By John Higham, EVA Board

My first EV was a Mazda Miata I converted in my garage with my then 15-year-old son. It was designed to have a range of 50 miles so we could drive it to San Francisco (40 miles one-way), charge it while we played in The City and then be able to drive home. But it took 12 hours to fully charge and back then there was nowhere to charge it, not even in San Francisco. I freaking loved that car, but it never got more than maybe 20 miles from my home. A lot has changed in the EV space since then.

I recently did a road trip in a Hyundai Ioniq 5 from the San Francisco peninsula to Salt Lake City, then to Whitefish, Montana then returning home on the peninsula. All in it was 3,857 miles over 32 days, including 19 DCFC stops and zero headaches. Others have done far longer EV road trips and this was far from my first (earlier this year I wrote about road tripping in an EV in Norway). But this is my first (US) trip that felt like the electrification of transportation was entering a “end of the beginning” phase. Electric Vehicles are just cars now.

I’ve done this same loop in an ICE (internal combustion engine) car and also in a Tesla. When I did it in the Tesla, the network was still in its early stages and there were some fairly out of the way detours required. I had also contemplated doing this trip in a Jaguar I-Pace I once owned. The I-Pace is a great car, but for road trips it is more aligned with a Chevy Bolt in terms of drivability. In fact, the trip contemplated with the I-Pace was the last time I did this trip in a gas car because the predicted charging burden was just too much.

This trip provided two key takeaways that are important insights in my view.

The first key takeaway is that outside the west coast metro areas, Electrify America is a far cry better than the bashing it receives on social media. I acknowledge that in the metro areas of LA and Silicon Valley, the lines are long and the high utilization can lead to broken chargers. I think the kindest way to frame this problem is that EA is a victim of its own success, but as I once wrote, while they are still bound by the terms of their court-mandated financial approval cycles, funding for repairs will be challenging.

But outside of the metro areas the lines evaporate, and my unscientific sampling found chargers in good working order. Of my 15 EA DCFC sessions on this particular trip, 14 of them were one-and-done simple. Once I had to restart the EA app because I had terminated the previous session at the dispenser, which is (apparently) a known no-no among power users.

So, Electrify America in my view gets a solid A. The other networks I used were in the C- to B range, but comments on Plugshare were valuable in getting a session started with little drama.

The second key takeaway for me was the simplicity of it all. In 2024 if you can use a smartphone, you can do an EV road trip. A Better Route Planner (ABRP), connected to the car via Bluetooth, really made planning idiot-proof. Checking a station's Plugscore eliminated the uncertainty. The Hyundai charges like a champ and in virtually every charge stop the car was done charging (as reported by what we needed to resume by ABRP) before we were ready to resume. This is a far cry from my first EV roadtrip in a BMW ActiveE, before there was any DCFC, including Tesla’s SC network.

Stated more simply, the second key takeaway is that a modern EV is just a car now.

To get those stats out of the way:

• 3,857 miles from door to door.

  • 1,573 miles to Whitefish via SLC

  • 1,109 miles during our 4 weeks in Whitefish

  • 1,175 miles to return home

• 19 DC Fast Charging stops, with 900.7 kWh added over 452 minutes

  • 11 on the way to Whitefish, 8 on the return trip home

  • Several undocumented overnight Level 2 charging sessions, especially at our destination in Whitefish

• 15 Electrify America sessions, two Enel X, one each at Chargepoint and ZEF Energy

  • $0 at Electrify America, compliments of Hyundai

  • $44 in charging fees at the non-EA stations

• Electrify America sessions worked on the first attempt all but once, and that was due to an error with the app, but got quickly sorted

  • Some of the non-EA stations had a bit more drama, but nothing that sacrificing a goat on a full moon won’t cure

• 3.83 miles/kWh on the highway

• In all but three of our DCFC sessions, the car was done charging before we used the restroom, grabbed a snack, etc.

• Each of those three charging sessions were on lower-powered DCFC stations, like Chargepoint’s 62.5 kW stations.

Charging thanks to Glacier National Park at St. Mary’s visitor center. Logan Pass, thanks to e.bikes….