Lipton introduced canned iced tea to the world in 1972. I was in grad school in Georgia (a place where we know a thing or two about iced tea). It was a foul swill that bore no resemblance to actual iced tea. Then, a friend offered a new perspective. “Stop thinking of it as iced tea,” he said. “If you just think of it as a canned drink, it’s not bad. It’s only bad if you think it should taste like iced tea.”

The experience of driving 4,200 rural, back-road miles in an EV followed a similar trajectory. 

At first, I leaned into an early life of road tripping experience: Get in the car in the morning; drive til you need gas; fill up; keep driving; make pit stops only when necessary; buy easy-to-eat-in-the-car road grub; drive til you’re tired; sleep a few hours; repeat. You could cover a lot of miles that way, and if the few hours of sleep included camping, you could even have some really good fun.

Then aging set in. Children in the car required more stops and less marathon driving. Retirement brought a new freedom: The journey became the priority instead of the destination.

Then we dared to change machines, from internal combustion to electric, at a time when we knew the infrastructure for on-the-road charging was still nascent.

The first week or so was overwhelming. Would we find the chargers we needed? Would we wait for hours while a Level 2 charger juiced us up? Would we have to spend days waiting for a charge on a 110-volt circuit? (I brought a 100-foot extension cord along just in case.)

Very quickly, we learned that the mileage capacity that showed on the dash at 100% had little or nothing to do with reality. We also learned that the 272-mile range the Ariya was supposed to have was fiction … and that the stories we had read of high speed, mountains, and cold weather affecting performance were totally true. (According to the car’s computer, our lowest range at 100% capacity was 191 miles; our highest was 246. Actual experience might have been even more variable. I expect to see well over 300 in summer.)

Two experiences taught us the importance of being conservative and careful. The first was our very first road trip when we left Albany, NY with what appeared to be 100 miles of extra capacity (a seemingly comfortable cushion) and drove north through the Adirondack Mountains at Interstate speeds of 80-ish on a very cold evening. By the time we reached our Grand Isle, Vermont destination, that 100 miles of extra capacity had miraculously become 20 miles. We made it, but I was neither happy nor chill.

The second was on our journey west in Lafayette, Indiana late on a Saturday afternoon. Wisely or not, I had made the assumption that college towns would be more likely have chargers than other places. I still have no idea if that assumption is totally true. The best bet for finding a high-speed charger is a place with a bunch of car dealerships … but dealer-provided juice might cost an arm and a leg.

In Lafayette, we had reserved a room at a motel with a charger, so we didn’t worry when our capacity started to get low. By the time we arrived, we had 50 miles of range remaining. When I made the reservation at The Best Western, I had asked the clerk every question I could think of, but silly me had neglected to ask one more essential question: Did their charger work! The clerk was utterly non-plussed when we asked. “Yes,” he said, “we have a charger. But it is not working right now.” Lesson learned. Take nothing for granted. 

So I called the local Nissan dealer. The nice guy on the phone assured me they had a high-speed charger we could use. It not only worked fine, he said, but the guys at the dealership would provide the charge for free. But the guy on the phone was not the guy at the dealership … and the guys at the dealership were jerks. Their high-speed charger, we were told, was for their cars only. We could use their Level 2 charger for the 2 hours they were still open, which might get us 20 miles, but then we were on our own until Monday. Like I said, take nothing for granted.

Fortunately, we found a Doubletree with a free Level-2 working charger. We paid more than we wanted for the room, but left in the morning well rested and with a full charge.

Lesson: Plan to charge with at least 100 miles of range remaining. Misinformation, broken chargers, and long waiting lines (especially at Walmart chargers) are commonplace.

By this point in the trip, I had reached a nadir: Road tripping in an EV sucks, and I never want to do it again. I told my family back east that the experience had earned an “F,” and it would be a while before we tried a stunt like this again.

From the Depths

That is when the attitude shift started to set in … when, like with the Lipton canned iced tea, I stopped thinking of this experience as just another road trip, but rather as a road trip in an EV, with its own pace of travel and its own opportunity for really fun, cool experiences. I have come to embrace EV travel. I never did learn to like bottled iced tea.

The trip home in Mo was slower than I had anticipated, and it required a lot more planning and flexibility, but the experience was well worth it. Plus, we gave ourselves some time to just have fun. We dawdled before leaving Omaha, enjoyed an afternoon along the Mississippi, spent a full day at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and hung with really good friends in Syracuse.

Wintertime is assuredly the wrong time of year to learn the EV ropes. The days are short, and the battery life stinks. Plus, we are slow-moving old folk who had a hard time hitting the road before 9:00, who wanted to stop before dark (just because), and who wanted to avoid Interstates (because we love the quiet, beautiful, truck-less solitude of back-road driving). Speed was not a priority.

In summer, with warm temps and lots of daylight, I expect to be able to cover 600 miles a day. On this trip, with our traveling days limited to 7-ish hours (9-4), average speeds of about 50, and 2 charging stops, we aimed for about 250 slow, leisurely miles, and we succeeded. The rhythm of the day became a fun part of the trip. Planning the route around reliable chargers … which required a lot of apps and phone calls (to be sure they were available and working) … and motels with chargers (usually free Level 2 that take all night to charge) became a daily ritual.

Is it like driving a gas-powered car? Yes and no. You still climb into a car, start it, put it in drive, punch the accelerator, and cuss at the horrible, rude drivers or cut you off, speed and weave, tailgate, or don’t let you change lanes. But it is also the smoothest, quietest ride I have ever imagined. The acceleration is from a different planet. The internal climate control (because it does not depend on heat from the engine) is totally comfortable all the time … and it is easy to heat the seats, steering wheel, and back seats. Most importantly, in 4,200 miles, we did not burn a single drop of gasoline!

My jury is still out on long, destination-focused road trips.  But for everyday driving, there is no choice: The EV wins hands down.