Traveling Long Distances with Electric Cars: My Experience

Last year we had our first experience with going on vacation with our electric car, an Audi Q4 Eton. We didn’t travel too far, maximum 550km and drove relatively slowly on the highways in France. The experience with finding charging stations along the way and on our destination was quite positive and this year we took a ‘normal’ trip in the sense that we didn’t limit our destination because we were driving an electric car. We went to Croatia and split the 15OOkm trip into parts as usual so as not to spend a whole day in the car. Again, finding charging stations along the road in Germany was no problem at all but Croatia turned out to be more of a problem. The number of high power charging stations in Croatia was quite limited and as a result we had to wait 2 times for a charging station to become available, something we never had to do before in France, Germany or Austria. Vacationing with our electric car turned out to be almost the same as with a normal petrol car. We didn’t drive too fast but mainly because we had 4 bikes on the back and it wasn’t a good idea to drive very fast regardless of the type of car. The only difference being that you need to add half an hour of charging time every 350 km or so. Because we always try to avoid very long distances in one day this doesn’t impact us much. Last week though I went on a 1 week return trip to the area of Bordeaux with a one way distance of almost 950km, to be done in one day in each direction. Because of time restrictions we also could not drive slow so we were speeding along at 130km/h in France like in any regular car. We made this trip also in almost the same time, only needing to add roughly 1 hour for the charging. And because we had to drive that far and needed to get to our destination in time we were forced to stay on the highway and eat at a charging station. This is in my experience the main difference between travelling with an electric car and with a petrol car. Because you need to charge roughly half an hour every time you cannot also afford to go somewhere and add another hour or so for eating on top of the charging time. And food quality along the highway is not very great. On our outbound trip to Bordeaux we even had the good fortune to find the restaurant closed at 9PM. And on the return trip we had a few issues with charging stations being out of order and that informationation not being up to date in the navigation system of the car. This is another drawback. Although the navigation system has many charging stations listed, not all of them are there and the information is not always up to date. The apps from providers like Ionity or Fastned are more accurate of course but then you need to look in several apps on your phone and navigate to a station nearby via their app/google maps. I am sure also this will improve in the next couple of years. Still, based on these last trips I conclude there is no real restriction in travelling with an electric car. Rather I consider it a little less comfortable because It takes an hour longer and going for a good place for lunch adds too much time to the trip if you are travelling a long distance. If battery capacity improves another 30% or so this last point will also disappear.