First Road Trip with our Ioniq EV
Last week my wife and I picked up my son at college to bring him home for a quick weekend visit. He goes to school about 80 miles or so from home, so a round trip drive is about 160 miles, give or take, which is pretty close to the maximum highway range of the Ioniq.
I know this is not a big road trip, but I think any trip that exceeds your vehicles range is a road trip, so I’m counting this as the first one.
My wife didn’t want to take the Ioniq, but I convinced her it would be easily doable and since my son had not yet seen it, we decided to give it a try. Looking at PlugShare, there were DC fast chargers at a rest stop on the highway about 52 miles away and there were many AC chargers at the college, so we had options.
We left with about 98% battery and hit the highway. Since we often stop at the rest stop mentioned above to use the restrooms, we also stopped there this time to check out the chargers and do a quick top-off. Signs clearly led us through the semi-truck parking to the charging area tucked off to the side of the main building where there were four DC fast chargers (2 200kW, 2 62kW) and one AC charger, all from ChargePoint.
Three of the DC charger spaces were in use when we arrived, used by a Chevy Bolt, Nissan Ariya, and Rivian R1. This was the first time I’ve seen the Ariya, which looked nice enough. The Rivian was an eye-catching yellow. The Bolt had a bike rack on the back, which must have noticeably reduced its efficiency.
I backed into the one open space (a 62kW station) and after parking I noticed the display at the top of the station said it was “In Use”. That was strange since there was definitely nothing plugged into it. Not a great start.
Regardless, I opened the ChargePoint app and tapped the phone on the station. It recognized it and said it would notify me when the station was available. I then figured I might was well remove the cable and plug it into the Ioniq to see what would happen. Immediately the station recognized all this, started a new session and started charging! So even though it looked like it wasn’t going to work, it did work pretty easily.
My wife headed into the rest area while I waited with the car.
This was the first time I used DC fast charging with the Ioniq, so here are a few observations. First, the CCS plug is huge and bulky! It will actually be nice when all EVs eventually switch Tesla’s NACS plug, which is much smaller.
When we got there, the car had about 69% charge. That’s not especially low and we didn’t need to charge to get to our destination, but I really wanted to give it a try. The car started pulling down 21kW (the maximum it can do is about 50kW), but dropped down to 14kW when it got to 75%. My understanding is that this would have been closer to the 50kW maximum if the car was starting from a much lower battery percentage.
When wife returned the car was about 80% and it got to about 83% before we decided to head back out on the road1. This took about 20 minutes in total, adding 5.1935kWh according to the ChargePoint app. Cost was $2.70.
We arrived at the college with about 65% battery remaining. I parked at one of the several AC charging stations on campus (also ChargePoint) and plugged in the Ioniq where it pulled about 5.8kW. We then met my son and watched some of the baseball game being played on the nearby field. The car charged for 1 hour and 11 minutes and added 6.8871 kWh. Charging was free.
We then stopped at my son’s dorm to pick up a few things to bring home (there was plenty of room in the Ioniq’s hatch area) and then drove all the way back home, getting off the highway for supper, arriving with about 26% battery remaining. That is the lowest I’ve arrived at home with so far.
The Ioniq averaged about 4.6mi/kW on the way there and about 4.2mi/kW on the way back. In both cases, I had the adaptive cruise control set to 72mph for the most part. I suspect our extra passenger and gear we were bringing home might have caused some of the lower efficiency on the return trip.
It doesn’t look like we could have made it there and back without charging at all. More practically, just using the AC charger at the college while watching the baseball game might have given us enough of a buffer to make the trip back home. Temperatures were around 50F, so it’s possible that warmer temperatures (say 70F) might improve the efficiency enough to make this trip more feasible on 100% battery with no additional charging — would really want close to 5mi/kW for that, I think.
It was great to see my son for the weekend and I’m glad this (short) road trip gave me an opportunity to try a DC fast charger. Maine does not have a lot of highways, but it is nice to see that the major highway, interstate 95, has fast chargers at rest areas that are about 70 miles apart. I’d like to see more stations at each rest area, however, as having only four stations at the rest area we stopped at does not seem sufficient, especially as there are more and more EVs on the road every day.
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I had the DC charging maximum set to 90% for this particular test.