The EV Benefit on Road Trips You Really Can’t Talk About

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When I wrote about the #1 benefit of EV life being the #1 thing people worry about before getting an EV, I knew readers would chime in with some excellent comments. One comment in particular, from Kiryn Silverwing, triggered this followup article. Kiryn wrote:

“It was less the time it took to get gas than coming home tired after work and telling myself ‘I’ll just get gas on my way out tomorrow’, forgetting I needed to do that, and either being late or risk running out of gas to get there.

“With an EV, I just plug in when I get home as part of my routine, so needing to refuel just stopped even being a thing I think about outside of road trips.

“On road trips, I actually enjoy the more leisurely stops where I go get a meal, shop for snacks, or even just take a walk to stretch my legs. I find I actually want to do those things when I stop on a road trip, but in a gas car it felt like I was wasting time taking a walk when I could be getting back on the road instead.”

There are two key points here. Let’s roll through them one at a time.

First of all, yes, I actually forgot what that’s like. With a gas car, how many times are people exhausted after work or a long trip or a busy day transporting kiddos around, then decide they’ll postpone filling up the gas tank until the next morning, and then forget about having to leave home earlier than usual to do that? Who knows, but that already shows how much less convenient the gas car fueling process is compared to the EV home charging process. On the way home from a long day at work, an exhausting trip, or a busy day transporting kiddos around town, one does not dread plugging the car in at home! It’s a super easy, no-hassle, quick process that requires almost no thought or work.

But it’s the second part that triggered this article. Road tripping is where EV life can get tricky. It depends. And when it depends, that’s when it gets hard to explain the options and even some of the benefits of EV life — without sounding like a nutjob, at least. First of all, yes, the person does have to have a decent spread of EV charging options along the route they are planning to drive. You can’t really know if that’s the case when talking generally with someone about this topic. Assuming there are good charging options along the route, though, most of us turn to the same basic point — the time you need to go to the bathroom, grab a coffee, grab a bite to eat, let the dog pee on something, and stretch can typically be combined with charging stops and there’s not much difference to your travel time. That’s fine — easy to explain and hard to find a fault with. It does still depend on charging station availability and decent EV range if you want to get very close to gas car travel time, though. That said, there’s an actual benefit to taking it a little slower on a road trip anyway! This is what Kiryn points out, and I fully agree, but it’s super hard to feel comfortable trying to explain this to people.

Most of us grew up with the same mindset: on a road trip, drive for as long as humanly possible before stopping for gas or food or the bathroom, and then get back in the car and on the road as quickly as possible. It’s all most of us have known. I learned approximately a decade ago that it’s actually recommended to take a break every couple of hours. But, come on, who’s going to do that? Well, for any of us with an EV in the early days and limited charging options — or perhaps more recently in a region or on a route that’s still not very well developed — we’ve done that. And I think most of us have learned that we actually enjoy that way of road tripping! You do feel more fresh, more relaxed, and less fatigued when you take breaks to stretch and walk around every two or three hours.

Unfortunately, I think that you really can’t convince people this is a nicer way to take a road trip. You can’t effectively explain the discovery until they experience it for themselves. It’s just too much of a departure from what we’re all accustomed to. But, hey, we can at least share the good vibes amongst each other!