Electric Road Trip Acid Test

Our family just wrapped up our first long road trip in our new-ish Honda Prologue EV (which replaced a Tesla Model Y because… you know).

Every other year, my wife’s whole, big family gets together at a little resort town on Lake Erie in Ohio. We drive there from our house in New Jersey, altogether a ~515 mi (828 km), 8.5 hour drive that we split over two days, staying one night in DuBois, Pennsylvania, a very small town that has slightly more going on than the other small Pennsylvania towns on Interstate 80.

The last time we made this drive was in our Tesla. Tesla’s Supercharger network and the car’s easy to use, charging-aware navigation system made it easy to find, connect to, and pay for charging when we needed it.

Our Honda has a lot going for it — it’s much more practical and comfortable than the Tesla, with cushier seats, better cargo space, and actual buttons on the dashboard. But we didn’t know what to expect driving across the country in an EV that’s way more car but notably less smart.

Here’s how it went:

DC fast chargers are a lot more prevalent than a few years ago

We may have missed this change from being in the Tesla ecosystem for three years, but since 2021 it seems like lots of new charging stations — and particularly DC fast chargers, which can increase your EV’s range by 150 mi (240 km) in about 15-20 minutes — have come online.

We had no trouble finding the highest-speed 350 kWh chargers along our route; the longest detour we took was on purpose, to a brunch place in metro Cleveland that happened to have Rivian Adventure Network chargers in the parking lot.

Walmart is, believe it or not, one of the most reliable fast charger locations

Electrify America, one of the biggest new EV charging companies, has some kinda partnership with Walmart, placing their charging stations in Supercenter parking lots all across the country. Nearly every Walmart Supercenter along I-80 in Pennsylvania and Ohio had one.

Where Walmart wasn’t an option, the next best places were Pilot/Flying J Travel Centers have set up EVgo chargers in partnership with General Motors.

A fun fact nearly every Honda Prologue owner knows, and will throw at strangers on Reddit at the slightest nudge: Honda and Acura’s EVs are actually manufactured by GM, on the same platform as the Chevy Blazer, because Honda’s Zero EV platform won’t be ready until next year and they didn’t want to completely miss the current cohort of EV buyers. (This plan was, of course, made before Donald Trump was re-elected.)

When we stopped at a Flying J to charge up I also had to refill our wiper fluid, and saw our “Honda”‘s GM lineage on tags and labels all over the place. I wonder if the car felt more at home charging at the GM-branded charging station?

Finding chargers in the Honda is way more annoying

It’s not that annoying, and could maybe have been improved if we’d used the PlugShare CarPlay app, or if I were paying for an in-car cellular connection to use its built-in Android Auto stuff.

But it’s hard to deny that a charger-finding navigation system, with automatic battery preconditioning and seamless payments, is one thing Tesla and (to a lesser extent) Rivian do super well.

We worked around the lack of an in-dashboard charger finder by planning ahead, making a list of 350 kW chargers along our route, deciding ahead of time where to stop, and doing several short charges (rather than fewer long ones) to take advantage of the fastest charging speeds at each stop.

We like planning things to death, so this was fine, though having this information in our GPS navigation and not an Apple Note would have been nice.

Even if we’d had this CarPlay app set up, Tesla or Rivian’s giant touchscreens are still a nicer experience, at least for this.

CCS vs NACS… doesn’t seem to matter? Yet?

For people who aren’t EV acronym-pilled:

NACS (North American Charging System) is Tesla’s EV plug/cable format, which they’ve successfully sold all EV makers to adopt in the next few years.

CCS (Combined Charging System) is the full-speed, DC-capable charging standard all cars except Teslas currently use.

Starting this year, many EV makers can now connect to Tesla’s Supercharger network using a NACS-to-CCS adapter, ahead of 2026 and beyond when non-Tesla cars will start shipping with NACS ports by default.

I made a point to order an adapter, expecting (based on our last trip) that Superchargers would be an important part of keeping our car’s battery full during the drive.

We didn’t end up stopping at a single one.

Honestly, I’d be shocked to see EV makers actually, fully switch to NACS given how many of these brand-new, very nice charging networks were built around CCS plugs. What, are people going to buy a new Rivian only to find they can’t always charge it at Rivian’s charging stations? Is Rivian going to retrofit every Adventure Network charger with new cables or adapters?

Maybe so, but I expect that for the next few years owning a non-Tesla EV in the US is going to involve adapters, research, and keeping a half dozen charging-network apps on your phone.

Speaking of which:

Be prepared to move, or else install the app

At the brunch place near Cleveland that had Rivian chargers, we first had a 35 minute wait for a table, followed by a seemingly endless wait for our food. We were there for more than two hours, during which time our Honda recharged all the way to 100% and — for the first time ever — we went into idle time.

For non-EV owners: charging stations charge per kilowatt-hour of energy until your car is fully recharged, after which you have to pay a ridiculous per-minute fee for taking up a charger space without charging. This is idle time.

We have a home charging station, so most of the time we can leave our car plugged in overnight to charge and just unhook whenever we need to drive next. And on this road trip we didn’t want to stop long enough to fill the battery. Most EVs recharge much more slowly once their battery is ~80% full, and really the best move is to top up to around 60% and then stop again to stretch your legs and get an iced coffee refill at Sheetz.

Most EV charging stations have a basic, ATM-like interface with a few physical buttons and a credit card reader, which is more than enough to get charging. However, with a few exceptions like Electrify America, they mostly don’t have a way to, say, enter your phone number to get text updates on your charging status. For this, charging networks rely on sending push notifications to their apps.

We ended up spending about $11.50 just for the privilege of keeping our car parked at Rivian’s charger while we finished our omelets. If I’d had Rivian’s app installed, presumably I’d have gotten a buzz when we entered idle time and could have run out to move the car. But I didn’t, so we didn’t, so we paid.

Of course, if you’re not expecting to stay anywhere long, you don’t need to worry about this. But when in doubt, install the apps and use them. Just think of how many more Sheetz iced coffees $11.50 will buy.