Man Shows How Brutal an EV Road Trip Can Be as He’s Forced to Bundle Up Instead of Using Heater in Car

Insider’s Tim Levin recently made a round-trip drive from New York City to Washington, D.C., and back, and found that he was forced to spend roughly a quarter of his time charging his electric vehicle.

And that wasn’t even the worst of it.

He made the drive in early April, and the outside temperatures were chilly, Levin wrote for Insider. So, unfortunately, were the inside temperatures — inside the car, that is, because of the effect running the heater had on the vehicle’s battery life and, therefore, its range.

Levin chose to make the trip in a Toyota bZ4X, a new electric SUV on the market. However, the battery in the vehicle was designed for longevity, not fast charging.

In a relatively new industry like electric vehicles, such trade-offs are not uncommon.

For the bZ4X, that means that the battery can charge at a maximum rate of 100 kilowatts. Levin labeled that rate “uncompetitive” in and of itself, but in point of fact, though he charged the vehicle’s battery three times during his trip, he never even saw it charge that quickly.

That led to what he described as “some excruciating charging times.”

Levin made the 500-mile round trip in nine hours of driving, meaning that he averaged almost exactly 55 mph while behind the wheel. Given the traffic along that corridor, that’s a respectable rate of travel.

However, he also had to spend an additional three hours charging the vehicle, making his effective rate of travel more like 40 mph.

Three fill-ups in a gas vehicle would be expected to require less than an hour total, of course. But for a 500-mile trip, one fill-up would probably have done it, cutting down travel time even more.