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.
I’ll say that a 1400 mile road trip on a holiday weekend in the snow in an EV that isn’t known for its road tripping prowess is basically the worst case scenario.
I don’t know how frequently you make such trips but that’s like a once a year thing for me. So a bit of inconvenience there is offset by the other 363 days of the year when my car is charged each morning in my garage.
In a Model 3 in non-snowy weather my usual pace is a 10-15 minute stop every 2 hours or so of driving. With the Supercharger network on similar drives I have had lower costs as well.
As others have mentioned usually charging to 100% along the way is slower than charging to 50-60% and continuing on. The percentage at which charging slows down depends on your car. Some chargers charge per minute instead of per kWh so those longer charge sessions may have contributed to the cost.
A trip like that is once a year but we do frequently make 400 mile trips. That seems possible if we could find reliable fast chargers on the way.
He/She could have rented a Bolt or Nero.
FWIW, I got an Ionic 6 about a month ago. While waiting to get my home charger installed, I charge 12 hours overnight with the included L1 charger, at a rate of 0.6 kw per hour. Once a week, I go to the nearby Electrify America charging station to juice up. From 30% to 60%, it charges at about 125 kw/hr. From 60 to 80, it slows to about 80 kw/hr. The one time I tried to go to 90%, as soon as I hit 80%, it slowed to 5 kw/hr. I disconnected.