Getting to Tremblant from Toronto in a day?

While EV’s work great in the city and for daily driving, many feel that EV’s are not ready for a road trip. Common refrains are: Range anxiety, #rapidgate, and grumblings over deficiencies in the public charging infrastructure. Avid readers of this blog will note that that’s all nonsense, you certainly can take roadtrips in the Nissan Leaf or any other EV, but you do need to understand your EV’s limitations and plan around them. I recently took a ski-trip to Mnt. Tremblant from Toronto in my 2018 Nissan Leaf, and yes we did make it to Tremblant in a day, albeit a long one.

With ski season upon us, Mnt. Tremblant is calling. It offers over 100 runs when fully open, a 645 m vertical and a village for some “apres-ski” fun. What is not to like. Getting there from Toronto is about 600 km of driving, which google maps estimates takes about 6 hrs and 30 minutes. So lets start by figuring out how long the trip would have taken in a gas car, for reference. I do find google maps a little optimistic, so lets say the gas car would be 7 hour of driving. No allowance is made for rest stops along the way, for something that long, Id stop for dinner and probably a coffee stop. So, door to door, in a gas car, we got 8 hours. Lets see how the Leaf compares.

We did this trip in our 2018 Nissan Leaf, and 600 km, is right on the edge of what we can do in a 10 hour duty day (see this post), so this would serve as a good test of my math. As the whole family was going, we decided to put the roof-box on. That way we keep the ski’s out of the way and the (growing) kids get a little more space in the back. We did anticipate a loss of efficiency, which we found to be about 10-20%. Overall we achieved 5.8 km/kWh as an average for the entire trip. As expected, slower legs along Hwy 7 did slightly better, while the worst was the hilly region near Tremblant.

Another wrinkle was charging speeds. While I have seen the car charge at 45 kW, I was seeing rates closer to 35 kW, and dipping towards 20 kW. There are a few reasons for this, going to Tremblant we stopped early at Coburg. As the battery was about half full when we arrived, charging speeds were understandably reduced. This was on purpose as we wanted to keep the battery as cool as possible. Coming back we drove through a fair bit of winter weather, starting with a very cold battery. Again under such conditions, the Leaf throttles the charge speeds, but again on a long driving day, I was OK with that as it would result in less thermal throttling for later stops.

To further keep the battery cool, we decided to do some of the driving on slower “secondary-roads”, primarily Hwy 7. These slower roads also did wonders for my efficiency, but the impact to my travel time was less than I expected. Mostly because Hwy7 is a more direct path.

Despite this, I did see some thermal throttling at my later charge stops, a first for me. Instead of charge speeds of 35-45 kW, I wound up seeing 25 kW instead so my later charge stops were longer than I had hoped

From the data tables, I did have to add a stop in Pickering, about 35 km from home. Mostly because we hit some nasty winter weather (snow/freezing rain), which forced us to blast the windshield heat and thus an extra charge stop.

Despite all of this, door to door time was 10 hrs and 30 minutes. About two hours and 30 minutes longer than my hypothetical gas car. Its interesting to ponder, how I could close the gap. Looking at the time statistics, about 75% of the time is spent driving, so simply driving faster would have reduced drive time, at the cost of increased charge time. That might have made sense with active battery cooling, I suppose active battery cooling would have closed the gap with the gas car by about an hour or so.

In either case, what would the difference to my ski trip be? Surprisingly small in the end, after all, what matters is could I have picked up the kids after school instead of at lunch when going to Tremblant? Probably not, even in a gas car, an 8 hour drive is too long, assuming school ends at 3:30 pm, that would put us into Tremblant at 10:30 pm, possibly later as rush hour traffic starts at about school time. How about the return, could I have skied until the early afternoon on my return day? Perhaps, but the ski-lifts get busy at lunchtime, and my kids would be eying lunch anyways, so in the end, 8 hour drive or a 10 hour 30 minute drive, adds up to a very similar trip.