iondrive

[iondrive]

As the automotive landscape changes from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, can we still make long distance travel the way we used to?

I recently took a trip from about 50 miles north of San Francisco to downtown LA in our Polestar2 and learned a lot about the current charging in the wild. One of the many beauties of an electric vehicle is the ability to pull in to the driveway on empty and leave the next morning with a full charge but I was weary about how reliable the public fast chargers were.

I plugged in the destination and native google maps app asked me if I would like to add charging stops as I would need them to make it to my destination. I left with 90% charge and a reading of 220 miles to empty but the maps picked 3 stops on my 450 mile journey to charge. The first spot had a one of four stations that had an error but the unit next to us worked and we were off.

On the way down we stopped for as long as we could manage. Entertaining our selfs with local shopping, food and a game but into the infotainment system. Yes, manufacturers other than Tesla do that too. The goal was 30 mins per charge and it is was often the case that shopping always took longer than than but it did feel like the car was driving the schedule. We arrived with over 40% state of charge.

On the return leg was a whole different story. We realized the programming was really set to avoid you getting anywhere near stranded and we could probably make it with one long stop in the middle. We also saw that google tells us how long we should be staying at each stop and we had been staying twice a as long as we should have. This time we had a 10-15 min restroom stop on the first quarter and the third quarter with a 1 hour sit down dinner in the middle. Now the trip is based on our needs and the car is just the tool to get us there. The future of EV travel is here… well, nearly.

At the last charge stop we left with a projection of 2% remaining when I arrived home but I have had experience pushing those limits and knew it was over conservative. Worst case would be another 5 minute charge but I didn’t and arrived back home with 11%. I call that a win