This is part five of a five part series that is describing an epic road trip to Alaska that was made from North Carolina with a Rivian R1S. Please be sure to read part one, part two, part three, and part four of the story before continuing with this post.
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly…
At the onset of this epic blog post (5 sections…Whew!) I promised that I would provide an honest assessment, my personal opinion, of where I think we are in America (and even Canada!) with electric vehicles, the charging infrastructure and everything else EV. At this point, I would say, that I have some authority on the subject having completed a 10,000+ mile road trip through two countries with well over 500 miles of it on unpaved roads. It truly was an epic trip! So lets get into the deets…
What Went Well? (The Good)
First off, the Rivian R1S performed like a champ. If you are a regular reader of our blog then you know that I love this vehicle. After spending 25 days in it driving countless miles, this opinion hasn’t changed. It is a great car! Other things that went well? There are some great tools out there that you can use to plan a trip like this. One that I used, and it proved to be especially helpful, was A Better Route Planner. This website could be customized to the type of vehicle that you have and it had a better awareness of charging stations versus the onboard computer included with the Rivian. I would venture to say that the issue I ran into while in Wyoming (part 4) would probably not have happened if I was using this tool. For ease, however, I just used the onboard GPS and it didn’t perform too well on this particular jaunt. Another item that worked well that I eluded to in part one was the Starlink satellite. While there were a few times that it wasn’t perfect; for the most part, I was able to get Internet (thus phone calls) just about everywhere I travelled. It was funny to be days from a cell phone tower on a dirt road and still get phone calls with people wanting to book a vehicle. While it is nice to go off-grid with some trips, this particular trip was not one where I had that luxury. I needed to stay connected and Starlink ensured that I could. Finally, I would say the trip in general was good. Very good actually. I was really worried when I first took off and I definitely breathed a major sigh of relief when I made it back home. All-in-all, however, I could not have been more please with how the trip went. It was truly epic!
What Didn’t Go Well? (The Bad)
There was honestly a lot more that could have gone wrong/bad on this trip and I am thankful that I was never stuck or never ran into any major issues that could not be resolved. I wouldn’t be honest, however, if I didn’t dump some dirt on a few things. There is also one issue that I am also saving for “The Bad” section of this article. So, here are the things that didn’t go so well…
It absolutely stunk that a manufacturer of charging stations shutdown operations and all of their chargers went offline:
I am not sure if this is true or not but I read a news story online where they claimed that several of these companies sprouted up to get government funding for building/installing charging stations but were going to shutdown as things moved into the maintenance phase as there wasn’t enough money in ongoing maintenance. Whatever the case, this is completely unacceptable as people rely on these chargers and by not maintaining them, the lack of reliable infrastructure literally leaves EV customers stranded. Especially in remote locations where there are few alternatives in rural areas.
It also stunk when the onboard GPS on the Rivian routed us to a charging station that was out of order. It was even showing “out of order” on the onboard map, so it should have had awareness of this station not being an option. As stated earlier, I did open a case with Rivian and they were quick to respond and they sounded genuinely interested in the issue, and resolving it, so that it doesn’t happen again. One of the things that people need to realize with EV is that the technology is still very new. There will be challenges but infrastructure, service and things in general will get better and improve. That is what makes America great, we analyze, fix and improve things here!
What Was Really Bad? (the ugly)
The freewire issue above was really close to being the ugly of this trip but I would have to say Wyoming is the ugly this time around. Not in a physical sense as it is a beautiful state with friendly people. But this should never happen:
Wyoming, please for the love of EV, put some more charging stations in your state! You have a lot of people that want to visit there and they drive EVs. The trickle chargers (6KW) that are riddled throughout the state and inside Yellowstone are not very useful to anyone that doesn’t have 10-12 hours available to get a charge. Modern level 3 chargers are now delivering 350+KW and there should be more in Wyoming. A lot more!
Final Thoughts…
There were two big takeaways that I got from this trip. The first one is that it is actually fun to prepare and plan a trip. We seem to have lost that romance of the old days before GPSs and smart phones where you had to actually plan out your long road trips. When you do that, you notice more and are keenly aware of everything on the trip. Yes, it took a long time for me to plan this trip but it was a wonderful experience! Second, the EV scene has really come a long way but it still has a long way to go. I don’t mean this in a negative way. I successfully made a 10,000+ mile trip using an EV. Clearly it is not bleeding-edge anymore. It does, however, need more attention which it absolutely will receive. We definitely need more chargers (are you listening Wyoming?), we need more creative ways to charge faster, battery technology needs to improve, the cost needs to come down, etc. I remember back in the 80s when I purchase my first computer and it was $300. That was a lot of money in the 80s and the computer didn’t have a hard drive, only 16k of ram (not megs, kilobytes), or any other storage device for that matter. It was very simple and very expensive. Yet look at where we are now with computers. I can by a computer for about the same price (which is a lot less when you factor in 40 years of inflation) which has more than 1000 times the computing power. Just think where we will be with EV in 40 years. What about just 10 years? We will be laughing and saying “Remember When?” while we talk about the EV technology of today. I am just happy to be an early adopter of the technology and bring it to our customers who want to book this form of transportation for all their transportation needs. We want to stay adventurous, forever! As this technology improves and expands, we will continue to expand our fleet with additional EV options. Cheers!
