Speed Limiters, Short Cables, and Other EV Road Trip Revelations

Article Comments
1

Originally published at: Speed Limiters, Short Cables, and Other EV Road Trip Revelations - TidBITS

Since March 2026, we’ve been enjoying our Hyundai IONIQ 5 for the most part, including several long road trips that were improved by the application of additional tech, notably the A Better Route Planner app and service (see “My First 700-Mile EV Road Trip—What Worked and What I’d Change,” 24 April 2026, and “How Planning Made My Second Long EV Trip Stress-Free,” 10 July 2026).

We just got home from a long trip to Vermont to visit some college friends and for Tonya’s cousin’s wedding party, and I wanted to share a few more observations about the IONIQ 5 and long EV trips.

Planning Round Trips in ABRP

As with our last trip, I wanted a sense of where we’d need to charge as we drove to our destinations (two of them) and then home. Building a round trip in A Better Route Planner (ABRP) confirmed we would need to charge only once while driving to and from Vermont, but it again felt a little clumsy because there was no way to match the stops with the days on which they’d take place. (ABRP was also requiring a login on each launch, which I suspect is a conflict with the iOS 27 beta.)

Nonetheless, seeing the state of charge at each stop was tremendously valuable, because we could make sure we arrived at each charging station with a comfortable buffer. On the way home, we chose a less-traveled scenic route that required charging at a Tesla Supercharger site that would have been the last charging option for 100+ miles. That gave us pause at first, until we realized that if something was wrong with that Supercharger site, we could reroute at that point to standard interstate driving, where there were many more fast chargers.

One annoyance we hadn’t planned for was how weak or nonexistent cell service is in rural Vermont and northern New York. We thought connectivity was problematic in the Finger Lakes region of New York, but we can’t complain compared to where we were driving last weekend. Needless to say, ABRP didn’t allow route planning or changes without Internet access, and even Apple’s Maps had trouble because I hadn’t thought to set offline maps for those areas.

The lack of service affected other activities too. Our friends’ fiber Internet connection was down the entire time we were visiting, so with no cell service, we were completely offline. Tonya found that unsettling, since we hadn’t alerted family members that that might be true. It didn’t turn out to be an issue at all, but it was illuminating to see what it felt like to lose Internet access unexpectedly for nearly a day.

Later in the weekend, Tonya and I went on a short trail run, which we had planned to go around the Sugar Hill Reservoir. However, since our phones were in SOS mode the entire time, we didn’t have enough mapping support to trust ourselves with a loop, so we dropped down to a simple out-and-back. Besides, when you find yourself on something called the Sucker Brook Historic Trail, do you really want to find out that you’re the sucker?

Discovering the IONIQ 5’s Speed Limiter Feature

Even though we’ve had the IONIQ 5 since March, I just discovered my favorite feature: speed limiting (called Manual Speed Limit Assist in the manual). I’ve received only a handful of speeding tickets in my life, but each one has mortified me because they’ve all been due to missing a speed limit change. (In case it’s not obvious, I hate making mistakes, especially those that are both easily avoidable and expensive.) I have long wanted a feature that would prevent me from speeding while otherwise letting me drive normally. The IONIQ 5’s speed limiter does exactly that.

To enable it, I long-press the Driving Assist button (a short press turns on cruise control). That also sets the speed limit to the current speed, and a rocker switch lets me increase or decrease it in 1 (short press) or 5 (press and hold) mile-per-hour increments. There’s also a Speed Limit Assist Offset setting that lets me add 0, 5, or 10 miles per hour to the acceptable speed limit so I can drive up to 60 in a 55 MPH zone, for instance.

We had chosen to take the scenic route home through the Adirondacks from Vermont, which put us on winding, hilly roads that were actively fun to drive, especially in comparison to the boring interstates where the IONIQ 5’s automatic features could probably have done all the driving on their own. It’s easy to see self-driving on interstates being commonplace within a few years.

However, with the speed limiter in play, I could zip around the curves and cruise through small towns without worrying about inadvertently speeding. Each time a speed limit changed, the IONIQ 5 would either adjust the speed limiter automatically or suggest that I do so with an up or down press of the rocker switch. I couldn’t figure out why it changed automatically in some situations but not others. The manual says the automatic changes happen only on roads of 45 MPH or higher, but I’m not sure that was the case.

Regardless, I was able to drive entirely naturally, except when my acceleration would have exceeded the limit. The car stuck to the speed limit even when my pressure on the accelerator varied slightly. However, if I floored it, the IONIQ 5 would ignore the limit and let me accelerate freely, beeping to alert me that I was exceeding the set speed. The one time I needed to pass a car going well below the speed limit, I briefly turned off the speed limiter to avoid its beeping, gunned the IONIQ 5, and blew by the Sunday driver with a G-force-inducing burst of electric torque. Nothing beats EV acceleration.

Hyperactive Parking Assistance Warnings

This is only tangentially related to our latest trip, but on the negative side, I now have a least-favorite feature in the IONIQ 5 as well: the parking assistance warnings. Whenever I pull into or out of a parking spot, the IONIQ 5’s Parking Distance Warning displays how far I am from nearby objects with a diagram that shows green, yellow, or red around an outline of the car. It also beeps with increasing urgency as the distance to an object narrows.

The diagram is great—I like seeing the sensor data that tells me that I’m getting very close to something that’s going to ding the paint. But the beeping! The only thing that could be more stress-inducing is a parent, spouse, or DMV instructor yelling: “YOU’RE GETTING CLOSE! YOU’RE GETTING CLOSER! YOU SHOULD REALLY STOP!” Although there are settings that allow changing the volume of other warning beeps (including turning them off in favor of haptic vibrations in the steering wheel), those settings don’t apply to the Parking Distance Warning beeps.

Worse, the warnings don’t take the context into account. If I’m in reverse and backing out of a parking space, I don’t want to hear beeping related to things in front of me! That’s especially annoying when reversing out of a garage where there’s always something in front.

There is a way to turn off the warnings—press the Parking Safety button on the center console—but that has to be done every time, and if I’m backing out of our garage, as we do every time I drive the IONIQ 5, we can’t turn it off until I have shifted into reverse, when I should be focusing on pulling out, not pressing buttons. It’s a terrible, horrible, awful, no-good interface.

But wait, the parking situation gets even worse! Those of us who live in the country or park at trailheads—such as on our run last weekend—often have to park in tall grass or weeds. The IONIQ 5 has a Parking Collision-Avoidance Assist system that slams on the brakes when it thinks I’m going to run into something while parking, either in the front or back. So I see red on the parking diagram, hear increasingly urgent beeps, and then, even though I can see full well that it’s just grass behind me in the rear view camera, the car slams on the brakes and refuses to let me back up further. It’s so abrupt that I think I’ve hit something, but no, it’s just the tall grass.

Luckily, I can override the feature by pressing and holding the Parking Safety button for a few seconds. If the brakes have already kicked in, I may also need to press the brake pedal at the same time. That’s hard to remember after I’ve been beeped at constantly.

Both of the parking assistance features are optional, and I may turn them off once I feel I have a better intuitive sense of how big the IONIQ 5 is and how it fits into parking spaces. But for now, as much as these features go overboard, I think they may reduce the likelihood of damaging the car or something else while parking.

This is another instance of how cars should act more like computer software in providing options, given how much they are defined by behaviors that aren’t encapsulated in hardware. The settings exist; Hyundai just won’t let me control them.

Beware Short Tesla Cables

Because the 2026 IONIQ 5 uses Tesla’s NACS connector, we can—in theory—charge easily at Tesla Supercharger sites. However, we ran into a minor problem worth sharing: short charging cables.

Tesla has installed four generations of Supercharger sites with ever-evolving designs and specifications. I believe our previous trip’s Supercharger site was a newer V3+ or V4 design with longer cables, whereas the one we encountered at Chestertown, NY, on the way home was a V3 design whose shorter cables are only about 6 feet (2 m) long, attaching to the inside of the charger cabinet.

When we arrived, only one slot was open, so we backed in, only to discover that the cable wouldn’t reach the IONIQ 5’s charging port on the back of the passenger side. (In contrast, Teslas all have the charging port on the back of the driver’s side.) Luckily, in the two minutes it took us to figure this out, someone else left, freeing up a charger cabinet perpendicular to the others at the end. With that one, we could pull forward onto the grass to get close enough to connect. Slightly awkward, but it worked.

A red Hyundai Ioniq 5 plugged into a Tesla Supercharger station, parked beside a red Tesla Model X in a lot lined with trees

In reality, the turnover was high enough that if we had had to wait for someone to leave, it would have taken only a few more minutes. However, we would have had to occupy a spot designed for the next cabinet over, which would have prevented a Tesla from connecting (though not necessarily another model, like the black Kia Niro with its charging port in the nose). Electrify America and EVgo sites we’ve used have had much longer cables.

Nothing in the Tesla, ABRP, or PlugShare apps identifies the generation of a Supercharger site, but there are a few ways to tell. The easiest is a photo—if the cabinets are white with red interiors and the cables are inside, that’s V3. The V3+ or V4 cabinets are taller, white and black, and have longer (nearly 10 feet, or about 3m) cables mounted on the side, as you can see in this PlugShare photo from Keith Bohling. The other giveaway is that V3 chargers will be listed as supporting only 250 kW, whereas V3+ and V4 chargers will be listed at 325 kW or higher.

A gray electric SUV charging at a row of Tesla Supercharger stations in a parking lot

Anyway, if you can charge at Supercharger sites, keep in mind that you may encounter a short cable. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it could require an additional wait and some spot-jockeying.

ChatGPT Scores on Restaurant Recommendation

Finally, we had a notable success with using ChatGPT to find somewhere to eat dinner on the way home. We had passed through the town of Speculator and were slated to go through Rome en route toward Syracuse. It was 5:40 PM, and we wanted to eat sometime in the next 90 minutes or so, without being pushed toward fast food or a diner focusing on fresh-from-the-freezer fried food. After a tap on the ChatGPT CarPlay icon and another to start a chat, I said:

We’re driving from Speculator to Rome and then on to Syracuse before heading home to Ithaca. We’re looking for somewhere to eat dinner, probably in between Speculator and Rome, so that we can be done with dinner around 8pm. It is currently 5:40pm. What would you recommend as a restaurant that has interesting food, not just a diner, and certainly no fast food?

After a moment, ChatGPT came back with:

So, yeah, given the timing and Sunday hours, I’d nudge you a bit farther west and aim for Tailor & the Cook in Utica. It’s a farm to table spot with a serious reputation, craft cocktails, and it’s open till late, so you’ll actually relax.

It also suggested a Greek place that closed at 8:00 PM, but Tailor & the Cook looked entirely reasonable and had a reservation available when Tonya checked, so we went there. The food, decor, and atmosphere were far nicer than what we normally experience when stopping at random restaurants on the road.

There’s no telling if we could have found something equally good on our own, but the search space was large—quite literally, given that we didn’t care when we stopped as long as it was on the way. Fold in questions about cuisine type, food quality, price, and hours, and Tonya could have spent 30 minutes on her iPhone researching with no guarantee of equivalent success.

Anyway, if you find yourself in a similar situation of needing to find a restaurant that fits a few time, space, and food constraints, it might be more productive to work with a chatbot rather than risk getting carsick poring through Yelp.

5 Likes
2

Excellent, thank you!

1 Like
3

I don’t have an electric car, but I’ve heard about the charging side compatibility problems between chargers for Tesla (port on left side rear) and other manufacturers that now support the Tesla plug (aka NACS) but have the port in other places.

And that some drivers solve the problem by parking in the “wrong” space. That is, they park and then use the cable from the charger in the adjacent space. Which means that now a Tesla or other vehicle with a left/rear port can’t use open space, because the wrong open charger has the cable on the wrong side.

4

Glad you found the speed limiter useful. I have been involved with this technology for decades and helped write the Euro NCAP test protocol more than a decade ago. A list of key developments is here:

Unfortunately regulators and manufacturers have not always (ever?) listened to the researchers and some aspects of the resulting technology could certainly be improved.

3 Likes
5

I definitely have sympathy for your Parking Collision Avoidance issues. Our Polestar 2 sometimes does a similar thing. The first time that I encountered it I thought I’d hit something since the braking was so abrupt! It hasn’t done it recently but it does make you extra cautious when reversing.

6

Let me just say thank you for your work! There is no single other feature I’d like more to have in my present car (Prius). I do use cruise control and I like it, but it’s no replacement for a simple speed limiter which I’d enjoy even more, especially for shorter local trips in dense urban areas where you very much do want to adjust your speed. I love driving and I do it a lot. But there are few things I detest as much as gratuitous speeding. Having a little automation that prevents me from inadvertently doing it myself would be so very welcome.

(I also have a strong dislike for distracted driving. I am fully aware of the irony: one major reason you’d need a speed limiter is because you don’t want to speed “by accident” because you, yep, get distracted.) :laughing:

7

I remember my late father just before he died bought one of these Mercedes GLK SUVs when they were brand new. One of the key new features was a parking collision avoidance system, which at the time was also considered the latest and greatest car tech. I never liked that car (love Mercedes, just not their SUVs), but that collision avoidance system really took the cake. It had zero dynamic range. It would remain silent for the longest time while you inched forward and then all of a sudden it would start screaming at you and all the red lights would start frantically flashing. What good are 6 red lights if the only state the system is ever in is all dark or all flashing and honking? Somebody please tell me modern parking collision avoidance systems come with meaningful dynamic range such that they actually are supportive when parking in tight spaces.

On a related note, I’m still waiting for push-button fully automated parallel parking in traffic and in a reliable manner (weather, leaves, deteriorated curb, etc.) in a car that comes in south of $60k. Please tell me I’m just out of touch with the current car market.

8

Another is when you’re driving towns with known speed traps.

When I lived in NJ, I was a frequent patron of the New York Renaissance Faire. In order to get there, you need to drive on NY route 17, which passes through the towns of Tuxedo and Sloatsburg.

These towns are famous for their speed traps and have a reputation for holding people with out-of-state tags in jail until the judge shows up the next business day.

The speed limit in these towns is 25 MPH (vs. 50 for the rest of route 17), and I’ve personally experienced the local police tailgating me from one end of the town to the other, waiting for me to do 26. And on one occasion, after I crossed the town border, he flipped me off before turning around back into town.

I can guarantee you that all 50 states have small towns that are just as crooked.

So yeah, a bit of tech to prevent a slight mistake resulting in a 3-day stay in the local jail is worth its weight in gold.

2 Likes
9

That sounds so quaint. :rofl: 3 days in a local jail for minor speeding! In my town we don’t even manage to book hardened repeat criminals with felony records, let alone secure convictions that result in the slammer. Around here “released on his own recognizance” has become a refrain to the point where you’d think it’s straight out of SNL, but no, this is real. It’s odd that we appear to struggle with finding a spot on what must be a vast range between 3 days in jail for minor speeding vs. you only go to the pen if you flat our murder somebody. But I digress. :wink:

10

Thank you so much for this! I’d love to see it become the default mode for all cars, with an option to override, instead of something I have to turn on and set each time. Plus, I think the automatic speed changing could be better.

11

Translating the article into Japanese, I asked Claude (Sonnet 5) the same question as Japanese text. Here is its answer, after I asked it to answer as English text:

Tailor & the Cook is a solid option — 4.7 rating, in downtown Utica, open 4:00–11:00pm tonight (Friday), so no time pressure there. It’s known for chicken riggies (a Utica specialty), pork belly mac & cheese, and seasonal smash burgers. The vibe is described as lively and upscale-but-not-stuffy. A few recent reviews mention inconsistent quality, but overall sentiment is very positive.

Like Ocean Blue, it’s in Utica, which means the same ~15-20 minute detour off the direct Speculator-to-Rome route. So the choice between the two comes down to taste: Tailor & the Cook for a livelier, casual-American vibe, or Ocean Blue for a more polished seafood-and-cocktails experience.

If you’d rather skip the detour entirely and stay right on route, Vine & Fig in Rome is still the easiest fit with your 8pm target.

Wonderful getting such information from here in Japan – the only places I have ever visited in NY are NY City and Niagara Falls.

1 Like
12

As a new Ioniq 5 owner myself (2023 Limited), there are some things I truly love about the car. And then there are the complete thorns in my side such as incessant warnings about phantom collision menaces and the brake locking described in Adam’s article. It seriously almost makes me want to learn to code with AI just to hack into the car and turn all this parental crap OFF. I’m sure there’s a DIY car hackers group online to join.

But I’m posting here just to say that it wasn’t until we took the Ioniq on a proper road trip across the State of Washington that I truly discovered how much effort planning the charging side of the trip could be, particularly the first time. All the things in these articles, plus: the car can FAIL to charge – you just an error message – leaving you SOL if you happened to roll into a town with very few (say, one) high-speed charger.

Electrify America support was “helpful” in that they could see what the problem was: Failure to communicate. Great, what do do? Sorry sir, you’re SOL. Ahh, got it, that means “Soldier On, Laddie” so I tried again, and again using “brute force” logic with the menu choices, and again at another charging station that opened up. 30 minutes later, I’m charging. I hate this, I decide. BTW, it happened again on the return leg of the trip. Same charging station, unsurprisingly. Only wasted 20 minutes that time before getting a charge to lock in.

But the real gem was encountering a problem that only arose after driving for more than 45 or 60 minutes at freeway speed (70-ish, the speed limit): Cruising along, suddenly the power faded from under my foot (I don’t use cruise). I could see it on the dash in the power/regen meter too. It was as if the car suddenly decided to start regenerate or something, and I had to floor it to get it to resume maintaining freeway speed. When regenerating, if I didn’t immediately floor it to resume speed, the engine/regen system would jump back and forth between zero (no power, no regen) and say 15% regen, because it clearly could not make up its mind where it wanted to be. I’d lose patience and just floor it to get back up to speed, not to mention if there’s traffic around me I’m keeping pace with.

This power fade/regen would happen again a few minutes later, and continue intermittently until at some point we’d pull off to use the loo or whatever. After getting back on our way, this would occur yet again after some 45 minutes or so. Now I’m thinking I bought a lemon. A constantly beeping at me and slamming on me brakes on me lemon…because this same power fade/regen lurch happened to my wife too right before our road trip on a shorter trip she took herself up to Canada.

According to AI this issue has been reported online and supposedly there is a technical advisory about it, but until I recreate the problem, the dealer can’t do anything about it. Tomorrow I take half a day off work, drive freeway speeds and then hope the problem presents itself someplace near my dealer so I can immediately pop in and have them scan the car for codes. (sigh)

Otherwise, I love the car for zipping around town. So smooth, so game-like when paddling the regen to slow without braking. On the highway, my current rule of thumb is 50 miles per every 25% charge at 70-ish mph with three adults and AC and audio. There’s some margin built-in there; ECO didn’t seem to help, and charging often for short spells is, for me, the recipe for feeling like the car can go the distance (literally).

All this said, many thanks to all who’ve shared their stories! Truly helpful for highlighting the myriad concerns to be mindful of interfacing grid electrons with auto electrons and human synapses (and stomachs) across time and space.

1 Like
13

Would a plug in diagnostic help figure out the problem? It should be able to give you the diagnosis codes to report to the dealer. I use a BlueDriver on my hybrid, but you can check their website to see if your car is covered.

postscript, you learn something everyday and one of them is from their site “EVs are exempt from OBDII regulations and manufactures are permitted to use a proprietary/closed diagnostic system.” After I looked up your car.

So the car is not covered. Still a cool device that I use on my hybrid

2 Likes
14

Reading these tales of detailed planning for fuel stops and alternatives makes me think that automobile drivers in the 1920’s and 1930s would have had similar stories, as gas stations were few and far between. We’re still in the period of development and working toward standardization that the support system for gasoline-powered vehicles reached by the 1950s, including the development of service clusters at Interstate exits. I think the process will be much faster for electric vehicles, but current owners are still seeing the kinks.

1 Like
15

I should install a charger in my driveway and then rent it out to travellers. I’ll call it AirVolt. AirWatt? AirZap?

2 Likes
16

That’s one of the things that drives me nuts about my (relatively) new Telluride. It’s like the car doesn’t know what direction it’s going. (It has the same problem with the backup camera. If I’m coasting down a hill backwards, the car will turn off the backup camera. If I want to use the backup camera, I need to ride the brakes in Reverse.)

In 1988, my Macintosh SE could talk to me. Granted, everything needed to be recorded and played back (that was before different voices could read text, wasn’t it?), but it could talk to me by playing sound files. Flash forward to 2026. My Telluride can only beep at me. Something behind me? Beep. Something to the side of me? Beep. Something moving behind me? Beep and lock the wheels. About 30% of the time when I’m exiting the interstate (signalling, mind you), the car will give a double-beep when there is no one anywhere near. Each of these beeps requires me to look at the dashboard if I want to try to get context (which I’ve never gotten with the double-beep when exiting the interstate). With all the computer power built into a modern car, couldn’t it beep and then announce the issue? Or at least have different beeps for different quadrants of the car?

Adam, thanks for these articles. I might have an electric vehicle now except that the salesperson, when I asked how far a particular EV could go on a charge and how long it took to recharge, answered, “Not far enough and too long.” Probably my next vehicle will be electric and I appreciate you lowering my learning curve.

17

Hi Adam,

I enjoyed your latest article relating to the trials and tribulations of being a relatively early adopter of a fully-electric vehicle. Just thought I’d add the recent experience with my 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 6 for the edification of those who are considering coming over to the light-side.

I read that a small percentage of Hyundai electric car owners had experienced a total failure of the electrical system thus completely disabling the vehicle. The percentage was relatively small so I figured the odds of it happening to me were remote. How wrong I was. Not only did it happen but at probably the worst possible time and place.

My wife and I were driving back on the Interstate from Hendersonville, NC to Asheville, NC at about 10 PM when a red, warning message appeared on the dash and the car slowed down to about 35 mph. The message stated that there was a problem with the battery computer. I pulled onto the shoulder and the car lost all power in short order. That was “fun” considering we were in the dark, illuminated only by the headlights from speeding trucks and cars. I thanked the weather gods that at least it wasn’t raining.

I called the Hyundai emergency number and a flatbed tow truck appeared about 11:30 PM. The driver took my wife and myself and the car to the Hyundai dealer in Asheville. The car was diagnosed with a malfunctioning battery computer. The good news is that there isn’t much that can go wrong with an electric vehicle. The bad news is the battery computer is what runs the car.

Hyundai took care of everything. They replaced the battery computer under warranty (the car is 16 months old with about 13,000 miles on the odometer), paid for our rental for the return trip to Atlanta where we live and shipped the car to one of the Hyundai dealers near us because the dealer thought it would take several days to receive the replacement part…turns out the part arrived the next morning, but we had already left town.

I love the way the car handles, although I wish it had more range, and I’ll probably never go back to a gasoline-powered car even though most people consider me a “car-nut”. I’ve never even owned an automatic transmission vehicle in my life (I’m 81). In fact, I can still say that since an electric car doesn’t have a transmission. The bottom line is electric cars are the vehicles of the future (except, possibly, in the U.S.) just like gasoline automobiles replaced horse-drawn buggies.

2 Likes
18

I’m going to open a competing business in my driveway called airE p times t .
(unless you want to be Mr. Charge and I can be the Charge King)
;-)

3 Likes
19

Imagine in 20 (?) years time when someone proposes to build a car with an oily, inefficient engine that burns a highly inflammable liquid and that you need at least 60 litres (sorry I don’t do gallons) of it stored in a thin-walled metal tank underneath the vehicle.
They would be laughed at.
:grimacing:

3 Likes
20

Continuing the discussion from Speed Limiters, Short Cables, and Other EV Road Trip Revelations:

We have actually considered this seriously as a way to underwrite a solar installation at our summer place. My guess (and as of this date we haven’t done any research), however, is that local and state codes and regulations would complicate or prevent us from doing so. Anyone?