EV Chronicles #60 - PA to FL and Back Roadtrip

Last weekend, we finished our epic trip to Walt Disney World where we spent a week with various members of our family. We had 9 of us in total in Florida with us, all from either Pennsylvania or Northern Virginia (my brother's family). 2 of us flew down and back, and the rest of us drove in 3 different vehicles. My wife and I made the trip in our new 2025 Polestar 3, and my brother's family of 5 traveled in his 2021 VW ID.4 and my niece's 2024 Nissan Rogue.

In summary, traveling in a well designed EV (one with 200kw+ charging speeds, a good charging curve, and preconditioning) with quick access to reliable Charging networks (unfortunately, this prize still goes to the Tesla network) results in a travel experience that is almost exactly like that of traveling in a gas vehicle. On the other hand, traveling in many EVs today, due to the design of the vehicles and more importantly, because of the charging network they can use, can still add about 10% more travel time to your overall trip.

For example, my brother's ID.4 is a great EV for the functions it was designed for but done in a way to keep the price reasonable. That means that there are some design choices made on this vehicle that make it just an "OK" road tripping vehicle, particularly in COLD weather (it was NOT cold last week, so pre-conditioning was not a factor). Since we drove the same route for about 80% of this trip at roughly the same time of day, this was a good opportunity for us to compare how the two vehicles performed relative to one another. He estimated that compared to my trip in the Polestar, that driving the ID.4 added about 90 minutes to his trip in each direction. Here are the factors that contributed to his trip taking longer:

• CCS Chargers are typically further from the Highway exits than Tesla's Chargers

  • He estimated that he wasted as much as 10 minutes at a few charging stops because of the distance he had to drive off the highway to get to them.

  • We used 100% Tesla chargers. I intentionally picked the ones that were super close to the highway exits, but I had plenty of choices. We only had one that was a bit off the highway, but that ended up working out for us because it allowed us to avoid a slowdown on I-95 due to heavy rain by getting back on the highway further south.

  • IMPACT: Probably as much as an 30 minutes to an hour

• There are dozens of CCS charging networks, each with a different interfaces

  • Some networks can be or MUST be started with their App, which means you have to have a valid Credit Card attached to an account in their system.

  • Some of them use Credit Card Readers - great, but then have subpar screens on these readers that make them very hard to read in daylight.

  • My brother reported that he was delayed getting several of his charging sessions started as a result of some of these challenges.

  • Compare this to my experience - I had ONE app to deal with all day. I would grab the adapter and cable, plug it all together, and within 30 seconds, I could have a charging session underway from the Tesla App.

  • IMPACT: 15 minutes total

• Fewer CCS charging options means congested charging sites

  • Impact 1: Full charging sites results in power sharing across charging ports, resulting in reduced charging rates. He experienced this once where his charging rate was at 80kw (I think he should have been getting 120-150kw)

  • Impact 2: Full charging sites means EV owners might have to wait to get a plug. I think he had to wait once for less than 10 minutes (at the same site he then had reduced charging rates)

  • IMPACT: 10-15 minutes

Most of the above issues my brother experienced using the CCS network might be completely resolved once VW gets access to the Tesla network. I hope he gets a chance to do this trip again someday with acces to the Tesla charging network.

For my wife and I, the trip was nearly flawless. The only issue we really had during the entire trip is that our charging speeds were really reduced during the afternoons in the extreme heat we had last week (98F+). I didn't actually notice this was happening until we got to Orlando. At 4pm in the afternoon, with temps over 100F in the parking lot of the Orlando Tesla chargers, I was getting charging rates that were about 60% of what I should have been getting. I stuck it out and stayed as long as I could before our dinner reservation. Over the next few days, I had some time to go back and analyze all my charging session from my trip down and it was then that I could see the reduction in the data. In the heat of the day, it happened during the entire session, but earlier in the day, I would see some sessions would start out normally but 5-10 minutes into the session, I would start to see the rates drop. I collected over a dozen new charging sessions over our trip and at least 6 of them were severely degraded as shown in the RED line below.

I learned when we returned home that my Polestar has a known defect/recall on the vent doors for the cooling system which explains the poor charging performance in the heat of the southern afternoons. I am not looking forward to more HEAT, but I can't wait to do another charging test once this issue is fixed when temps exceed 98F.

I have said it here many times, but for the way we travel (drive 1.5-2 hours, stop for ~10-15 minutes, repeat with occasional longer stops for meals), we have found that driving long distances in an EV adds almost no additional time to our end to end travel time. In the data I provide below, if you assume we could keep every stop to only 10 minutes (unlikely if we have to fuel up a gas vehicle twice, and come on, Buc-ee's is a 20 minute+ stop no matter what right!?) and we still have one longer stop for a meal, driving our Polestar at MOST only added 30-40 minutes to a 14 hour day. We have found that we actually like having slightly longer stops when we feel like we need to stretch our legs.

Because we do not have access to ALL Tesla chargers, we are still experiencing a minor inconvenience when driving in an EV. During this trip, we found that our bladders were the primary driver for when we needed to stop, not the car needing a charge up. The Tesla chargers that Non-Tesla EVs can use are still a bit spaced out, particularly when you get into some of the more rural regions south of Washington DC to Richmond and Richmond to Jacksonville. I made one bad decision for a late morning bathroom break on day 2 of our return trip. We decided we needed a bathroom break just as we drove past the awesome Halifax stop which has 60 Tesla chargers that are 20 yards from a convenience store. The next stop available to us was at Emporium and it looked like it was going to work, but it turned out that it was in the parking lot of a grocery store or department store like building. So the nearest bathrooms were about 200-300 yards away at a KFC or the Starbucks. We managed to still do this stop in 9 minutes, but it was a long, HOT walk across the parking lot. If we were driving in a gas vehicle, we would have found a better stop or maybe have even used one of the visitors centers right on I-95. BTW, why don't they have chargers at these rest stops?

The Polestar 3 has been a road trip monster for two reasons. It gets about 30% more real world highway range than I got in my Model Y. At 70-80 mph, we are talking about 280 miles of range vs. low 200's in the Model Y. This is most important during the first leg of the trip and carries over into the first half of a full day of travel. The Polestar also gets about 20 kw higher charge rate than the Model Y at SOCs above 40%. That equates to almost 10 miles of extra range for every 10 minutes of charging.

Here is how our first day of travel played out for us. We drove for a total of about 12 hours and were stopped for meals, bathroom breaks, and charging for about 2 hours. Here are the events of the day:

• Drive 1: 1.5 hours

  • Depart Home 3:35 AM

• Stop 1: Joppatown - 10 minutes (96 miles from home)

  • 5:04-5:14 AM

  • The primary purpose of this stop was a Bathroom break and WAWA breakfast sandwiches.

  • Bonus Charging: Added 22% to the vehicle. Departed with 71% SOC

• Drive 2: ~2 hours

  • 5:14 - 6:58

• Stop 2: Strafford, VA - 17 minutes (198 miles from home)

  • 6:58-7:15

  • Stop Purpose: Bathroom - we ended up staying a little longer than a typical bathroom break to stretch out our legs a bit.

  • Bonus Charging: Added 29%. Departed with 72%

  • Note: For those that "never need a bathroom". We arrived here with 43% which means we could have easily traveled another 100 miles without this stop, or a total of 300 miles from home with one 10 minute charging session during a bathromm break. Most people RARELY travel over 300 miles in a single day, and my data shows you could do over 300 miles with a 10 minute bathroom stop.

• Drive 3: ~2.25 hours

  • 7:15-9:35

• Stop 3: Halifax, NC - 20 minutes (360 miles from home)

  • 9:35-9:55

  • Stop Purpose: Charging: this is the first stop we HAD to make because were were getting low on charge.

    • Charging: This is ALSO one of the LARGEST Tesla Supercharger sites on the east coast and I really wanted to stop here. It has over 60 stations! I actually stopped here a few years ago with my brother but it only had 8 or 12 chargers at that time. The expansion is very neat....and of course I forgot to take a picture.

    • ...and Bathroom - We ended up staying a little longer than a typical bathroom break to stretch out our legs a bit and get a snack. It was starting to get HOT outside, but we didn't see reduced charging speeds here yet.

  • Charging: 44% added - 13-57%

    • Note that because the Polestar can cover more range than the Tesla, we planned out our lunch stop at this point and ended up really overcharging at this point. We started to have some issues at this point as well with the Google navigation which also resulted in us staying here a bit longer than we should have stayed while I used some other apps like ABRP to figure out our next stop.

• Drive 4: ~1.25 hour

  • 9:55 - 11:06

• Stop 4: Benson, NC - 23 minutes (447 miles from home)

  • 11:06-11:28

  • Stop Purpose: Lunch and charging

  • Charging : 44% added (23-67%)

    • This was the first charge of the day where I started to notice slightly slower charging speeds after the first 15 minutes or charging or so. We were on the nominal charging curve until about 55% and then it really dropped off.

• Drive 5: ~1.5 hours

  • 11:28-13:02

• Stop 5: Florence, SC - 28 minutes (553 miles from home)

  • 13:02-13:30

  • Stop Purpose: Buc-ee's but also bathroom and charging

    • I think it took 5 minutes to get from the door to the bathroom of the Buc-ee's...what a madhouse. We decided that was the last Buc-ee's we were going to stop at.

  • Charging: Added 34% (21-55%)

    • This entire session was de-rated. Not a good stop for charging, but we got enough to move along.

• Drive 6: ~2 hours

  • 13:30-15:37

• Stop 6: Ridgeland, SC - 15 minutes (702 miles from home)

  • 15:37 - 15:52

  • Got a ticket in town...

  • Stop Purpose: Bathroom and Charge

  • Charging: Added 32% (22-54%)

    • Also a de-rated session, but we only stayed here long enough to use the restrooms. We needed to charge too as we didn't have enough to get to our final destination, but we probably really only needed about 15-20% here

• Drive 7: ~1.75 hours

  • 15:52 - 17:35

• Stop 7: Brunswick, GA - Final Day 1 stop, stayed the night (796 miles from home)

  • Charging: it took about 1 hour for the car to charge from 18% to 100%. This session was de-rated as well. Thankfully, the chargers were across the street from the hotel, so we did the gym while it was charging.

Tesla Superchargers at Brunswick GA

On Day 2, we covered 250 miles in about 3.5 hours, 4 if you include our side trip to get Gideon's cookies! We stopped once for a bathroom break at a WAWA and got a bonus charge there. We used a bit more energy on this day due the the extreme heat, so after getting to the hotel in Orlando, I went and found a charger and added about 50% while Susan rested in our room. This was the extremely de-rated session I mentioned above.

On our return trip, we broke the trip up into a 9 hour day and an 8 hour day. We took our time and our stops were generally about 25 minutes. The heat was slowing us down a bit but we didn't mind much. Our first stop on day 1 was for lunch for about 30 minutes and then we had 3 more stops that day of about 20 minutes each. It was significantly cooler on our second day and it really made a huge difference. We only needed 3 stops of 9, 29 (lunch), and 7 minutes total.

Can't wait to do this trip again later this year!