April 2024 Road Trip, Day 2

3 April 2024

Today’s weather was even less good than yesterday for much of the day — the temperature averaged 5ºF lower, dipping to 40 at one point, and I spent more than half the day in heavy traffic and rain. The last part of the trip on I-71 from Cleveland to Columbus was good, though, and I ended up maintaining my 3.0 miles/kWh average for the trip so far. No complaints there! Here is where I’m at:

Yesterday, I’d played it very conservatively with charging, stopping twice when once would probably have been enough. Today, I let the car’s navigation figure things out for me. It worked out fine in the end, but I’m going to rethink that approach going forward. Here’s what happened:

I took off from Syracuse NY with 100% charge. ABRP (A Better Route Planner) had suggested that I stop before reaching Buffalo to top off but I went with the car’s recommendation of continuing to Cheektowaga, just south of Buffalo, as that was a free Electrify America fast charger in a Walmart lot. If only … I arrived to find all four chargers in use and at least one more car waiting for a charger to free up. I parked and went inside to use the bathroom; when I came back out, two more cars were looking for juice.

At this point, I had about 36% charge left and it was pouring rain. After checking to be sure I hadn’t missed any other charging options nearby, I opted to keep going to Fredonia where there was an Electrify America with a Tesla Magic Dock charger setup across the street — surely, one or the other would be available! I also decided to take the car up on the “most economical” routing suggestion and took the slow, backroads route to Fredonia. Once there, though, I had a bay of 4 chargers all to myself in another Walmart parking lot and was thrilled to see 175kW delivered by a 150kW charger! I went from 13-80% in 20 minutes.

Now the car said I should go to the Eastgate Shopping Center on the east side of Cleveland, off of I-271, and use an EVgo charger. I figured that was a decent idea even though I’d have to pay, because I’ve heard that EVgo are highly reliable and I also needed to complete my signup process with them by actually doing a charging session. (From now on, I only have to plug the car in and the charger will recognize my vehicle and charge my account without me having to present a credit card or use the app!) Again, I had the chargers all to myself, but by sheer bad luck I took one of the 100kW ones rather than the one 350kW charger, so it took 30 minutes to go from 14-80%.

With that, I had enough to get to Columbus to the brewpub I was heading for and then to go on to my hotel. I ended the day with 22% charge remaining after 8 hours of driving plus 50 minutes charging (plus the lost time at the full charger). A road trip in the EV has a very different rhythm than the hybrid that could go 600 miles between fill-ups … but I think I’ll get used to it eventually.