What's a roadtrip really like in an EV?

This weekend we drove down to Paso Robles for wine tasting and a concert – took the GV60 on its first road trip. (Side note: we saw Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit at Vino Robles, which was just fantastic. Isbell and the 400 were joined by the fabulously talented Amanda Shires for this gig, which was a huge treat, and the whole set list was just about as good as it could possibly be. Awesome show. And Vino Robles is an amazing amphitheater that I highly recommend for any act. And go visit the Daou winery - the views alone are worth the price of a tasting but the wine is very, very good.)

Back to the EV - range on the GV60 is about 230 miles max. Paso is 180 miles away from our home in San Jose. It was 90 degrees in San Jose, and about 109 in Paso, so it was a hot drive at high speed, not the best for maximizing range. On the way, we planned to fuel up in Soledad, about 120 miles away, so that we’d not be nervous when we arrived – and we weren't in any rush.

Using their app, we saw that Electrify America in Soledad had an open spot. (There were 3, the other two were taken including by one car that was at 100% with no driver in sight, which is an EV party foul.) The electronic card reader was broken and wouldn’t accept my Electrify America card from Apple Pay, so had to use a physical card. This means I didn’t get my “free” charging that I got through Genesis when we bought the GV60. It would take a regular credit card, though, so we paid out of pocket. The 350 kW cables are a BEAST to maneuver and the giant CCS plug is very hard to seat. I was very glad to have the tall strong guy with me. We walked across the very hot and windy parking lot to Starbucks and got an iced tea; by the time we had paid and checked email the car was over 90% and we were back on the road. This charger was in a large public parking lot with a number of stores surrounding it, very safe area easily accessed from the highway. We noticed another DCFC offering at the other end of the large parking lot as well by a name we didn’t recognize so lots of capacity there.

In Paso, we had hoped to charge at the hotel, but not available. No worries, all of our apps showed other options. As a back up we decided we would charge up Sunday morning before we left at the Electrify America station in the back parking lot of a Bank of America. When we got there, they had four stations but the fourth one was broken and the other three were in use for at least another 30 minutes. We only realized the charger was broken after we had done some unnatural parking to make the cable/plug reach the rear passenger panel where the charger goes in the GV60. (The EA app did not tell us the station was not in service.) Instead we drove to King City, a small agricultural town about 45 miles away. There the EVGo chargers were in a bank parking lot off the old downtown main street – lots of boarded up/closed businesses and a few local restaurants. It was morning so didn't feel unsafe but sure wouldn't have headed there at night. We plugged in without having to repark and there was ample cable length, nice. Walked a block and found breakfast (absolutely delicious huevos rancheros with freshly made tortillas) and were at 100% in less than 30 minutes. (We weren't actually trying for 100%, btw, would have been happy with 80% -- we were just finishing our coffee.) All of the five 350 kW EVGo chargers were in good working order and were sitting unused, except for us, the whole time. They are not near the highway interchange where the gas stations, McDonalds, Starbucks etc are so can’t imagine they get much use – we found them via the Genesis app. It cost us $35 to fill up, though, which seemed like a lot.

Got home with about 70 miles to spare. Didn’t have anxiety, had some good local eats, but the overall experience is definitely not ready for prime time. Early adopters -- we've been driving an EV since 2014 -- will put up with this but I can't imagine doing this with kids or pets in the car or for more than a trip like this that just pushed us slightly out of range.

What would make it better? How about signage at highway exits that let you know EV chargers are somewhere near by (like we do with gas stations). Maybe better maintenance of chargers so they work as promised. We were toggling between EA's app, the ChargePoint app, the Genesis app, and Google, and that seemed like a lot. Cell service isn't terrific on that stretch of 101, either, so a little dicey to count on it. Some sort of standardization for the cords and cables so you at least know what to expect and how to park.

At home, we don't charge publicly. We did once at the local EA at the Valley Fair mall just to see if our "free" offer worked. We found that one spot was being hogged by one of the Lucid test drive vehicles for the mall's storefront, and it was fully charged, which was a bad look for Lucid. The rest was a Lord of the Flies experience come to life and I think we were Piggy.