Charging networks, availability and reliability are of major concern when changing from an ICE car to an EV. Besides, you typical don’t want to sit too long at a station, to have enough State of Charge, SoC:s, and range to reach your destination. Calculating required SoC has been a hard task to understand and also something that has slowed down the transition to EV cars.

All of this are about to change, modern EVs has built in navigation and route planning who does the job for you. Reaching your destination, no longer require a degree in physics, just let the car do all calculations and guide you.

It’s very natural to keep thinking range, in a world were charging could take an hour or more, it was essential to avoid en-route charging. If you had too, you made sure you had a car with the biggest range to minimize the hustle of charging. The reliability and speed of en-route chargers were many times questionable, not to mention the amount of different apps needed to be able to pay for the charging. Tesla solved this early with an own infrastructure and charging network.

Today we have many different charging networks to choose from, both nation wide or international networks like Ionity. Reliability has slowly increased and so has also the numbers of available charging points done. In many parts of the Europe, the coverage is no longer an issue, peak season availability can be a challange still. Using apps like ChargeFinder will help you find and plan your trip if your built in planner dosn’t do.

There is no longer any reason to chase the car with biggest battery or the car with the greatest range, actually the combination of consumption and charging performance are the most essential parameters when buying a car if you are planning for a road trip. Typically no one wants to sit and wait for charging an hour, even if you could drive for five consecutive hours with full charge.

What’s the conclusion

Look at your planned use of your car, if you plan doing a road trip, choose a car with higher charging performance instead of maximum range. The range of modern EV’s will likely outperform the human need for stops anyway. But have to wait for your car to charge, will always feel like a waste of time, especially on road trips when you want to move on.