Trip Report - Ohio, USA to New Brunswick, Canada
Recently returned from a nearly 3,000 mile/5,000 km road trip and thought I’d report on how things are out there. We visited many places in Maine and also crossed over the border to see a few things in Canada. The tl;dr version is that EV road tripping is now generally very easy and doesn’t require extensive planning as it used to.
First, the good: It’s super nice being able to pull into Pilot/Flying J truck stops, simply plug in, and have the car automatically start while billing your EVGo account. These were definitely the easiest stops, although generally your food/shopping options are limited to what’s on site. We also really liked Ionna and Mercedes sites since the hardware is really good and there were more things around. The first hotel we stayed at had a bunch of AC chargers so we managed to fill up overnight.
Along those lines, I have really come to appreciate how well the Ariya DC Fast charges, at least in the summer. While peak power isn’t super high, the curve is truly excellent and we were never waiting around much on the car. Multiple times we came out of the restaurant or wherever with far more charge than needed, which is always nice.
Nothing was truly *bad*, but there still were a couple challenges. Once you get far into Downeast Maine, there’s not much in the way of DC fast charging. I brought along the Level 1 EVSE we use for our Bolt EUV at home and plugged into an outlet at the vacation rental. That got us the few extra miles we needed.
And the reason we needed those miles was because unfortunately public Level 2 charging is still quite unreliable. Of the four L2 stations we visited, only one of them was available and worked correctly. It’s even more frustrating because some of the stations require a bespoke app where you have to load money into an account rather than it billing you for what you actually use. Still uncertain if we can get our $20 back on that.
DC Fast charging has improved immensely in the last couple years, but there were still two stations that had hiccups. The first was an Evolve NY station in Syracuse that worked OK but only put out ~70 kW even though we were at 15% SOC. The second was a ChargeSmart station near Buffalo where the credit card reader was completely unresponsive. I managed to activate it thru the ChargePoint app since they have a roaming agreement, but when a F-150 Lighting joined us, the station stopped delivering any power (see last photo). This might have been acceptable in the past, but I’m a bit disappointed a newly installed station is so buggy.
Still overall it was a great trip. Acadia is great to visit, although quite crowded in spots. I also didn’t realize how beautiful Atlantic Canada is, and we definitely want to go back. Let me know if you have questions!