Jameson Dow, a writer for Electrek.co joined Cheddar News to discuss ways electric vehicle owners can do to prepare for long road trips and how it's gotten better from previous years. “As long as you think a little bit about where you're going and mainly stick to highways on road trips, you're going to have a pretty easy time these days,” he said.

Closing Bell

What to Consider Ahead of EV Road Trips

Okay, welcome back to Cheddar News is closing bell. Everyone as electric vehicles are becoming more common. So to R. E. V. Road trips while electric cars can be cheaper to run than gas or diesel powered vehicles. Many road trippers may think twice before making the switch and concerns about things like ranging or the fear of not having enough battery power to make it to a destination could prevent people from getting an E. V. Makes sense. So here to break down everything that we need to know about planning an E. V. Road trip is Jamison dow rider for electric, a news website dedicated to electric transportation. Hello, thank you for joining Jamison. So what are some of the things that people need to consider when planning for an E. V. Road trip? You know, it's getting a lot better these days. Um, back in the day when I first driving, started driving electric cars, we would stop at, you know, RV campgrounds to try to get charges. Um, that's still possible but a lot better these days because we have fast chargers out there and um, it's really easy these days in a Tesla, the car will do a lot of the planning for you outside of a Tesla. You often have to do a little bit of planning yourself. But there are apps for that. Um, there's an app called a better route planner and plug share, which is a major um, electric car charging app. Uh, it shows you where charging points are, they just added a new trip planner to their um, to their app. So, uh, as long as you think a little bit about where you're going and mainly stick to highways on road trips, you're going to have a pretty easy time these days. It's honestly not that bad. The length of stops is sort of um sort of the same as you would normally spend for food and bathroom breaks anyway. So jamison quelling, quelling any concerns. I think that's what we were all hoping to hear for anyone who is considering find an electric vehicle. I do want to pull up an example of what an E. V. Road trip from new york city to Chicago might look like east coast to middle America According to Tesla when using the company's model three long range vehicles trip from NyC to Chicago would require six stops, more than two hours of charging and more than five hours of driving. So do you think it's reasonable considering drivers would probably only have to stop to fuel up maybe once in a gas powered car and unlikely that they would be spending two hours actually sitting at a charging station. Yeah. So uh I haven't done that trip myself. I'm on the west coast. I've driven up and down California and in any trips that I've done, it hasn't felt like I'm ever waiting for a charge really. Uh it's more like I stopped, I get food. I don't rush to eat, I don't, you know, rush to get in and out of the stop. But you know, you eat, it's sort of a normal pace and when you get back to the car, it's pretty full. Um, There are a lot of different ways that you can minimize your charging time if you charge when the car is lower rather than higher. If you don't charge to 100%, that helps. Um, I don't, I think that about five hours driving and two hours of charging is, it seems a little bit high for charging in my experience. But if that's what Tesla says, then that's what Tesla says. They have a very good charging app in the car where you just tell it, hey, take me to Chicago and it'll tell you where to where to stop and all those stops will have food, something to do, places to shop, anything like that. And I think in the lucky case, right, we did show basically a clean line people were able to drive straight from new york city to Chicago. Not really detours or routes. For instance, if they were perhaps going to two places that weren't necessarily as well known, major metropolis is like new york city and Chicago. Jamison. I do want to ask you about industries embracing electric vehicles and charging stations, hotels are doing it more and more. We see national parks, people who want to actually go to some of these places to travel. They are embracing it. What does that mean for the industry and for consumers ability to make these trips? Uh Yeah, I mean it is helpful. Anything like that is helpful as electric cars get bigger and bigger and they will because they're growing by about um 50 to 100% every year. Uh New electric car sales and as that happens, we need to grow charging uh at a similar rate honestly in order to keep up. So the more hotels that added, the better, the nice thing about hotels is that if you charge overnight and you leave with 100% charge, you don't have to think about where you're going to charge for the first, you know, two or 300 miles of the day depending on which car you're in. And if that's the case, you know, it's kind of rare that you want to drive more than 300 miles in a day. In my experience at least if you're doing like a leisurely like looking at things road trip, it's just you know, you get tired of being in the car for that long so you want to get out and stretch your legs. I get it Jamison dow rider for electric dot co and thank you and also fun fact viewers to leave you with. Did you know that most americans, daily road trips to work? Only average about 30 miles. Almost electric vehicles can drive at least 70 miles on a single charge, making that accessible for the average commuter