EV Road Tripping Made Easy

By John Martinson

YES! You can drive an EV on a Long Road Trip!

If you are considering purchasing or leasing an EV, know that driving even very long EV Road Trips is relatively easy. I’ve been doing it since Tesla set up their first Superchargers in 2013.

Road Tripping in an electric vehicle has never been easier and due to the opening of the Tesla Supercharger network to other brands and the continuing growth of DC Fast Chargers from other networks, it gets better every week. See: https://driveelectric.gov/stations.

2024 Summer Road Trip | 6,000 Miles

This summer (2024), my wife, Suzanne, and I drove a two-month 6,000-mile loop road trip in our Tesla Model X. We started off from the Valley of the Sun east to Santa Fe, NM, then north through the American Rocky Mountains to Glacier National Park, and then north across the border into Canada at Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta. We continued through Calgary to the Canadian Rocky Mountains (Banff, Jasper, Lake Loise, and Revelstoke), then east to Vancouver Island (Tofino and Victoria), and south to Olympic National Park and the Pacific Northwest. Our last leg took us south along the American West Coast from Seattle down to Palm Springs, California and then back to the Valley of the Sun and home. We visited 10 US States and 2 Canadian Provinces.

We averaged 281 Wh/Mi. All DC fast charging was on the Tesla Supercharger network, and we also charged at many destination chargers, both at hotels and tourism locations.

We wrote 31 blog posts. You can read them all (including photos) on the Member Stories section of the Valley of the Sun Electric Vehicle Association’s website under, “6000 Mile EV Road Trip,” beginning June 18, 2024.

2023 Summer Road Trip | 11,000 Miles

Last summer (2023), we and drove a two-month, 11,000-mile loop road trip in our 2023 Tesla Model X from the Valley of the Sun across the Southern U.S. tier of States to Jacksonville, Florida, and north up the east coast, crossing the Canadian border at Calais. We then visited all the eastern Canadian Provinces (New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, and Ontario, returning to the USA at Buffalo (New York).

Then, after visiting friends in Kentucky, we drove west through the midwestern tier of States to Colorado and then home. In all, we drove through 28 US States and 6 Canadian Provinces. The 65 blog posts for this trip can also be found at the Valley of the Sun Electric Vehicle Association’s website under Member Stories entitled, “EV Road Trip.” The first post is dated May 26, 2023.

We averaged 287 Wh/Mi. We DC fast charged at Tesla Superchargers until we got north of Enfield, Nova Scotia (off the Tesla Supercharger network), at which point we used a combination of FLO and NL Hydro CCS DC fast chargers (using our Tesla CCS adaptor). Additionally, about half of our hotel stays had destination chargers.

An Active Online Community of EV Road Trippers

If you are new to EV road tripping or are a seasoned EV road tripper, consider joining the 7,800+ and growing EV Road Trippers Facebook Group, where many experienced electric vehicle road trippers are available to answer your questions.