Road Trip Spring 2026 Day 1

Post author John
Post date March 8, 2026

8 March 2026

This is my first trip of this length in the 2026 Hyundai IONIQ 5 and while it’s not quite as comfortable nor as quiet as the IONIQ 6 I had, there are plenty of good reasons why I like this one better. That aside, here is what my day was like:

I had to play for church in Manchester CT so I headed there on the usual backroads route this morning with the temps at 46º and plenty of heavy fog. This isn’t the worst of it but this will give you a small idea of what the world looked like at the beginning of my day:

Church ran long and I didn’t leave there until almost 11:30, heading west on I-84 to its end at I-81 in Scranton. Just after crossing into Pennsylvania, I made my first charging stop at a Tesla Supercharger in Matamoras PA that I’ve been to before. As I’ve seen in the past, there was only one other car at this 16-charger station. I was really pleased to find that the new battery platform for Hyundai is much more efficient at stepping up the Tesla 400V current to the 800V required by the car — 124kW vs. 96kW speed that I had in the previous car! And that rate is very flat right up to 75% charge when it only drops off by 8-10%. I charged from 31-80% in 22.5 minutes, taking on 44.7kWh.

From there to the next charging stop in Sugarloaf PA (just after getting onto I-80) I had serious headwinds! My efficiency up to Matamoras was 3.0 miles/kWh and that dropped to 2.6 miles/kWh for the next 90-some miles. Sugarloaf has another Tesla Supercharger, this time with V4 chargers (long cords! no need to block two spots!) but with V3 cabinets (so still 400V to the car). I charged from 37-80% in 20 minutes, taking on 39.644kWh. There are 12 chargers here and I was the only car charging until just before I was done when one other pulled in.

The last leg of the trip was just 23 miles on back roads to Bloomsburg where I ate and am staying tonight, at an efficiency of 3.8 miles/kWh (yay!). My hotel is a fairly new Fairfield Inn & Suites that amazingly has SIX free EV chargers, 4 Tesla destination chargers delivering 8.2kW and 2 J-1772 plugs. This is particularly nice because I’ll be at 100% when I leave in the morning.

Here are the numbers for the trip so far:

Finally, here’s the view from my hotel room for the night. Tomorrow, I’ll try to get an early(-ish) start so I can get to Schmidt’s German Restaurant in Columbus OH by 3:30 in the afternoon.