Hi. I need to get to Cincinnati and it's really cold outside.
It's eight degrees Fahrenheit, which is about -13 Celsius right now.
And I have one of those electric cars.
This is a Hyundai Ioniq 5, it's a 2022.
I've had it for four years at this point, and I'm going to document
what the process looks like for driving in very cold weather,
because there's still a lot of people out there
who thinks this is either impossible or very hard.
And I'm going to do this entirely manually.
I'm not going to have my car
tell me how to get to where I'm going.
I'm not going to have my car pick chargers for me.
I'm just going to do this
all on my own, and I'm going to show you
what my process for doing that is like.
I've decided to make this video in two parts.
First, I'm just going to show you the charging stations that I stopped at
on the way there and on the way back
as well as how long I spent charging
to give you a sense of how this trip actually went.
But then I'm going to start over and walk
you through the process of choosing chargers
and how to verify through the information
the car shows you that you're going to be able to make it to that charger.
I am not having the car make these decisions for me.
I'm doing this entirely manually because quite frankly,
I can do a better job than it can.
But it is something to think about that
a lot of people aren't necessarily used to yet.
And so I'll show you that process.
But again, first I'm just going to show you
the actual end result of the trip.
So let's get started.
I started this trip with my car fully charged to 100%,
which isn't something I typically do, but because the weather is so cold,
I wanted to squeeze all the range I could out of it
to hopefully make it to Lafayette, Indiana as my first charging stop.
And I made it just fine.
Believe it or not, the charger activated on the first try,
which for Electrify America is actually pretty amazing.
So it has not started charging yet,
but it should any moment now.
It just takes a while for these chargers
to start talking to the car because they're old.
There we go.
So now the question is
how fast are we going to charge?
The car is estimating it will take 25 minutes to get to 80%,
which is slower than it should.
It should be able to do that in 18.
But 25 is still not bad.
Okay, for those who may not have any familiarity
with charging an electric car on a road trip,
let me explain the 80% thing.
You'll see that my car is quoting a remaining time of 25 minutes to 80%,
but almost twice as long to get to 100%.
Every electric car is like this.
That's because the higher the state of charge a lithium ion battery is,
the more slowly it can accept additional charge.
And so the advice is always unplug at 80%
and just accept that you aren't
getting quite as much range as your car is capable of,
simply because it's much faster to do it that way.
My car is actually exceptionally quick
at charging from 80 to 100%.
Most other EVs can take 30, 40,
sometimes up to an hour just to get that last 20%.
My car only takes another 20 minutes or so if conditions are right.
But still, why sit there for 20 minutes to gain
just a little bit more battery charge?
Just unplug and go to the next charger.
So that's what I'm doing here.
I just wanted to explain one thing with charging
EVs on road trips is you're never really going to fill them up.
You can if you want to, but you'll waste a lot of time.
So you really just want to unplug at 80% and get going.
Okay.
I just finished eating my sandwich
and I have found out where the next charging stop is going to be.
And we're already at 74%.
And actually, I can safely unplug right now
because the next charger is only 86 miles away.
As you may have seen from the dash cam clock,
I pulled into this charging station at 11:17 its time and I'm pulling out at 11:46,
so total time spent here was about 29 minutes.
I think the car was charging for 25 minutes of that.
Pretty much exactly what it said.
But between charger activation and programing
in the next destination in my car
spent an extra five minutes at the charging site, but
our next and last charging stop is in Shelbyville, Indiana.
And as I already said, it's not even 90 miles away.
Shelbyville is just outside of Indianapolis, and, well, I'm
actually only recording this because I don't want to cut up the time lapse.
I want you to see the whooole thing.
Is that important?
Not really, but, Yeah.
So, we're almost there.
This went by a lot slower in person, let me tell you.
Okay. We're almost there.
We're almost to Shelbyville.
We're almost there.
Aaaaaaaaannnnnnd
okay we're there.
I was really hoping my dash cam would record
audio much better than it turned out to.
I even tried that AI voice enhance thing, and it just, uh, it's real bad.
So I have to rerecord a lot of everything.
It's great.
But anyway, this is a Pilot/Flying J station that I'm about to plug into here,
and then I'll just give you a quick update as far as the charging speed
I get once we're plugging in and how long I'm going to be here.
Okay. I just got back from using the bathroom.
We are not getting the best charging speeds,
but we're getting pretty good.
16 minutes to 80% means, realistically,
this is going to be about a 20 minute charge stop total.
So I can definitely get to my destination
once we are at 80%, meaning
I spent, I think I looked it up.
The total drive time was just shy of five hours,
and we spent 45 minutes charging.
I don't think that's a very big deal myself.
You can disagree, but extending a five hour drive
by 45 minutes is really not that big of a deal, guys.
The first charging stop, I was eating my sandwich
and by the time I was done, I was ready to move on.
This charging stop, I'm not eating anything so I will be waiting on the car,
but I'm only waiting about 15, 20 minutes.
No big deal.
As before, I'll point out the dash cam showed
the time was 1:05 when I pulled in to charge, and it's showing 1:26 as I'm leaving.
So I spent pretty much 21 minutes at this charging stop,
and now I am on my way to my destination.
Well, I made it 38% state of charge still.
That is a very pessimistic number, 59 miles of range.
But it has been a very pessimistic day.
But we did manage to click up to 2.4 miles per kilowatt hour.
So we're getting a little bit better efficiency in this last 90 mile leg.
But I am here and,
I saw a couple of chargers on the way here.
So I am totally set no matter what happens.
So I'm going to check in with you tomorrow morning
when I head back, but for now.
Mission accomplished.
Now, when it comes to where I'm going to charge at my destination,
well, there are many different options available,
but the one I chose was this:
Hello and good morning.
I did end up staying at a hotel, and I looked for a hotel
that had EV chargers as a perk, and this one does.
Did you know hotels have electricity?
It's pretty wild.
And the smarter hotel managers out there are getting electricity from their hotel
out to at least a few parking spots.
That way, people like me who have electric cars
are more willing to stay at this hotel.
They probably lost about $10 on me from the electricity that I used,
but they gained 150 bucks from me for the room rate.
So, you know, they got 140 bucks out of me
that they would not have if they didn't have those chargers.
So... just pointing that out, that smart business people
that like money and people to give them money
should be offering perks
like electric vehicle charging.
But anyway, because I stayed here overnight,
my car is now at 100%.
Well, I went out to put something back in the car
and it was at 98%.
But at this point, it is now at 100% for sure.
I didn't even need it to charge that high,
because I just need to get back to.
What was that,
Shelbyville, Indiana?
But, you know, I might as well,
because then that shortens the charging time in Shelbyville.
I might only be charging there for ten minutes
this morning or this evening.
I'm not leaving until around four, but we'll find out.
Yeah, that was a little optimistic.
I'm not going to bother showing all the time
lapse footage on the reverse trip,
because it literally is just the reverse trip.
Although there's a small twist which I will get to in a moment.
But I just want to point out that I spent 20 minutes charging here.
It still wasn't a very long time at all.
And then I moved on to a different charging station
than the one that I stopped at on the way back, because, well,
you'll see soon that the weather is getting worse.
It's getting much colder, and the winds are picking up.
And the fact that it took
almost all the battery pack for me to get from home to Lafayette meant
it would not work to get from Lafayette back home,
so I ended up charging at a charger
farther away from here in Shelbyville.
That way I wouldn't have to stop twice.
Except ultimately I did make two charging stops,
but not because I needed to.
I did it just in case.
I'm going to talk more about this
in the second half of the video, but Plug Share,
which is the app I'm using to find these chargers,
had indicated that there was an issue with the charger
in Remington, Indiana, which is where I wanted to stop.
And although the app showed me that they were all online right now,
given the weather, I was a little bit paranoid and I decided to stop in Lafayette
to give myself enough charge to where if I got to Remington
and it turned out those charges weren't working,
I wouldn't be stuck there because the gap between Remington
and Chicagoland is quite large.
So if I were stuck in Remington,
if those chargers weren't working, I would have been stuck.
So I decided to stop in Lafayette to give myself enough charge
to get to Remington and back, just in case there was an issue.
Turned out there wasn't an issue,
so I didn't need to stop in Lafayette after all.
But I did just in case.
Okay. Good news:
We made it here to, Remington.
This is actually a canopy charging site.
The car is plugged in, and it's just still negotiating the charger.
Bad news:
I saw the worst efficiency I've ever seen on this leg in this car.
It was down to 1.8 miles per kilowatt hour.
This is the stretch with all the wind turbines, and it is windy.
And of course, they are facing the wrong direction now.
I'm driving into the wind again.
So we are charging
and it thinks it's only going to be 20 minutes to 80%.
So the battery pack must be pretty warm.
Let's see where we get.
We're over 100 already.
That's pretty good
for only 20 minutes to 80%.
That's very close to this thing's max charging speed.
So I really can't complain about the charging speed.
It's just the range has dropped a lot because of how cold it is.
But now I think I'm only
about 100 miles from my home.
And so long as I'm only 100 miles from home,
80% is...
quite safe.
I cannot imagine a situation
where an 80% charge can't get this car to go 100 miles.
That would effectively be a 50% range drop
'cause 100%...
what would that be 120 miles, basically?
So yeah.
I cannot imagine if I get to 80%
I'm not going to be able to get home just fine.
So I'm just going to sit here until we're at 80%,
and then I'm going to get going.
I will see you, probably
I'm just going to check in when I'm home.
Unless there are issues.
Were there issues?
Nope!
Made it home just fine.
And I arrived with 21% state of charge.
I ended up charging up to 85% in Remington
just to give me that extra buffer, because, you know,
the weather was really bad,
but that wasn't even necessary.
I got home with 21%, and because I have a charging station,
I'm just going to plug into that, walk inside and go to bed.
But now let's rewind to the start
so I can explain what I'm going through
as I make this happen.
And I'm going to start by addressing battery preconditioning,
because this is the weak spot of EVs,
and it is particularly a weak spot of my car.
So first, what is battery preconditioning?
Well, if you were picking up on me,
talking about the charging speeds after I plugged in,
it is not safe to charge a lithium ion battery pack quickly
when the battery cells are cold.
And in weather like this, that means you get an extremely slow charge.
Now, engineers are smart, and what they did was
they added a battery pack heater.
So the car has the ability to warm up the battery pack
as you are approaching a DC fast charger
to make sure that those battery cells are nice and warm,
and it can charge as fast as possible.
Any decent electric car does that these days,
and that is why the winter road trip is no longer
that painful of a process.
However.
although Hyundai equipped these cars
with the hardware, they need to warm the battery pack.
The software which controls that feature
is, pardon my French, batshit.
Hyundai needs to fix this because right now
this car is an absolute
pain in the butt to use in this specific case,
because I have to trick it into thinking I'm
going to a charging station.
Let's back up.
So some electric car manufacturers out there
decided that the best approach is to hand hold their drivers,
and you are supposed to just put in a destination.
And because the automaker owns all of the charging network,
it will just pick every single charging stop for you
and you just follow its instructions.
Now, because so much of the automotive industry
has decided that they need to copy that approach, that's what Hyundai did.
But you see,
there's all these new chargers that are showing up every day,
and I am no longer paying to connect my car to the internet.
In fact, I've never paid for it
because I think that's kind of a silly thing.
I have a smartphone with me, and I can plug it into my car,
and it can take over my car's infotainment screen, and it's really great.
We had this technology called Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
It's great, except GM's trying to kill it because they don't like it.
They want anyway.
my point is, I don't want to use the car's navigation system.
I want to pick chargers myself.
Because any time somebody builds this feature into a car,
it gets really clunky to do things like say,
oh, I want to prioritize this charging network,
or oh, I don't want to use that specific charger.
So rather than have to go through all that rigmarole,
I would rather just decide where to charge.
And so that is what I do.
But because the car will not battery pre-condition
unless it knows I am navigating to a charger,
I do have to use its navigation system
and oftentimes I have to enter charging stations which don't exist.
It is incredibly dumb.
Here's an example of what I mean.
I have a friend who lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and on the way there,
there is an ion station in Janesville, Wisconsin,
and that's the one that I want to stop at.
But my car doesn't know that charging station is there.
So when I make trips up there in the winter, I have to tell it.
I'm stopping at a blink station near there,
which I'm pretty sure no longer exists,
but that's the only charging station my car knows about.
And this is just so dumb.
I just want a button that I can press
that says start battery preconditioning
because I do not need my car to navigate
on the way to a place I know where to go.
I just want to be able to tell it, start preconditioning the battery.
And in case it's not clear, this is irrelevant in warmer weather.
The only reason you have to do
this is because it's cold and warm weather.
You don't bother with this at all, just drive to a charger.
But my car really needs the battery pack to be at least like, 70°F.
So even in the middle of spring,
charging isn't exactly as fast
as it could be unless you battery precondition.
And I am just so mad at Hyundai
for selling me a car which has this critical feature
that I have to trick the car into turning on.
It's incredibly dumb.
They deserve a lot of shame for this.
And until they patch the software, which, by the way, we know they can do
because when I got the car, the infotainment system
could not turn on battery preconditioning at all.
And then it got a software update and now it can.
So it is totally possible for them to add a button,
but they just haven't bothered.
And I'm going to keep getting on their case about this
until they fix the problem,
because we really need to stop tolerating any sort of company,
but especially car companies selling products that are not finished.
Thanks, Tesla,
you ruined the industry for letting them think that's normal.
But anyway, if you're a person like me
who wants to make his own decisions and use his own brain,
then there is some strategizing when it comes to picking chargers.
And if you don't know where chargers are,
you should check out the Plug Share app.
Or I believe they have a website.
This is a great resource to understand what chargers are in your area,
and you can filter them by connector type as well as their power output.
And in the case of my car, I now have the Nax adapter
so I can look for any CC, S1
or next charging station.
However, I do not want to use Tesla Superchargers,
and not just because I have a preference to avoid them, but in my car
they are very, very slow because again, I don't.
A lot of people can't stand that.
I sound like I'm Tesla bashing all the time.
But seriously, it is 2026 and Tesla now has last.
I checked for 800 volt capable
charging stations in the entire world.
And because my car is an 800 volt native car,
it charges very slowly on 400 volt infrastructure,
which is almost everything Tesla has.
They are so behind on charging infrastructure,
but the broader public just doesn't really seem to know that.
But anyway.
If you're like me and you want to make your own decisions
and pick your own chargers,
you do need to know how far your car can actually go on a charge,
and that varies a lot depending on the weather.
That's kind of the whole point of this exercise.
But one thing that I would really encourage
you to do is to not dwell so much on this,
because what you can do is just get going
and then see what the conditions are actually like.
And that's exactly what I'm doing here.
I picked that charger in Lafayette
because that's an easy distance for my car
to do in the summer, but it's going to be a little bit dicey today.
And I also already was aware of the charging station in Remington.
So that was going to be a bailout.
But that's not even important yet.
What is important is I had my car charged at 100%,
and I'm going to get going today.
And after we've been driving for 50 miles
once, once I'm out of, city traffic
and I'm on the open road.
It's very easy to assess what sort of range
your car is realistically going to get.
There's several different ways to do this,
and I'm going to start with the easiest one,
which isn't the most accurate.
However, you're using a navigation system,
whether that's an app or the car's built in navigation system.
You're going to put in a destination
and you'll have a figure which tells you miles to go.
And the car also has a range estimator, which tells you
how many miles it thinks you can go on this charge.
Now, the very important thing to remember is that is an estimate.
That is why I say this is the least accurate.
But this is actually really useful
because if you compare the difference between those two numbers,
you can just keep track of that distance to see
if you're getting worse energy efficiency
or better energy efficiency than the car expects.
So, for example, if it tells me
I have 150 miles to go until I get to the charger
and I have 180 miles of range,
then the difference between those two numbers is 30 miles.
So as I drive, I'm just going to keep watching those two numbers
and doing a bit of mental subtraction to see what the difference is.
If the difference between those two numbers is getting smaller,
that means I'm using range up faster than the car expected,
and I might want to slow down, which will increase your range
or consider picking a closer charger.
However, if the numbers are getting farther apart,
that means conditions are better than the car expected and you can relax.
I honestly use this method quite a lot,
but particularly with winter driving,
it can catch you off guard because of battery preconditioning.
When the car decides to turn on the battery heater,
which is typically when you're about 45 minutes
to an hour away from the charging station.
That battery heater consumes 4.5kW,
which isn't huge in the context of the car,
but it's still quite significant.
And that means your energy efficiency is going to start dropping
quite quickly once it turns on that battery heater.
If the car is doing its own navigation for you,
it should account for this.
But you know, I don't really trust any car software these days,
so I am normally watching things pretty closely.
But just to give you some context,
if a 4.5kW heater is running for an entire hour,
that only represents about 7% of the car's battery pack capacity.
So it's not a gigantic thing,
but it is something that can catch you off guard,
because those efficiency numbers are going to change
as soon as the battery heater kicks on.
Now, the more accurate way to gauge
your driving efficiency is to actually look at the energy efficiency.
Every car is going to have a different way to show you this,
but the important metric is miles or kilometers,
depending on where you are per kilowatt hour.
Right here on this screen,
the car is telling me how many miles per kilowatt hour
the car has averaged in the last 89.5 miles,
and it's only averaging 2.3, which is really bad.
This was the moment that the car turned on the battery pack heater.
I snapped a photo of it.
Now the efficiency was so bad.
Not really because it's 18°F outside.
That's not that big of a factor.
It was just I was driving into a headwind
and it was quite nasty.
This is why I say just get going and see what the conditions are.
After a while, I going to be able to get a pretty accurate representation
of I'm getting 2.3 miles per kilowatt hour.
And if you want to equate that to actual range, well,
the car has a 75 kilowatt hour battery pack roughly.
So you can multiply a 75 by 2.3.
And then that's your answer.
It's going to be 180 ish miles.
But remember that is assuming the efficiency stays the same.
And since I just turned on the battery pack, well,
since the car just turned on the battery pack heater,
the efficiency is going to drop.
And that is why when we actually got to the charging station,
the actual average energy efficiency
ended up being 2.1 miles per kilowatt hour,
which again is quite poor for this car.
But a good point two of that was simply
because the car was heating up the battery pack.
I haven't mentioned it yet, but the thing about battery
preconditioning is it's to save you time, not energy,
because the car is less energy efficient when it does that.
But if it didn't do that,
I would be plugged into the charger for probably like an hour.
As soon as you plug it into a DC
fast charger, it's going to start heating up the battery pack.
But the fact that it takes almost an hour for that to happen
means you don't get that much help out of it.
So you really want to have the preconditioning start
a solid 45 minutes to an hour
before you are expecting to hit the charging station.
Now I'm going to cut to me back then with some thoughts.
got back from the store.
We are charging at nearly 200kW,
which is almost as fast as this car can go, so that's great.
I was a little worried because when I left to go into the store,
the time estimate suddenly became like 32 minutes
and I was like, oh great, is this this charger being bad?
But I don't know why that happened.
The charger is able to sustain 200kW just fine.
The reason why I say that is because that's in question
with, good old Electrify America,
especially with this old charging hardware.
But it appears to still be going just fine
and will be out of here probably
when it originally estimated we'll be out of here.
So I also want to point out I'm
going to sit here and eat the sandwich I just bought.
So I'm really hardly waiting at all.
And if I wanted to,
I could turn the car on while it's charging and have it
keep the cabin warm.
I'm not going to bother doing that
just because the cabin's pretty warm as it is.
And there are circumstances where that can slow down.
Charging in my car.
I've never really noticed that happen, but,
you know, I'm perfectly fine to
just let it sit here off while I'm in the car
and I'm going to enjoy my sandwich.
And while I'm sitting here, let me flip this around here.
While I'm sitting here, I am now going to plan my next charging stop.
So I know that we were only able
to go about 140 miles in this weather,
starting from 100% charge, and then we got down to 15%.
I'm only charging up to 80% right now,
so I'm going to look for a charging station,
which is a something like 100 miles away.
And I'm going to as I said earlier,
I'm going to plan a bail out station,
which is even closer than that, just in case
the weather really is this bad the whole way.
I don't expect it to be, but it could be.
I'm just surprised because I'm going southeast
and I appear to be going into the wind.
So what's almost certainly going to happen
is on my way back,
I'll be going into the wind again because that's just my luck.
But regardless, the whole point I'm
trying to make with this video is that I'm being slowed down
a little bit on this trip with this cold weather
is really not that significant.
The biggest issue is just dealing with my cars very bad software,
which Hyundai should be royally ashamed of,
and I'm going to keep being a thorn in their side
about until they give us that button.
Okay.
I just finished eating my sandwich
and I have found out where the next charging stop is going to be.
And we're already at 74%.
And actually, I can safely unplug right now
because the next charger is only 86 miles away.
I am going to now program that in.
Let's see.
It was in Shelbyville, Indiana.
This is the terrible nonsense I have to do.
I'm going to go ahead and cancel this route.
Let's see.
Let's just pick somewhere in Shelbyville, Indiana.
Is there maybe a Walmart there or something?
Let's just.
Look, I just have to search for a place there.
Sure.
I'm going to tell the car, take me there.
But then as it's routing, I'm going to say, let's add a stop.
And then we're going to add a stop.
The nearby charging station by the destination.
Okay.
I ended up picking a charging station in the wrong spot.
So that's why I'm starting over here.
But I just want to chime in and say I am
not sure this is the way you have to do this,
but any time I have selected to
just take me to a charger like I did this twice
and it did not start preconditioning, both times.
So the only way that I have made sure it always starts preconditioning
is to navigate to somewhere near
to a charger that I know exists
and then say add, stop and search for a close by charger,
which is at least 150kW.
It's so bad.
But anyway, that's what I'm going through here,
and I have to find the charging station that I meant to look for.
I just picked the wrong town.
Yeah. It was.
I picked a pilot station, which wasn't where I wanted to go.
Well, this is what we're doing.
This is the closest EV
charging station to where I want to know that it knows about.
And it's a high enough speed of charging that it should precondition.
So I'm going to tell it I'm going to add this charging station,
which may or may not even exist,
but we're going to add that charging station to the route.
We're going to have it take us there.
And I'm not going to listen to the car.
I'm going to have Waze or Google Maps
or whatever you want to use on my phone, actually navigate me
to the charging station we're going to, which is a flying game.
But at this point we can unplug.
We're actually at 82% already,
and I'm going to move on
to the next charging stop, which is either going to be the last or second
to last, depending on what things look like.
I'll let you know in a moment.
And now enjoy the lovely dash cam audio for this segment.
Oh, this is the exit.
Does that sign show EV charging on there now?
It does.
Good. I've noticed they're putting that on there.
That's good to know.
I would love to have, like,
the sign that shows you the gas and diesel price to tell you
the price in miles per kilowatt hour, but
I mean, dollars per kilowatt hour cents.
Really like one mile.
We're not there yet.
We'll get there soon and Okay,
so what I was saying earlier,
the car is going to keep being mad at me is that this can absolutely
be my last charging stop before my destination.
The question just becomes, where do I want to charge when I'm there?
And can I?
Because I may be able to charge overnight.
I am spending the night in Cincinnati,
but I am not entirely sure yet
where I am staying.
I haven't even booked a hotel or anything
because I might be staying with friends, but I'm not sure yet.
Anyway, what's important
is that if I wanted to charge somewhere else, I totally can.
There are fast charging options near my destination.
So I'm going to look into that while I'm charging here.
But here we are at the pilot flying J.
all right, so I just double checked and I am indeed
only about 90 miles from my destination.
So despite the terrible efficiency
we have had on this trip so far,
thanks to all this wind,
I don't need to charge again.
Now. There are several charging options in town
near where I am going to be.
But I don't know yet
whether or not I'm going to exercise those options
because I may be staying overnight somewhere that I can charge.
But I don't know yet for sure.
Really.
This whole trip is very just flying by the seat of my pants.
But I don't need to do that.
Again, the thing that's kind of confusing, and I'm noticing it's almost.
It's interesting how as it's getting easier,
some things are getting more confusing.
I can absolutely treat this car like a gas powered car at this point.
If the battery is cold soaked,
like if it's actually cold
and I just plug it into a DC charger, it's going to charge
stupidly slow. But
this means that
I can just get to my destination with 30% state of charge.
Pretend it's like a third of a tank of gas,
and I got plenty of range to fart around town,
and then I just need to charge somewhere before I head back.
Or if there's a charging station, like on my way back
just 20 miles outside of town, I'll stop there.
But I also have the option to, for instance,
stay at a hotel that offers EV charging as an amenity
and I can plug it into a level two charger overnight and charge that way.
And by the way, even if you're parked outside,
if you are plugged into a level two charger
that is like five kilowatts or greater.
So that's like virtually any public charger you're going to find.
You're not going to notice it.
It's the battery the car might end up using,
maybe like a kilowatt of power to keep its battery
pack warm in extreme, extreme cold,
but it still has four kilowatts to actually charge the battery.
You're really not going to notice it being slowed down at all,
and the battery doesn't need to be anywhere near
as warm as the car's been trying to get it to charge quickly
just to charge, the fastest
AC charging rate this car supports, which is about 11kW.
In the context of a battery pack.
This big is a trickle. Charge it.
It's irrelevant.
It does not matter that it's perfectly safe
to charge the battery at that speed
at practically any temperature.
But anyway, I'm just giving you some context there.
The only real inconvenience if I stop somewhere in Cincinnati
park overnight and don't charge,
is that if I plug in to a charging station in the morning
with a cold battery, it's going to be very slow,
but I can still do it.
And once the car is plugged
in, it's going to start heating the battery pack up as soon as it can.
But I have done this before.
The car had battery preconditioning software,
and it does truly become like the theoretical 18 minutes
becomes 45 minutes to up to an hour
if the battery is really, really cold.
But that's the first charge of the day
from then on out, the battery pack is going to be fairly warm.
You don't have to deal with that.
I hope that makes sense, but I'm already at 71% state of charge.
Which is enough to get where I'm going for sure,
but I will let it get up to 80% just to give me that
bit of buffer.
Since the winds today have just been awful.
Awful, awful.
The last leg averaged just 2.1 miles per kilowatt hour, which is
I thought it would improve because it's getting warmer
and we had a little bit of snow there, but it's also getting sunnier.
But it's just I'm driving almost directly into the wind right now,
which stinks.
That does mean every other car out
there is getting significantly worse
fuel economy, but they don't necessarily notice it
because it doesn't impact the range as drastically as it impacts this car.
But again, I'm just going to say, as I've said
probably dozens of times now
for five hours of driving, I had to stop two times
and spend 45 minutes charging the car.
I really
we didn't even increase the time of this trip by more than 20%.
It's not a big deal.
And since I spend literally zero time
going to gas stations in my day to day
life on net, I'm almost certainly ahead.
But I don't even think you need to care about that.
Just consider the context of I'm driving
five hours today to get to Cincinnati from Chicago,
and I only needed to, but I crossed the entire state of Indiana.
I'm still in it now, but I'm almost to Cincinnati,
and I will have crossed
the entire state of Indiana in the middle of winter
when it's well below freezing,
and I took two charges and 45 minutes of
time is really not a big deal
that there's people who think that's a big deal to them.
That's fine.
We very much disagree on
what is a big deal,
but you're allowed to disagree.
I just think if you're actually honest,
a less than 20% increase in time
spent on a road trip,
it's not really a big deal.
Okay, so I already talked about the charging stops on the reverse trip,
so there's really no point getting too deep into the weeds there.
It's the exact same process.
I'm just doing what I was telling you.
I'm checking the car's energy efficiency.
I'm comparing its range estimate to my distance to go,
and just making sure that everything looks hunky dory as far as will
I make it to the charger I planned to make it to,
but I do want to give more context
for why I decided to stop in Lafayette.
Basically, I knew that charger was working just fine
and there was a plug share report from a few days ago.
At the time, I made this video
that said somebody had some charging issues.
I think it might have even said all chargers are down.
I don't remember, but it was enough of a concern that I decided
I had better not skip Lafayette
because if I do, I will be stuck in Remington.
There were probably some level two chargers
somewhere around there that I could have used, but
it didn't make any sense to try and risk it.
And since I knew the Chargers in Lafayette were working,
my decision was to stop there and get effectively 60 miles worth of range,
because the distance from that charger to Remington,
as you might have seen, was exactly 30 miles.
And so I wanted to make sure that I could get back to Lafayette
if for some reason I got to Remington
and those chargers were not working.
I discovered on this trip that the
the stretch of road that I was taking between Chicago
and Indianapolis still has relatively few chargers on there.
I was genuinely surprised.
So the gap between Remington and somewhere close
to Chicagoland that I could actually charge was just like,
much longer than I anticipated.
Basically, I think it was Dalton.
Like, if I had charged in Lafayette, if it turned out that Remington
really wasn't working and I had to go back to Lafayette,
then I would have gone to Dalton, Illinois,
where the Pope is from, and charged there
because that would have been a fine gap, but it ended up not happening.
But I just wanted to throw that piece of context in there to explain.
The decision to stop in Lafayette
was just because the Remington Charger,
at some point in the recent past had a reported issue.
If I had risked it, I would have been fined.
But you know, when it's almost zero degrees Fahrenheit outside,
it's not good to risk those sorts of things.
So I didn't.
and the last thing I want to touch on before I close
this out, is how much energy the actual heater was using during this trip.
I was keeping myself toasty warm in the cabin.
I was not trying to be frugal or anything like that.
I think I had it set to 70 or 72 Fahrenheit.
Typical room temperature just fell a little bit on the warm side
for room temperature, but it was really nice.
And yet the cabin heater
was only drawing about two kilowatts at the most.
Now I'm bringing this up because the cabin heater
can look like it sucks a lot of energy out of the battery pack,
especially when you start your car up.
Like when I'm commuting back from the office.
If the car is sitting outside and it's cold,
the amount of energy it takes to warm up
a cold car is so much greater
than the amount of energy it takes to maintain a warm car.
Once the car is up to temperature,
it only takes a couple kilowatts to keep it warm.
Now, in the case of my car,
it has a heat pump, so it's
probably a little better than a car without a heat pump.
But in these temperatures, heat pumps tend to struggle a little bit.
I wish I knew the coefficient of performance of the heat pump.
That'd be really cool to know, but I just wanted to say the cabin heat
was pretty much irrelevant to this drive
because, you know, the two hours
between charging stops for kilowatt
hours was used for heating the cabin.
That is not even like that's
basically what I said for the battery heater running for an hour.
So 14% max of each charge
was being used to heat the battery and to heat the cabin.
The rest of it was just to push the car
through the very cold, very dense air,
and I had wind in both directions.
I just, I genuinely I have the worst luck with that with my car.
I'm often taking trips west on I-80,
and somehow it's like, I'll head out west and I'm driving into the wind,
and then I head back east when I shouldn't be driving into the wind.
And all of a sudden I'm driving into the wind again.
It's I don't know why, but the wind really doesn't like me.
But anyway, I'm going to close this video out
because, like I said, the trip back is the exact same thing.
It's just the stakes were higher because it was getting colder.
But what I'm doing is no different.
I'm just seeing how much energy is the car using to go
this speed and,
is it getting worse than it thinks
it will be, or is it getting better?
And it's not really that difficult.
It's just
it's just something to get used to because
it's significant that my car goes from an easy 230 miles on the highway
in the summer, down to, as we saw from Lafayette, 145.
150 can be a stretch when it's cold and windy, but
just because the range dropped that far
doesn't necessarily mean it's such a huge deal.
So long as there are charging stations available
where you need them to be, and
more and more are showing up literally every day,
I'm going to plug a channel that you might want to check out.
If you want to see the progress of new DC
fast charging installations in the US.
Really good.
The network architect channel.
Sorry.
The network architect channel.
Walter is his name.
I was blanking on the name of the channel for a second there.
He does weekly reports on new DC fast
charging installations that are really great to keep track of.
They are literally coming in every day.
I know it doesn't seem like we are supporting electric cars
because, you know, we have a lot of people in positions of power right now
who are very skeptical of them, perhaps
because they can't make as much money
in a world where people can charge their cars at home
and they drive cars which need very little maintenance,
something to consider.
But despite the fact that we seem
to be very anti EV right now as a culture,
and we removed a whole lot of the government incentives
to build out infrastructure, or at least made the very difficult.
It is still being built out very, very quickly.
The on a network, as a matter of fact, hasn't taken any government money
and it's one of my favorite charging networks
because they are rolling out really fast,
they're really reliable and they're pretty cheap. So
there's lots of good news in this space.
It's only going to get easier.
And at this point, with just a tiny little bit of thought,
I can take my car anywhere.
And I don't really even need to plan.
I just need to look at the plug share app,
monitor the conditions as I'm driving,
and pick chargers as I go.
So thanks for watching.
I hope this video was helpful.
And if you're considering an electric car,
this is the sort of thing
you're going to have to do on road trips only.
And keep that in mind.
If you can set up charging at home,
or if you have access to a charger at work,
you're never going to use these things
unless you need to drive far, which is exactly the case for me.
The closest chargers to my home
that I actually use regularly are in Wisconsin and Indiana,
because when you can charge at home
or at work, it doesn't have to be at home.
But if you can charge some where your car is parked
and you have regular access to that,
you're not going to use these DC fast chargers.
You only need them when you exceed your car's range.
And now that modern EVs have minimum ranges of 200 miles
road trips, that's pretty much the only circumstance
unless you drive professionally.
And if that is your case,
an EV is probably not right for you quite yet.
But we'll probably get there because, you know, we're moving pretty quick.
Anyway, thanks for watching.