How do you actually plan a first road trip with an EV and kids in the car?
We've had the EV about three weeks now and my in-laws are already asking when we're driving up to see them — it's about 260 miles, would've been nothing in the old car. I don't know where to even start planning a trip like this with two kids in the back. Do I just type the address into Google Maps like I always have and let it tell me where to stop, or is there something else I'm supposed to be using? And is three weeks too soon to be trying this, or am I overthinking it because I just don't know any better yet?
Filed under: General EV Talk
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14 ANSWERS
@icewardenJuly 23, 2026
Three weeks is fine, some people wait less and it's still fine — the wait-a-few-weeks thing is really about you getting a feel for how your own car and your own charging habits behave, not some hard rule you have to hit. Since you asked though: drop Google Maps for the trip itself and use ABRP (A Better Route Planner) instead. It actually knows your car's battery and will tell you what charge you'll have at each stop instead of just giving turn-by-turn directions. Once you've got stops planned there, check each one on PlugShare before you go — not the planner's built-in station list, the actual recent comments, chargers go down more than people expect. Have a second station mapped near each stop in case the first one's dead or busy. And charge to 80%, not 100%, at the fast chargers along the way — past that it slows down enough it's not worth sitting there for, just get to 80% and keep moving.
okay that helps a lot, thank you. dumb follow-up — with two car seats back there we're probably stopping more for bathroom stuff than the app would plan for anyway, does that mess up the charging plan or does it kind of just work itself out since we're stopping either way
Pretty much works itself out in my experience. Most stops worth charging at take 20-25 minutes minimum anyway, so the bathroom break just happens inside that window instead of adding time on top of it. The annoying ones are when the kids need a stop but the car doesn't — that's the part no route planner can plan around.
How far ahead do you actually map out the stops for a trip like that — the night before, or way earlier? Wondering how much slack to build in with kids in the car.
Rough shape of the route — which corridor, roughly which stops — is worth sketching as soon as the trip is on the calendar, that part doesn't change much closer to the date. What I'd hold off on is locking the specific chargers and reservations until a couple days out, then re-verify the morning you leave like I mentioned above. With kids, the extra slack is less about charging time itself and more about not being rigid on which exact stop you use — if the planned one turns out to be busy or down, you want the flexibility to just take the next one down the corridor rather than a plan so tight there's no room to adjust.
Seconding this approach — it holds up well in practice. One habit worth adding: re-check PlugShare again the morning of departure, not just when the route was first planned. Stations can flip from working to reported-down within a day, especially smaller ones with only two or three stalls. We've got a longer writeup on the stop-planning side of this at /pages/road-trip-charging, but the short version is: plan in ABRP, verify same-day in PlugShare, and always keep a plan B a bit further down the road.
Does ABRP's estimate actually adjust for real elevation change on the specific route, or is it working off an average consumption number regardless of terrain? Asking because the last 'optimized' route I got seemed to completely ignore a mountain pass in the middle of it.
It does factor elevation, and weather along the route too if you let it pull live data — that's the actual differentiator versus a regular maps app. Where it falls short is mid-route: the estimate made at 7am doesn't automatically revise itself for conditions six hours later unless you manually refresh the plan. Worth doing that once you're a few hours in, not just trusting the version you made before leaving.
The backup-station thing isn't optional where I live, it's just how rural charging works. Had one go offline on us with zero warning last summer on a trip, glad we'd already looked at what else was down the corridor before we needed it. Doesn't take long to check, just don't skip it because the planner said it was fine that morning.
The preconditioning step is the one people skip because it doesn't feel like it's doing anything from inside the car. The pack has to actually be at temperature for the charger to hit its peak rate — plug in cold and you can sit there getting a fraction of the charge speed for the first several minutes while it catches up. Starting preconditioning 20-40 minutes out, usually through the car's own navigation setting when you route to a charger, gets the pack ready before you arrive instead of burning charging time warming it up after you plug in.
Worth being precise about what that's actually doing — preconditioning isn't heating the cabin, it's bringing the battery pack itself up to temperature so the chemistry can accept a higher charge rate. Two separate systems. People conflate them because both show up as 'warming up' on the same dash screen.
Logged this across about 30 road trip charging sessions at this point. Time added going from 80 to 100% versus just leaving at 80 and taking a slightly longer next stop instead: not close, 80 wins almost every time. The only case where it flips is if that's your last charge before you're done driving for the day.
Would soften that slightly — if the next stop is a genuine question mark, rural stretch, one charger, not sure it's even up, I'll top up past 80 anyway and eat the slower rate. The math changes when the alternative is maybe not making it to the next one at all.
@gravelpointJuly 23, 2026
does the routing app actually account for extra stops for kid bathroom breaks, or do you just build that padding in yourself on top of what it suggests?
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