4000 km Check-In

What I've learned about charging the EV so far

Approaching the Rockies from the Prairies

After a very bad morning driving north of Superior a couple of weeks ago (maybe you read about it here), I drove into Dryden looking for the fast-charger my app said I would find there. The app said “you have arrived” when I pulled into a parking lot between a Canadian Tire and a Mark’s Work Warehouse. But I could not see a charger. I drove around the block and on second pass, I saw a little laneway beside the Mark’s and a couple of chargers at the end.

I had loaded up with coffee at my last charging stop in Marathon and both my body and mind were focused on what I was going to do with all that liquid and how soon.

I was hugely relieved that the Ivy-branded charger actually worked—the previous one was bust and that had been the cause of a lot of unpleasantness. But relief was nowhere close for the more immediate source of my distress. There was a Timmy’s and an A&W 600 or 700 metres back down the highway. The good people at Ivy mistakenly thought I would want to buy some pants while I charged, or maybe pick up some hardware.

No.

I plugged in the car and then chugged off on foot as fast as I could down the very cold and very windy highway till I got to the A&W (it was closer than the Timmy’s). Sweet relief.

That little scene draws together a lot of the threads of my experience trying to charge my 2020 Nissan Leaf all-electric as I attempt to cross the continent. I have now been through Northern Ontario and the Prairies. I am heading into the Rockies and will no doubt soon have a whole new set of lessons to convey about mountain driving.

But for those who have an EV and are considering a long distance trip, or who are considering switching to an EV and are trying to evaluate what it would be like on the open road, I thought I’d summarize what I’ve learned so far.

• Chargers are sometimes broken, and in my experience so far the problem is greater in the most remote areas where the consequence of failure are most serious.

• The PlugShare app that I have been using to plot my course from charger to charger is generally accurate, but it is not perfect. Unlike gas stations, EV chargers are not announced on highway signs and do not proclaim their presence with big red or yellow canopies. In Vegreville the other day, the app led me to an electrical business across the highway from the shopping centre in which the charger was actually located. A helpful employee pointed out the correct location. In Red Deer it initially led me to some guy’s house on a suburban street. No idea why—there was no one around.

• The chargers are often located at truck stops or shopping centres where there’s some place to relieve yourself and load up with more coffee—or get warm, which can be a thing too. But I have also charged outside a city hall, closed on a Sunday, and at a gas station where there was no place to sit and wait, much less get WiFi.

• No. 1 Highway is generally pretty well accommodated with chargers—at least when they are not broken. But you get off No. 1 and its an issue. There is not a single fast charger between Regina and Saskatoon. Many EVs wouldn’t make it that distance. Few would make it in cold winter weather. I stopped off in the little town of Davidson and had a pleasant couple of hours while I plugged into a Level 2 charger at the hardware store there. But I am on a leisurely trip. That’s no good for people trying to get back and forth between the province’s major cities in more businesslike fashion.

• I’ve driven in the winter time in the heavily trafficked central Canadian corridor, and it’s fine. But in more remote regions where there aren’t many chargers, where chargers aren’t fixed quickly when they break, and in winter when your EV battery loses much of its range, travel may not only be difficult; it may even be dangerous.

People often ask me on this trip how much range I have in my EV. It’s a natural question, but my big takeaway so far is that it is also a misleading one.

Sure, the car might get 330 kilometres on a charge—even 350 if everything is going right. But everything often doesn't go right. Things frequently go wrong. You can’t plan on driving 300 kilometres to the next charger because it may be broken and then what do you do?

You need a Plan A and a Plan B and even sometimes a Plan C.

Plan A, for me, is usually to go something like 180 kilometres between charges so that I have plenty in reserve on my battery to make the charger after that if there’s a problem. Plan B is that second charger, if there is one. Plan C is sometimes a Level 2 charger that will let me bump my range by 20% in a couple of hours if that’s what I need to get to the next fast charger.

Plan D sometimes seems like it may be to settle down and raise a family wherever the battery lapses into exhaustion.

My conclusion on this trip to this point is that to make long distance EV travel practical for less masochistic people than me, we need chargers in more places and ideally run by different companies, so that they don’t all go down together with some IT problem. And we need modestly priced EV’s that have a theoretical range of something like 600 kilometres. That would allow people to drive, say, 400 kilometres in the morning, leaving a cushion in case problems arise. Then they could stop for lunch and charge the car, and drive another 400 kilometres in the afternoon. For most people that’s a full day of driving.

For now, what I am doing is likely to remain too much of an adventure for most people, I am perfectly sure.