Pat and Dave’s Easy EV Road Trip – PART 3: The Trip Home and EV Performance Summary

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I described our travels from Minneapolis, MN to Pigeon Forge, TN, and our visits to two National Parks, New River Gorge NP in West Virginia and Great Smoky Mountains NP in Tennessee. This final episode provides a brief summary of our trip back home and some details of how our new EV performed on the road trip.

Wednesday, April 24, 2024: We left the Golf Vista on Dollywood Lane shortly after 9 AM and headed eastward, stopping to charge the car at a place called Buccees in Crossville, TN. We’d never heard of Buccees before, but it’s apparently a very popular fuel and convenience store chain in the southeastern US. We were absolutely amazed by the place. There had to be sixty or more gas pumps in addition to two charging stations – a Tesla Supercharger bank with 16 chargers and a ChargePoint station with four chargers (interestingly bearing Mercedes Benz logos). The convenience store was huge – easily as big as large truck stops such as Loves or Pilot – and was filled with an amazing array of ready-to-eat foods, groceries, gift items, and such. One especially unique feature was an array of about twenty or thirty different types of custom-made beef jerky. We bought a bag and it was delicious. I’d recommend Buccees as a welcome stop for travelers of all stripes.

After charging the car, we drove to the Stones River National Battlefield in Murfreesboro, TN, for our final point of interest before sprinting for home. This site, operated by the National Park Service, memorializes the Battle of Stones River, which took place from December 31, 1862 through January 2, 1863. Union forces squeaked out a victory in a bloody conflict there, boosting morale in the North and gaining control of central Tennessee. Of the major battles in the Civil War, Stones River had the highest percentage of casualties on both sides.

We first stopped in at an impressive Visitors Center with interesting displays about the battle and its aftermath and then strolled around the 600-acre site to see several key battleground areas and the large National Cemetery in which more than 6,100 Union soldiers are buried, including more than 2,500 who were never identified. We left with a somber feeling, with a new appreciation for the immense toll that the Civil War took on the soldiers who fought in it and their surviving families and loved ones.

Then we headed off to another charging stop just southeast of Nashville and then on to the Hampton Inn in Pleasant View, TN. We enjoyed a meal at a little place called Firecracker Pizza near the hotel before turning in for the evening.

Thursday, April 25, and Friday, April 26, 2024: Our last two days were uneventful, including a drive to the Hampton Inn O’Fallon near St. Louis for our final night’s stay and then a long (for us) eleven-hour drive home as the weather turned cold and rainy. As we trundled our luggage up to our fifth-floor condo, we felt very satisfied with our Easy EV Road Trip. Here’s a recap:

EV Performance: Now for some information (hopefully not too nerdy) about how our new EV performed on the Road Trip. Hopefully this will be of interest to readers who may be considering purchasing an EV or who may feel hesitant about it due to perceived EV problems.

Many questions are related to charging an EV. How much does it cost? How long does it take? How hard is it to find chargers? I’ll answer these questions based on actual data from our Easy EV Road Trip. Details of our charging sessions during the trip are provided in this table:

One thing I’ve heard from a number of people is that, with electric costs rising due to inflation, operating an EV is too expensive. So, what did we actually spend on electricity during this Road Trip? $238.94, including the pre-trip charging at home in the condo garage. How would that compare to the identical trip with an internal combustion engine (ICE) car? If we assume an average gas price of $2.60, based on what we observed on various gas station signs along the way, fueling an ICE car would cost the same as what we spent on charging the EV if it got 37.2 mpg. (If gasoline prices miraculously fell to $2.50, an ICE car would only need to get 29.1 mpg to break even with the EV, but if it spiked to $4.00, it would need to get 46.5 mpg for an equivalent fuel cost.) Put it this way – the plethora of large pickup trucks and SUVs we observed along the way are costing a lot more to take on a road trip, while a Toyota or Honda hybrid would cost a bit less.

It’s important to understand that using high-speed (Level 3) chargers (such as the Tesla Superchargers we used) is the absolute most expensive way to charge an EV. By comparison, slow (Level 1) charging at our condo with a simple 110V circuit costs less than half as much, or intermediate (Level 2) charging at our Lake Superior cabin, with a reduced off-peak rate, costs less than a fifth as much. Equivalent-cost ICE cars would need to get 77.2 mpg or 193.7 mpg to compete with these Level 1 and Level 2 chargers, and I can guarantee there are no such ICE cars in existence anywhere. So, if you consider that road trips probably represent a very small percentage of the total driving that any of us do, an EV with a Level 1 or Level 2 home charger is far less costly to operate than an ICE car.

Another issue for EV hesitance is the time required for charging stops on a road trip. So, just how long did we spend charging the car on our Easy EV Road Trip. As the table above shows, the total charging time for the 17 stops was 468 minutes (7.8 hours) with an average of 27.5 minutes per stop. We generally used that time for something more or less productive, such as eating lunch, buying groceries, using the rest room, watching a Netflix movie on the Tesla screen, etc., so it didn’t really feel like wasted time. However, if getting to your destination as fast as possible is a high priority, the time spent charging is a significant detriment.

To put it in perspective, the comparable time for fueling an ICE car depends on the size of its gas tank and the car’s mileage. Calculations I did based on a Honda Accord hybrid, a light-duty pickup, and a heavy-duty pickup showed minimum total time for fueling over a 2,777 mile Road Trip would be 49.7 minutes, 55.1 minutes, and 59.3 minutes, respectively (assuming ten minutes per fill up), for a saving of nearly 7 hours compared to our EV, although some of that time would be eaten up by the aforementioned eating, shopping, etc. This would easily allow the trip to be completed in a day less, although Pat and I – retirees both – don’t like to drive for more than 4 hours a day anyway, so the savings would be meaningless to us. A good deal of this aversion to long driving times comes from the stress induced by other drivers — huge pickups that tailgate menacingly, freeway mergers who insist on reaching their final merge point at exactly the same position as our car — or driving conditions such as endless stretches of road construction or heavy wind or rain, to name but a few.

Probably the biggest factor in EV hesitance is range anxiety – will an EV driver be able to get to the next charging station before running out of power? The new Tesla Model 3 proved to be excellent in this regard. The quoted range is 324 miles under ideal conditions, and we found that the actual distance traveled averaged 93.4% of the range estimated by the car during the Road Trip. We generally recharged the car when it dropped below 20% of battery capacity and charged it to 80-90% of full at each stop. A major reason we bought the Tesla is the large number of Superchargers that have been deployed all across the country, and we never had any anxiety about reaching one in time. Planning the stops was very easy; we used two methods. The simplest way was to give a voice command, e.g. “Navigate to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee,” and let the car map out recommended charging stops. Sometimes we used an app called ABRP (for A Better Route Planner) to check out alternate routes – this app can be customized to use actual performance data from a specific car and/or to specify such things as minimum charging time, avoiding tolls, and the like.) Thus, the trip truly lived up to my claim as Pat and Daves Easy EV Road Trip. I can’t offer any insight regarding road trips in non-Tesla EVs, however.

One final note about the Tesla. Coincidentally, just before we left on the trip, Tesla decided to give all or most Teslas on the road a free month of what they call “Supervised Full Self Driving” capability, so we decided to try it out during the trip. The video below shows how it worked – quite well and rather fun.

It also included automatic parking in parking lots and automatic parallel parking on streets. However, neither of us was comfortable letting the car drive itself, and we also felt that the price for this feature — $ 99 per month or $4,000 dollars for the life of the car – was too steep, so we did not pick it up after the free trial. The car still has what Tesla calls “Autopilot,” which is adaptive cruise control, and “Autosteer,” which maintains the car within the driving lane and automatically steers around curves.

While the above considerations are all related to practical matters – cost, time, level of anxiety – they do not speak to the major reason to buy an EV, which is to help slow the inexorable advance of climate change. While I’m afraid that the drivers of those menacing, tailgating pickup trucks will merely scoff at that idea, I hope it can influence some readers; after all, doesn’t helping to save the planet seem more important than saving a little time on a road trip?

OK, that’s it! Thanks for reading, and please consider joining the EV universe!