Longer road trips?

Recently, I rented a Kia-Niro EV on my Tremblant run. Naturally, the teenagers were most pleased that they could get to Tremblant faster. Personally, given the time it took to pick it up, return it, and of course the somewhat rushed experience of loading and unloading, its a tie time-wise for me. But had we gone further afield, say to visit Le Massif, a 900 km distance from Toronto, the Kia-E-Niro would have been much better. With that, lets dig into the issues one might face on such longer journey legs.

In review, the faster charging characteristics of the Kia-E-Niro help us drive much faster, compared to my 2018 Nissan Leaf. Average drive speed was about 95 km/hr for the Kia E-Niro, while just 70 km/hr for the Leaf. This results in worse efficiencies for the E-Niro, as you would expect from driving faster, the E-Niro is at about 4.5 km/kWh, while the Leaf manages almost 6 km/kWh. But as the E-Niro charges at 50kW (averaged), but the Leaf manages only 27 kW (again averaged over all charging sessions). For the Leaf, the slower, shorter, Hwy 7 route, did help level things a bit, but in the end, driving faster only makes sense if you can charge faster, which the Kia E-Niro certainly can.

There are cars on the market that can charge even faster than the Kia E-Niro, the Teslas for example, would do more than 100 kW, perhaps as much as 250 kW, as does the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and so on and so forth. But lets get back to our Le Massif run. Whatever we are driving, I doubt we can manage faster averaged sector drive speeds than say 100 km/hr. To get that myself, I basically had to drive the speed limit “plus HST”. I don’t think you can count on going much faster, perhaps a little, provided one wants to hold on to their driving license, or worse, invite disaster.

So, 900 km, at 100 km/hr, that’s 9 hours of driving. But what of charging you say? Well, chances are high you will need some. Even the Lucid Air’s EPA rating is not enough to make it (source). Taking the Kia-E-Niro’s efficiency, 4.5 km/kWh, that drive is going to require 200 kWh of electricity. Since we start with 65 kWh, we would need to charge at least 135 kWh, probably 150 kWh as we do not wish to arrive with a dead battery, and keep some reserve there for emergencies. We did manage a session average of 50 kW, so that’s 3 hours of charging for a total of 12 hour trip.

There are cars on the market that do charge faster than the Kia-E-Niro, but even at 100 kW averaged charging speed its still an hour and a half of charging for a trip total of 10 hours and 30 minutes. Faster charging may not make much sense, since you need to be serious about your rest breaks on such a long drive. The other consideration is finding a suitable charging station, if you want an average charge speed of 100 kW, you may need to find a 250 kW+ charging station, and be driving something that supports such speeds.

As we can see, there are a lot more charging stations that top out at 50 kW, than support 200 kW plus charging speeds. There is probably enough to make the trip work, after all, the 401 is a popular corridor between Toronto and Quebec City. But you might face sectors along your route that require you to charge “deep into the pack”. This again, is a problem, as charging speeds dramatically reduce as the battery fills up. While I did spot the Kia E-Niro charging at 90kW, it was only when the state of charge was very low, once it got above 80 %, the speed crashed to measly 25 kW.