Originally published at: My First 700-Mile EV Road Trip—What Worked and What I’d Change - TidBITS
As I wrote in “Living with Digital Key 2 on the Hyundai IONIQ 5” (6 April 2026), I recently took my first long trip in an electric car. While I’m still far from an expert, I learned a lot and am looking forward to our next trip in June.
For this trip, I drove from Ithaca down to Arlington, VA, near Washington, DC. The trip was about 350 miles, and our Hyundai IONIQ 5 has an advertised range of 269 miles. I knew that the advertised range was far from guaranteed, but as you’ll see, it’s merely a starting point when planning how far you can actually drive.
Starting Charge
In fact, the first question is what constitutes a full charge. Generally speaking, electric vehicles prefer to keep their lithium-ion batteries between 20% and 80% charged, just as Apple optimizes charging for the MacBook, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. You might think of 80% as the effective maximum, but that’s just leaving miles on the table. There’s no problem with charging an electric car to 100%—you just don’t want to leave it there. The ideal scenario is to charge the car so that it hits 100% just before you have to leave.
I didn’t do that. I intended to, but the Tuesday night before I was scheduled to leave on Thursday morning, I got really sick and felt sufficiently horrible all day Wednesday that I planned to cancel the trip entirely. So I interrupted the IONIQ 5’s charging at 88%. Happily, on Thursday morning, I woke up feeling fine, so I decided that if I could get enough done before lunch, I would leave after lunch and skip the conference’s welcome reception. I re-enabled charging, but we’re using only a 110-volt outlet at 8 amps (0.88 kW), so we can add only about 1% of battery charge per hour. I wound up getting it only to 90%.
A brief aside so the units below make sense. Charging speed (power) is measured in kilowatts (kW), while battery capacity and energy consumed are measured in kilowatt-hours (kWh). Think of it like water: kW is how fast the faucet flows; kWh is how much fills the bucket. The IONIQ 5 has an 84 kWh battery.
Takeaway #1: Plan to start trips with 100% charge to provide more headroom when planning stops.
Planning the Route
Numerous apps and services show you where EV chargers are located, and you should amass a collection of them. I currently have PlugShare (an essential aggregator of charger locations with ratings and reviews that can tell you whether a charging location is worthwhile) and the apps for the Electrify America, ChargePoint, EVgo, and Tesla networks. They all provide maps of their charger locations, often with information about which chargers are broken or in use. But the real reason to download them in advance is so you can set up accounts ahead of time, rather than fussing with them at charging locations. It may be possible to pay with just a credit card, but I didn’t want to bet on that.
All that said, the best starting point seems to be A Better Route Planner (ABRP), which combines a database of charging locations with highly sophisticated route planning. It started as a personal passion project in 2016, became a company in 2018, and was purchased by EV maker Rivian in 2023.
What sets ABRP apart is its attention to the myriad details that play into trip planning. It starts with your particular EV and then takes into account the current temperature, route elevation, how long you’re willing to stop, and, most importantly, the percent of your charge you want to arrive with. Give it all those variables, and it suggests several routes, much like Maps gives you several driving options. ABRP is free, but a $5-per-month or $50-per-year premium subscription also takes into account variables such as wind speed, temperature changes, live data from the car, and charger availability, plus CarPlay compatibility. In retrospect, I should have subscribed to the premium version.
ABRP recommended that I charge in Harrisburg, PA, which was perfect because I was planning to share a meal with our podcasting friend Chuck Joiner there anyway. It identified an Electrify America location with six stalls and a theoretical maximum of 350 kW charging, though the average was 180 kW. The distance was 218 miles, and ABRP estimated I’d arrive with a 10% charge. That seemed like enough to find a nearby alternative if something was wrong with the Electrify America site.
Takeaway #2: Make sure you have all the apps you’ll need, including ABRP, PlugShare, and the main charging network apps. Plan with ABRP, but verify charger data with the network’s app.
First Leg of the Journey
After lunch, I hit the road, with the IONIQ 5 counting down from its estimated range of 268 miles and Apple Maps from 218 miles, giving me what seemed like a reasonable buffer of 50 miles. I put the IONIQ 5 in Eco mode, and since it was a warm, sunny day, I kept the climate control turned off entirely so it wouldn’t use any additional power. Had it been winter, I would have needed the heat, which would have reduced my range.
I also used the IONIQ 5’s advanced cruise control features to keep to the speed limit unless a car ahead of me was going slower, at which point it matched that car’s speed until I decided to pass. From what I can tell, the best efficiency in highway driving comes between 50 and 60 miles per hour, though I wasn’t willing to drive slower than the 65-mph speed limit on I-81. I suspect that driving 70 or 75 would significantly increase energy usage and thus reduce range.
On this first trip, I didn’t quite internalize that the IONIQ 5 actually has three estimates: minimum, maximum, and one in the center in larger type. I don’t remember what the minimum estimate was, but it may have been more accurate—as I drove, I watched the difference between remaining distance and remaining estimated miles drop from 50.
At some point, I used the ChatGPT app in CarPlay to run the numbers and get an estimated percent charge on arrival. It reported that I would arrive with a mere 3%, which I found decidedly uncomfortable. Unfortunately, I was in a less populated area of Pennsylvania with very few chargers nearby, so when I chickened out, my best option was a 6.2 kW ChargePoint charger in Pottsville.
It used the hefty J1772 connector, and although the 2026 Hyundai IONIQ 5 uses the smaller, more elegant Tesla-originated NACS connector, Hyundai provides adapters for both J1772 (for AC charging) and the even larger CCS connector for DC fast charging.
I don’t know what the situation is with other EVs, but it seems to me that being limited to a single connector type would be extremely stressful. Some stations offer multiple plug types, but none of those I stopped at did. Even having the adapters made me consider physical security a bit more—if they were stolen during a trip, I’d be limited to Tesla charging stations until I could replace them. Not all EVs can use Tesla charging stations, even with an adapter, but I don’t yet understand all the variables there.
Takeaway #3: Make sure to get and protect adapters for the three different connector types.
Over the next 97 minutes, while the charger slowly added 10% to my battery, I sat in the car and wrote up the unexpected release of macOS 26.4.1. My charging session cost $0.48 per kWh, and I ended up paying $5.02 for the extra 10 kWh.
Takeaway #4: With appropriate hardware and connectivity, time spent charging doesn’t have to be wasted. Work has to get done at some point.
After all that, driving the remaining distance to Harrisburg didn’t consume as much energy as I had anticipated. I later realized why: it’s almost entirely downhill from Pottsville to Harrisburg. I arrived at the Harrisburg Electrify America chargers with 16% charge left, meaning that if I hadn’t stopped in Pottsville, I would have arrived with 6% charge—tight but not down to my last electrons.
Dinner and a Charge and Another Charge
In Harrisburg, Chuck Joiner met me at the Electrify America station, which was a little tricky to find—it’s worth navigating directly to the station rather than a mall or nearby store because the stations are often around back or in somewhat hidden locations.
Having set up my Electrify America account before leaving home paid off—I just tapped my phone to the stall to start charging at $0.56 per kWh. The MyHyundai app told me that I’d hit 80% charge in 38 minutes, and Electrify America provides a 10-minute grace period before charging $0.40 per minute for idle time. Even though Chuck and I ate at a nearby BBQ place that served us quickly, I still ended up paying for two extra minutes of idle time. Overall, the session cost $31.02 for 55 kWh, and charging speed maxed out at only 90 kW (it was advertised as a 320 kW station), presumably because other stalls were in use at the same time.
Takeaway #5: If you need to get a meal on the road, charging may take less time than it would to eat. Pay attention to avoid excessive idle time fees.
In retrospect, I should have set the MyHyundai app to allow the car to charge to 100%; I had set it earlier to limit both AC and DC charging to 80%, and in the excitement of seeing Chuck for the first time in years, I didn’t think to change it. Charging speed slows as the battery approaches 100%, but it would have been nice to have a little more time for dinner anyway. The IONIQ 5 charges more quickly than many EVs thanks to its 800-volt architecture, but charging times will vary by station, depending on their effective power output.
I had 134 miles to drive to Virginia and wanted to charge before parking the car for the next few days. That way, when I left, I’d have a reasonably full battery. ABRP had identified an Electrify America station at a Hyundai dealership in Alexandria, VA, not far from the hotel in Arlington. But I was navigating there using Apple Maps, and when I arrived, three of the four stalls were in use, and the fourth was out of order. Oddly, there was a ChargePoint stall right next to the Electrify America stalls, but when I tried to use it, it told me I wasn’t authorized and to talk with my EV Admin.
By this time, it was 11:00 PM, and I was getting tired. Luckily, there was another Electrify America location less than a mile away, with an open charger. I wasn’t as low as in Harrisburg and the max charging speed was 162 kW, so bringing the battery up to 80% took only 18 minutes. (I caught up on email.) When I connect a high-speed DC charger to the IONIQ 5, I swear I can hear a giant sucking sound as it pulls in the power. The session cost another $22.62 for 40 kWh.
I hadn’t planned to be doing all this late at night, but it worked out surprisingly well. Traffic was almost non-existent, rather than the expected scrum, and although I had to try a second charger, I got the impression there was generally less competition at that time of day.
Takeaway #6: It’s worth checking charger availability in real-time as you drive. Had I used ABRP’s premium tier with its mapping, or had Tonya been in the car to check availability in PlugShare or the Electrify America app, I would have gone straight to the second charger.
Driving Home
After the conference and spending the night at some nearby friends’ house, I retraced my route home. Although I could have chosen a different route and charging network, I was tired and feeling a little under the weather, so I decided to use the same Harrisburg charging station. This time, however, I made sure to increase the limit to 100% before trotting over to a Five Guys for a hamburger and fries. The MyHyundai app told me I had 45 minutes, and although I didn’t wolf down my food, I got back to the car with only 1 minute left. The session cost $31.47 for 56 kWh.
The rest of the trip home was uneventful—I continued to drive the speed limit and used the air conditioning only briefly a few times when the sun heated up the interior a bit more than was comfortable.
Here’s what’s weird. The first drive from Ithaca to Harrisburg consumed 84% of the IONIQ 5’s battery. That’s why I was so concerned about charging to 100% in Harrisburg on the way home. However, I arrived home with an unexpected 30% of the charge remaining—I had consumed only 70% of the battery. Why did the drive to Harrisburg consume 14% more power than the same drive in reverse?
At first, I thought it might be related to elevation. But when I checked the route elevation in Google Maps, I found there was 11,000 feet of climb to Harrisburg and 12,000 feet on the way back, the opposite of what might explain the difference. Otherwise, all the major variables seemed the same: speed, temperature, and use of climate control. The only remaining possibility I can think of is wind speed. If I were driving into a south headwind on the way down or with a south tailwind on the way home—or both—that could account for the significant difference in energy use.
For the next trip, I plan to subscribe to the premium tier of ABRP, which claims to account for wind speed and can communicate directly with the car for more accurate estimates. Because it also supports CarPlay, I’ll try using it for routing, which should also help adjust for charger availability as needed.
Takeaway #7: Assuming you have the time and don’t worry about hogging a charger for a few more minutes, charge to 100% while on the road.
One final note: For the entire trip, I spent $90.13 on public charging and drove 711 miles, which works out to $0.12 per mile. In our old Subaru Outback, I would have been extremely lucky to get 30 miles to the gallon, and gas was priced at about $4.29 per gallon. I would have consumed 23.7 gallons of gas and spent $101.67, or $0.14 per mile.
So while driving the IONIQ 5 cost $11.54 less and was way more fun, the Outback would have gotten me there faster, since it needed only one stop for gas the entire trip, eliminating the 97 minutes in Pottsville and the 18 minutes in Alexandria. But if I’d charged to 100% at home and not needed the Pottsville stop, I would have been comparing a gas station fill-up with the 18-minute stop in Alexandria—faster, but not hugely so.
I can’t wait for our next trip in June!
