Lessons Learned (December Drive)

Stats and Observations

25 charges were needed (plus hotel nights)

We spent a total of $445.57 on charging for 3900 km trip. Last year in our Honda CR/V we got about 9.5L/100 so we would have spent $590 @ $1.60/L. So the savings in fuel was negligible (but the carbon overhead was much better).

Our best leg was on our last day where we drove 230km starting at 90% and ending with 29% charge. That came out to 21kwh/100km. Not far off summer mileage - we attribute this to a tail wind, sub 100km/h speed and a very warm battery. Warm battery due to conditioning and previous charges.

Charging platforms are varied, both prices ($0.20 to $0.62 / kWh) and speeds (50kw-350kw). The fasted ever charging rate was about 160.

We drove a total of 3900km in 47.5 hours.

Ioniq 5 negatives: Ioniq 5 has a heat issue to feet (hard to keep warm) and fogging of windows when it is really cold.

ABRP is conservative, following it's advice you will never be stranded (we think), that said once you know the car you can sometimes skip a charger overriding ABRP.

Driving speed is really important. Driving slower really does make a difference, you get far more mileage driving sub 100km/h.

Our goal was to cross the country in 4 days so we would not need to miss more than 2 days of work. We achieved that but we had too many long days. The primary reason for the increase in time is slow charging. Especially in Ontario we had to use more 50kw chargers than we were happy with. If the entire route had 200kw and better chargers we would have saved a lot of time.

If we had been stopped by a road closure it would have totally messed up our plans - we needed dog friendly hotels with a charger - those are few and far between.

Chargers are really quite unreliable - Invariably one of the chargers at a site will not be operational, it is critical to check if the next charger is working - we almost had to be towed out of Marathon.
We used plug share to check chargers and sometimes even phoned ahead to confirm charger was working.

We averaged 30.1kwh/100km over the entire trip.

In the cold battery conditioning is very important, make sure battery conditioning is on and set the charger as the destination in the cars navigation system. A warm battery really helps to extend range.

A strong headwind really reduces range

Sometimes plugs are finicky, make sure the plug is correctly seated.

When we return to Ontario in April and the Tesla supercharger network may be available to us it would be a game changer.

Planning a trip like this is a lot more work than using a ICE vehicle. We could not have done it without ABRP premium but even it had glitches at times.

Use https://511on.ca in Ontario to check for closed roads.

We are very happy to be back in Nelson, great winter experience.