This is short term until all the automakers get their vehicles switched the J3400 NACS connector. Then the J1772 & CCS connectors will eventually be phased out.
BTW, most don’t know there also are 3 main fuel nozzles: small ca.13/16” diameter (20.6mm), intermediate ca. 15/16” (23.8mm), and large ca. 1-3/16” (30mm). They are used for unleaded gasoline, light-flow diesel (used for cars small trucks/SUVs), and high-flow diesel (used for heavy duty trucks), respectively. The main problem is when there are both diesel & unleaded gasoline dispensed from the same pump unit; even though there are separate hoses for diesel & gasoline, the small nozzle will fit in the diesel filling port (the reverse is blocked by the restriction port in the gasoline cars).
I did some testing on 436 mile trips between Northern and Southern California in 1974. I saved the most fuel driving 65 rather than 70 or 55. However at 55 it took about 8.5 hours, at 65 about 7.2 hours, and at 70 only about 6.75 hours. I never considered the amount of fuel saved offset the longer driving time.
Adam: I own a 2023 Ioniq 5. I’ve done several long road trips, winter and summer. It sounds to me like you’re over-thinking this (as I did in 2023). First, I’d suggest that before you start paying for ABRP you try the native navigation app. It knows all the fast charge stations and their current status. It is much better at estimating the actual state of charge and available distance, and as pointed out above, will activate the battery conditioning automatically. If you want accuracy from ABRP, you’ll probably want to buy a OBD Bluetooth device to provide it better information. Sadly the Ioniq5 will kill Apple Maps navigation - you can’t use both at the same time. (If you want better integration between native navigation and Apple Maps, there’s BMW) Second, here’s how I think about a long drive. I have to stop either for a bio-break and/or a coffee every 2-3 hours. That usually takes me from 80% to 20%. I visit the washroom and the get a beverage/snack and by the time I get back to the car (about 20 minutes later) it’s back to 80% (even with a 150kw charger). Charging above 80% is much more time consuming, I might do it at home (less pressure on the charging system with level 1 or 2 charging) but not on a Level 3 charger.
When the lease on my Mazda CX-5 expired, I initially considered the Toyota bZ4X EV as a replacement. It was new to the market, boasting an advertised range of over 310 miles for the 2WD model and 280 miles for the AWD version.
However, when it came time to actually sign the paperwork, the dealer advised against going fully electric. He warned me that owners were reporting actual ranges far shorter than advertised—closer to 217, or maybe 250 miles. This discrepancy makes sense given that I live in a hot, sunny, and humid climate where the air conditioning runs almost year-round. In heavy, slow-moving traffic (which we have in abundance), the climate control drains the battery without getting you any closer to your destination. Even when the car is parked, the battery slowly depletes; local insurance companies mandate a dual anti-theft satellite tracking system to avoid skyrocketing premiums, which creates a constant parasitic draw on the power.
“Take the RAV4 Hybrid instead,” he suggested. I took his advice.
Having driven the RAV4 for over two years now, my takeaway is that its true benefits shine during short trips and in stop-and-go traffic.
My old Mazda CX-5, with its 2.5-liter engine, consumed about 3.9 to 4.3 gallons per 100 miles. During my first year with the RAV4—which also has a 2.5-liter engine—my consumption dropped to roughly 2.7 to 2.8 gallons per 100 miles. That’s a nearly 50% improvement in fuel efficiency!
In my second year of ownership, my daily driving distance decreased, and I rarely use the car for long road trips. As a result, my efficiency improved even further to about 2.5 gallons per 100 miles. For comparison, I used to get only about 310 miles out of a full tank in the CX-5, whereas the RAV4 gives me an average of 500 miles per tank.
The hybrid powertrain truly excels in slow traffic, seamlessly alternating between the electric motor and the gas engine to maximize efficiency. Unsurprisingly, though, when cruising at highway speeds almost entirely on combustion power, the fuel consumption is quite similar to what I experienced with my old CX-5.
I’ve recently been pondering whether my next vehicle should be an EV. Given my current driving habits and shorter daily commute, going fully electric makes a lot more sense now than it did two years ago.
Meanwhile, I’m also keeping an eye on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. They are completely zero-emission, with water being their only byproduct. They operate by combining oxygen from the air with hydrogen from the tank, extracting energy from that chemical reaction to either drive the wheels directly or charge a battery that powers an electric motor. While they are gaining popularity in Europe and Asia, they still aren’t a practical option in my neck of the woods (or in America generally) due to a severe lack of hydrogen fueling stations.
Adam, from your running experience you should know how much wind can make a difference! Compare your effort/speed on an out-and-back with-against the wind. Although cars are more aerodynamic than humans (!) there is a huge effect – you can feel it if you draft behind a semi at the right distance. It seems the apps should find the wind direction/speed from weather apps and factor that in.
Well, Adam, thank you for a very thorough article. You have well illustrated why I will never own an electric vehicle. I know they are supposedly better for the planet, but the amount of planning and stress involved in ensuring that a long journey can take place without stranding is simply not worth it.
I am in the UK, where the charger situation is probably worse than in the US. My Audi could have comfortably managed each leg of your journey on one tank full of gas, with fuel available everywhere without difficulty.
I do believe that electric vehicles are the future, I just don’t think the technology is quite there yet.
Here’s what I learned from this: you can torture someone halfway to death without their noticing just so long as you give them a couple of readouts and apps to provide the illusion of control.
What a delicious splurge to briefly turn on the AC in a hot car for a few luxurious secs! And thank god you didn’t need to use (gasp) heat. And if you had to wolf down a meal with a long-lost friend in 38 minutes flat, well, so be it. You’ve got driving to do! Modern electric driving!
Hours trickling en route (Hey, no prob! You got WORK done!), and staggering half-asleep around unfamiliar areas late at night to get in that last little bit of charge. It’s viable! You did it! You didn’t run out! You won!
I have a 2025 Ioniq 5 with a native NACS plug and the requisite CCS adapter described in Adam’s article. I have a few recommendations based on my recent 1,500-mile round trip from my home near Arlington, VA, to Gainesville, FL.
I concur with Maartech’s advice to keep your charge between 20% and 80%. That final 20% takes significantly longer and risks idle fees at many public chargers. In a gasoline car, I typically fuel up when the tank is at a quarter — about 100 miles of buffer. I recommend a similar approach with an EV. In unfamiliar territory, plan to charge with 75-125 miles remaining on the range estimate. I personally aim never to go below a 25% state of charge on a long road trip.
Seek chargers that provide at least 150kW. On my trip, most sessions took just 15-25 minutes to reach 80% — just enough time for a restroom break and a snack. In fact, our lunch stops typically lasted longer than the charging sessions.
Regarding navigation: I tried ABRP, but it prevents you from using Apple Maps simultaneously. I also find its suggestions more theoretical than realistic. ABRP may have lulled Adam into a false sense of security by suggesting he could arrive with 10% remaining. While it’s interesting for pre-trip planning on a laptop, I prefer PlugShare.
Use PlugShare’s route planner before you leave to map the entire trip and identify fast, reliable chargers. You can also check reviews to see if your specific car model has charged there recently and at what speed.
For Ioniq 5 owners (and others compatible with Tesla stations), use the Tesla app to weed out older stations that aren’t compatible with your vehicle. Tesla chargers are a game changer In the I-95 corridor between DC and Florida, they are far more ubiquitous than any other network. They are fast, and with 10 or more stalls per station, I’ve never had to wait for a spot. I also found the Ionna chargers to be fast and reliable. Looking forward to seeing more of them.
Finally, consider paying for a Tesla membership—even if just for 30 days to cover a given trip. At $12/month, it reduced our charging rate from roughly $0.55/kWh to as little as $0.35/kWh during peak times and $0.22/kWh during off-peak hours.
Yes they are. But what are typically edge cases are being used against them. If you drive out west, gas station management is a serious thing. EV charging was there 10 years ago on most of the country/planet. It is now mostly not a thing. At least in most of the US and Canada. And much of Europe. And other parts of the world.
Adam, as the other comment said, was somewhat overthinking. I did also, especially my first week of EV ownership, when I did a 300 miles road trip into the low mountians of Virginia. We all have decades of mental / muscle memory of how we expect cars to work. Most of us grew up on one to the extend of taking car rides long before we learned to walk.
And Adam understands this to some degree. He and I spent our teen years driving Ford 8N tractors, which while superficially a car, the differences were vast.
Anyway, we get to learn new things. That doesn’t mean the new are bad. Just that they are different.
As to range. I got very good at planning when I’d buy gas locally and on the road in my 9 years with my 1.5L Civic. MPG between 22 and 45 so I had to pay a bit of attention. Ditto with EVs. But the mental math of range has different values to be used in the equations.
It would only have been the two cars and the freezer—the electric cooktop is never used. (Just a handful of times in the 25 years we’ve lived here.) I wouldn’t expect the freezer startup to consume that much, but something must have pushed over the edge.
Oh! Good to know. I’m a digital guy, so I tend not to think about analog stuff like heat.
Yes, there is some sort of rebate program that I’m looking into, since equipment must be installed by June 30.
We’re not THAT rural. 200 amps to the house, and a 50 amp circuit to the garage.
I’ve heard from @jim8 separately that the IONIQ 5’s platform is notable for not slowing down as much when you get above 80%. The one time I took it to 100%, that was my experience—it was longer than going to 80%, but not radically so.
@jim8 was also suggesting more, shorter stops, which I’m having to wrap my head around because my default approach – at least when I was younger – was for fewer, longer stops. Plus, there’s a trade-off of driving faster and using more energy over driving slower and having to stop less.
Yes! I was using level 3 the whole way too. It’s a little annoying at times when I come out of cruise control because the regen kicks in harder than I would expect from other cars. But it seems worthwhile learning the new feel.
I don’t think regen accounted for the differences in the trips, though, since I was in the same level 3 both directions. And it was mostly freeway driving, so not a lot of braking.
I was somewhere in that range—I need to start internalizing these efficiency numbers so I have a feel for what is going on.
Hyundai’s system will do this, to be clear, both in the car and from the app. Because I was driving by myself and couldn’t get Tonya to run another system for comparison, I didn’t use it at all. Also, I’ll admit that I didn’t use the MyHyundai app’s planning because the app is sufficiently poorly designed that I don’t really trust it. You can’t set your own charge percentage when planning, so it’s assuming that I’ll be starting with the current 54% charge right now, for instance, and that prevents me from seeing how it would plan the route if I had a full charge.
Overthinkers 'R Us! (It’s practically required, but I will say that I’ve talked with non-geeks with EVs and they tend to be pretty random in how they’ve taken long trips.)
As I just replied, the poor quality of the MyHyundai app reduces trust in the system, as does the fact that it doesn’t even seem to know about Electrify America sites. And I really do like Apple Maps navigation at this point—it does a great job of just the right amount of information at the right time.
For the next trip, perhaps I’ll compare against ABRP with an ODB sensor.
Hah! Yes, and even more so from biking, where drafting is essential (though I’ve never really done bike racing). I actually tried following trucks more on the way down since the area near Harrisburg is rife with warehouses, so there was a LOT of truck traffic. But even with the cruise control and automatic following distance, it didn’t seem that I could drive close enough to benefit from the slipstream while not making the truck driver crazy.
Oh goodness, if that’s what some of you took away from the article, I wasn’t suffiicently clear. I enjoyed myself immensely the entire time—it was a grand adventure, which is why I’m looking forward to the next trip so much. I really liked doing the planning, and driving long distances is normally horribly boring, so having something to think about the entire time was great. I found the mental challenges posed by all the optimization opportunities fascinating. Saving money on only came up because I was curious how it compared—if not spending money was the goal, I wouldn’t have gone on the trip at all. And, of course, EVs are simply more fun to drive than gas cars.
I’m sure that most people here are old enough to remember when long trips in gas cars required similar amounts of preparation and optimization because gas stations were much fewer and farther between, the roads weren’t as good, and the cars weren’t nearly as reliable. And we didn’t have iPhones!
Oh heck, yes. And you could write a similar “torture” description of driving in a gas car today: getting gas smell on your hands while pumping, eating terrible gas station food, using only somewhat cleaned gas station bathrooms, wondering how much further you can go when the gas light comes on, and so on.
I’m a Google Maps guy. Every time I’ve tried switching something seriously annoyed me about Apple Maps. Or was just wrong. But I understand it is mostly a personal preference.
The Hyundai / Kia in dash navigation is seriously mediocre. On top of that the colors they pick are almost impossible for me to see. (How do you ship a nav system where a non trivial portion of the population can’t read the mapping?)
ABRP plus ODB-2 gives you great range planning and stop planning. Better than the Guess o Meter of my previous Civic. And can show you alternatives while you drive (co-pilot recommended) or with a quick pull over.
I’ve stopped checking them. I just look at the Guess-O-Meter when I get in the car.
FYI - with my 240 volt / 20 amp circuit (16 amps charging), unless there a big local trip or a road trip the next day, I don’t even plug in until below 65%. With your L1 charging just now I can see how you’d want to ABC. Always be charging. I switched to charging to 90% during the winter. And did 100% before bad storms were predicted. I have the plug adapter where I can get out 15 amps at 120 volts to plug into my fridge and one oil filled space heater or two.
And a big FYI. I can’t imagine going back. Although my 5.7L 2008 Tundra is handy to have. But it averages less than 300 miles a month.
Sort of. In most of the US and Canada power to home is 240 volts split via a center tap into 2 120 volt “legs”. Each leg is 180 degrees out of phase with the other. So when you talk about how much current you are using for any one device you have to know if it is on which single leg or both legs. An electric stove or L2 EVSE for car charging pulls off both legs at the same time. An L1 EVSE like Adam is using pulls off only one leg. (And Adam, it is not very efficient as at 120 volts and 6 or 8 amps a non trivial amount of the energy is going to overhead.) And charging 2 cars via L1 is a very different load if done on the same circuit (breaker) rather than if on circuits on 2 legs. With on the same leg but two separate breakers as another way to go.
FYI - Most electric dryers are 240 volts but only use both legs of power if on the high setting. Most other appliances in the house are single leg 120 volts. Except for heat pumps or baseboard style electric heating. Confused. Good.
Actually…I agree with you but think hybrids are a better answer for many users…for my wife and I we prefer to drive over fly unless oceans are involved…and with a 600 to 700 mile daily drive we rarely are stopped for more than 30-45 minutes making recharging sub optimum. And I agree with the earlier post that unless you can charge at home with whatever install cost that requires then fully electric has too many drawbacks. When we need another vehicle we will look at the hybrid RAV4 as well as the Mazda equivalents. Hopefully the horribly uncomfortable seats (at least for us) in the RAV4 we last tested in 2017 will have been improved…they were the decision maker that led us to the Mazda CX-5 over it and the Ford Escape.
What I remember (and realized much later) is the filing cabinet of map cards that each AAA office had. And the data base that had to exist somewhere of which card to stock in each office. And how at times you had to wait a few days when you asked for a trip setup that needed cards not in the local files.
Another Ionic 5 user here . . . you mentioned “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.” That’s what Ionic owners refer to as the “guessometer.”
Also, I’ve read that it’s worth charging the battery to 100% once a month, even if you don’t have a trip planned. Otherwise, 80% charge seems to the standard.
I bought my Kia Niro 4 years ago and my first long trip, from central England to Edinburgh (350 miles) involved much planning of stops with, generally, slower charging - plus a complete mind set change from using a petrol engine. Certainly the infrastructure back then was a little less populated with chargers the further north and west you went, though Edinburgh still had free charging at some points. Since then I’ve driven to Germany, south of France, Brittany, northern Spain and the Netherlands with no problems at all. I use Tesla chargers where I can, many hotels have charging points (or I book hotels that do have them - the one I stayed at in Lille last year had free charging) and often my destinations have charging points. I use time of use tariffs to charge overnight and can ‘fill’ my 64 kWh car for £2.44 using my home charger giving me a range of 260 miles or so to ‘empty’ during the summer months. British EV public chargers can be quite expensive but with the current (no pun intended) cost per litre of petrol it’s now cheaper per mile with my EV than a comparable sized SUV. And I can also charge for free, when the sun shines, from my solar panels. Servicing at a main Kia dealer is cheaper than my wife’s small Toyota at an independent garage. I do consider where I’m going to charge on a long journey and still do plan ahead using my apps to show me how busy EV charging sites are. I’d not go back to a petrol engine.
