Another EV Road Trip Goes Badly

This is becoming predictable.

A pair of YouTubers, Roman Mica and Nathan Adlen of the channel TFLEV, recently uploaded a video of their experience driving from California to Florida in an EV. The pair decided to use a Hyundai IONIQ 5 to do a Cannonball-style run, although they weren’t breaking speed limits. Instead, they wanted to see how quickly they could make such a journey, clocking in at 46 hours and 46 minutes.

Learn why charging electric cars in public can be tricky here.

The trip was done to raise money for a children’s charity, but it also helped expose how difficult it is to drive long distances in many parts of the country using an EV. Among the many challenges was rural areas not having many chargers available, fast chargers not working, and balancing speed plus onboard amenities with the need to preserve battery power.

While many EV-hesitant or even anti-EV people are doing another victory lap as the horrific nature of road tripping in an electric car is exposed, there’s a greater risk they’re not seeing. Keep in mind these YouTubers and their channel are big EV advocates. Check out the TFLEV channel and you’ll find only videos about EVs, not other cars, including kits to convert classic vehicles to electrified powertrains.

In other words, these guys didn’t release the video to show everyone EVs are bad or inferior or whatever people who don’t know their background might be thinking right now. I’ve seen this with other journalists who are obviously very pro-EV recounting the horrors of road tripping in one. Why would they do this?

It all comes down to this: these people are exposing the drawbacks of driving long distances in EVs to push for more charging stations. In most cases they’re trying to build public opinion in favor of the government constructing more chargers, like the plan to line interstates with them. The thought is if chargers are everywhere, people will buy EVs in big numbers, making ICE vehicles obsolete.

The reality is building all those charging stations, not to mention supplying electricity to them all, would be a huge undertaking. Then there’s the prospect of producing enough batteries for EV sales to constitute even 20% of all new car sales in a year when they’re barely cracking 5%.

But if you’re the kind of person who thinks government can solve all problems by mandating things, you’ll believe pushing lawmakers and bureaucrats into this direction will cause EVs to become ubiquitous overnight. That’s what I believe is behind the growing number of EV road trip stories in the media these days.

Images via YouTube