By Megan Seargeant
“Are we stopping to eat soon?” our four-year-old calls from the back seat. Our baby is also starting to get restless and looking to nurse again. Luckily, we are pulling up to a charging station that has had good—and, more importantly, recent—reviews.
When my sister got married on Vancouver Island, we decided it would be fun to camp our way home across the country. The kids and I flew to Vancouver Island and my husband, Martin, met us with our trailer and Ioniq 5 electric car. With the popularity of electric vehicles skyrocketing, more people are starting to think about the feasibility of going on family road trips with EVs. As a couple who enjoys extreme sports, this trip was fun, but probably not for everyone. The infrastructure is very new and anything but uniform, and there are many different apps, companies, and charger speeds, so navigating this can be a challenge
At this point in the journey we choose the correct app, the charger boots up right away, and we are charging in no time. Thankfully, we haul our own rest station in the form of a 1974 Trillium trailer behind the car. I feed the baby, Martin makes us sandwiches, and, because it’s a medium-fast charger, we still have time for a short walk around the tiny prairie town before the charging is done.
The most challenging part of travelling across the country in an EV is the relatively new infrastructure of chargers. A user-based app called ChargeHub helped us to locate the most recently working charge stations, but the information was not always accurate. The prairie provinces are a particular challenge. Towing the trailer decreases our battery range by roughly one third, so although our car usually stores enough charge to last 480 kilometres, it was down to 320 kilometres with the trailer. Usually this was not a problem, but occasionally we had to go on some epic missions to find working chargers.
The worst of these missions was when we decided to avoid a large city and take the scenic route in Saskatchewan. There was a charger listed at a beautiful campground, so that’s where we headed. It was late at night when we arrived, so we decided to charge in the morning. After a good night’s sleep, we packed up and drove to the site of the charger on the campground map. To our horror, we saw that the charger had been removed. We had very little charge left, so our only recourse was to drive very slowly on the side of the road to maximize the distance we could travel on our small charge. We finally made it to the small village of Fort Qu’Appelle. Mercifully, the small, level one (read: extra slow) charger behind the Scotiabank was working. It took us double the time to get there and had to charge for five hours to get a full charge. We lost almost a day of travel, but we did get to check out a great little farmers market and spend some time at a beach with miraculously green water.
Other than the Fort Qu’Appelle adventure, charging was mostly not an issue. Sometimes chargers weren’t working, or were slow, but usually there was an alternative close by. Having to stop regularly was a necessity with two small children anyway, so it was not too much of an inconvenience. We got to explore some small towns, villages, and beautiful rest stops we would not have otherwise checked out, and always had a kitchen where we could make lunch or supper while we charged. However, it was a slow trek across the country, and it will be nice when chargers are more reliable and fewer apps are needed to use them.
Overall, we loved our cross-country EV-plus-trailer road trip, but certainly the EV added another level of difficulty and required more patience. As the infrastructure grows and becomes more reliable and streamlined, this will be a good option for families. But right now, I would only recommend it for people who don’t mind many small (and some large) inconveniences along the way.
