Long distance sight-seeing trip no problem for this EV owner

Long distance sight-seeing trip no problem for this EV owner
M. McKinnon – Atikokan progress Volume 74 No. 40 – August 7th 2024

“Electric vehicles are fine for getting around in the city, but I don’t know if I’d want to take a long trip in one…”
That is a fairly common attitude, but EV manufacturers, charge providers, and EV owners are out to change that idea. Count Lise Sorensen, owner of a Hyundai Ionic 5, among them.
Earlier this summer she and a friend, Donna Giles, set out in her Ionic 5 for Salt Lake City, home of her son Thomas. They decided to make it a nine-day camping trip, travelling the scenic routes and taking in as much of the gorgeous country between here and there as they could manage.
Could that even be done in an EV?
“We didn’t know what we’d find,” said Lise. “I’d heard a lot of horror stories, but my research told me otherwise.”
Owning an EV, it sure helps to be plugged into the digital world, and Sorensen is certainly that. There are several different phone apps designed specifically to help EV owners connect with charging services. As she planned the trip (using CAA maps and sight-seeing tools), she kept her phone handy and checked all their suggested routes for EV charging services.
She was pleasantly surprised. Even in rural areas, well away from urban centres (much of their travel was through sparsely populated areas of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Utah) it was fairly simple to plan routes that kept them well within range of a charging station.
Still, it might prove to be different once they actually hit the road…
“I needn’t have worried. By day two we knew that was going to be all fine.”
Fully charged, the Ionic 5 has a range of five hundred kilometres. Sorensen lives at Fire Lake, and can go to Thunder Bay and back on a full charge – a charge that costs her about $2.50 when she plugs in overnight at home. (How much gas do you burn when you go to Thunder Bay and back?)
On this trip they travelled over 6,300 km and spent $376 (Canadian) on charges. A similar trip in a vehicle using eight litres of fuel to travel 100 km would burn 504 litres of gasoline, which would cost over $625 (CDN) at US gas prices (roughly $1.25 per litre in South Dakota).
Sorensen admits they spent more than they needed to on charging.
“Several places were very expensive,” she said, adding that they could have avoided those expensive charges had she done more homework. “I learned I have to actually go in [on the phone app] and look at the prices when I am planning where to charge.”
In many places, particularly urban areas, charging was free. (More and more city hotels are now providing free overnight charging.) They were a little limited in that they could not charge overnight, as they were camping.
There are a number of different charge providers; they used ZEF, Charge Point, EV Connect, and Electrify America during the trip. Think of them as the ESSO, Shell, PetroCan, and Mobil stations of the EV world. But it is still early days in the retail charging market, and pricing is all over the map.
In Watertown, South Dakota, they stopped for a picnic lunch and found a free ZEF charger. In less than an hour and a half it gave them enough juice to travel 320 km. The next day, they stopped for lunch in Stamford, SD, and ended up paying $41 for a Charge Point charge that added 370 km.
That was the most they paid at any point on the trip. Typically, a fast charge cost between $10 and $20. They got free charges in Chamberlain, SD, Jackson, Wyoming, Salt Lake City (all over the city, too), and Tattagouche State Park in Minnesota.
“We never had to wait more than a few minutes to use a charger,” she said. And when problems did pop up at a charging station, Sorensen was able to reach a help service online in short order. (One provider even contacted her after the trip to advise the problems she had experienced at a particular station had been repaired.)
The vehicle did draw some attention, especially at campgrounds.
“People were a bit curious. What kind of car is that? When they learned it was an EV, many asked “How is that going for you?” They always seemed a bit surprised when I told them how well we were making out!”
Sorensen started looking at ways to reduce her carbon footprint a when her granddaughter was born a few years ago. A friend in Terrace Bay, an EV owner with a lifestyle similar to hers, helped convince her an EV was the way to go.
“I considered a hybrid, but finally decided I didn’t want to spend another dollar on fossil fuels,” she said.
It took some determination – COVID supply line disruptions meant she had to wait eighteen months to get her vehicle – but she hasn’t looked back since the day it arrived.
“It was more expensive [than a regular vehicle], but when I considered the $20,000 in gas and $5,000 in regular service [oil changes, etc.] I’ll be saving, and the $5,000 federal rebate… it was a good deal.”
Back at the turn of the last century, travellers talked about auto trips. As the infrastructure – roads and service stations – developed, people stopped referring to them as auto trips. They were just trips.
We are not far away from a day when no one would even think a trip in an EV was any different from any other kind of trip.