out at 50. And you get less than those rates for many reasons: weather, battery condition, charging speeds that become slower as the battery fills up.

• Ballparking from my experience, you’ll want to budget two hours at a fast-charging station for a full charge in these 200-plus-mile EVs. For a 500-mile day and three meal breaks, while charging, that’s more than 16 hours. Do some back-of-the-envelope math and you realize moderately long drives will end up taking a full day or more.

• I shouldn’t have even bothered with the slower, Level 2 EV chargers. Assuming you have any kind of schedule to keep, you’ll never add enough miles to the battery to make up for the time you lose. It’s not worth it to plan your route with anything other than the fastest chargers.

• I didn’t identify enough Plan B chargers within a reasonable distance given the many times I ran into a malfunctioning charger. You can’t let the battery get down to the point you can’t drive somewhere else to charge. This happened to me, but thank God there was a standard wall-outlet nearby and I had the right adapter.

• As far as charging speeds and durations, you need to forget about the promises of car manufacturers. I mistakenly took to heart the ads touting “90 miles of range in 30 minutes.” When planning, knock off 25 percent from the marketing materials.

That’s a long list of hassles, frustrations and mistakes that highlight the impracticality of long-distance travel in an electric vehicle. In theory, the charging speeds and growing network of chargers make road trips possible. But there’s just no way I could recommend taking an EV outside your safe zone of home, work, school and errands around town.

However, road trips are an edge case for car ownership: most Americans seldom drive very far. If you’re a two-car family, I highly recommend buying an EV for commuting and errands, while keeping one gas car for road trips and heavy cargo. Install a 220-volt/Level 2 slow charger in your garage to recharge your EV overnight. Lobby your apartment building to install one — or seven — in the parking garage.

If you’re only going to have one car but want an electric vehicle, then plan on renting a car for any long trips. Otherwise, the ideal owner of an EV in 2019 is a retired couple who travels without haste and early adopter/enthusiasts of technology and environmental innovations. You need to be motivated to learn basic physics and do more planning than you’re used to with an automatic-transmission, gas car. You also need to have the finances and desire to spend $45K for a car in the $30K feature range, with a $15K battery slapped onto it.

That said, electric vehicles blow the doors off gas cars on any definition of efficiency and engineering. Paying attention to the workings of your car inspires marvel at the ability to turn electricity into kinetic energy. It is insane, on a fundamental level, that we sit in two-ton hunks of metal with hundreds of explosions happening every minute mere feet from us. It’s ludicrous we burn about as much dinosaur juice to get up a hill as going down it when the energy required for climbing is much more than for descents.

This is the electric car’s magnificence: I left Cornucopia Cafe in Grantsville, Maryland, with 80 miles of range and I reached the Hagerstown Valley Mall 87 miles later with 18 miles of range left. The thing added 25 miles back to the battery as I was descending Maryland’s mountains. Your gas car just burned 87 miles’ worth of gas.

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Gordon Chaffin is a reporter for Street Justice, a daily email newsletter covering transportation and infrastructure throughout the Washington region.