As I mentioned in my previous post, it’s certainly possible to complete long journeys with EV, quite easily in fact. You just need to complete a tiny bit of planning, but it’s definitely easily doable.
Now, if you are a Tesla driver, you can pretty much skip this entire post as you look down at us mortal EV drivers, and our lack of a Super Charge network.
There’s no avoiding this, Tesla still has a massive unique advantage over any other EV car, and that is the ability to not have to think about charging stops. The integrated navigation software will route you around, adding stops as needed along the way. Now, this feature it’s absolutely not unique: pretty much any modern EV nowadays will have the same function, but the big difference is what you’ll find once you arrive to the designated stop.
With a Tesla, 99% of times you’ll know for sure and you will also know that you need to simply plug in and go for a break.
With a non-Tesla? Well, that’s when the Poker game will start…
Who’s calling?
Pictured above, you can see my rapidly growing collection of everyone’s favourite game: RFID cards!
What are these colourful contraptions? These represent the “easier” way to start a charging session when you are on the road. Why wouldn’t you just use your contactless credit/debit card you may ask? I really wish I could, but for whatever reason, the charging providers have instead decided to gift us the hell that RFID cards and terminals are.
Yes, there are charging stations that will allow you to simply tap to pay, but they are few and far between unfortunately. I get that everyone wants to gather data, but this is simply not the right consumer friendly way of deploying such technology.
Oh, and by the way: RFID cards are actually the less of the two evils. Yes because many times you won’t even be able to use them, and you will end up filling up your smartphone with apps after apps, just to activate a one-time charge.
So the question then becomes: how do you manage all of this chaos?
There are even more apps that you could download to try and make sense of all of this, but the one I settled on, which so far has given great result is A Better Route Planner.
The name kind of gives it away, but fundamentally, A Better Route Planner (ABRP for short) gives you the option to have route planning with the ability to specify which charging cards and charging providers you want to favour above all else.
I’ll be honest, the first setup is a bit of a pain, but once completed, it can become the most seamless options to replace the built-in nav a route system of your car, which in the case of VW is just plain terrible. Thanks to the option of using CarPlay (disclaimer: CarPlay and live traffic info are premium features), you can easily manage all your plans directly in your car, with the end result of getting really close to the experience you get out of the box with a Tesla.
As you can see from the screenshot above, the app will even tell you for how long you’ll have to stop and how many free chargers will be there when you arrive (live availability of chargers is another premium feature).
So in conclusion, public charging is definitely still a mess, but luckily we have all sort of software to help us bridging gaps left and right.
We’ll definitely talk more about software, but in the meantime, who’s dealing the next hand?