The most common argument I hear about electric vehicles—Tesla or otherwise—is that you plain can't travel long distances because the charging infrastructure doesn't exist or because it takes too long to charge.
That may have been the case as recently as five years ago, but things have changed. Companies like ChargePoint, EVgo, and Electrify America have Level 3 fast charger stations sprouting nationwide, with the latter already offering more than 1,700 fast chargers (and counting) spanning coast to coast and border to border. You can thank Volkswagen's dieselgate scandal for that.
So we devised a plan: We'd drive both cars north to the growing vineyard town of Paso Robles, with Reynolds driving the gas Kona and me the electric one on the northbound leg, swapping cars for the return south.
Normally a 220-mile trip that would take between 4 and 5-and-a-half hours, depending on traffic, the drive is about the same distance as a trip from New York to Washington, D.C. or Chicago to Detroit. In other words, it's a realistic distance that the average American family may expect to travel to visit family or friends in a distant city a couple times per year. Too near for an airplane but too far for an EV?
To level the playing field, we decided to treat the two cars as equally as possible. We'd both leave our L.A. headquarters at the same time, fully charged and gassed up, take the same route on both legs, and drive in the same manner north and south. To make matters more difficult for the EV, we weren't going to bother with any fancy route-planning apps—we knew there were both ChargePoint and Electrify America fast chargers along I-5 near Paso Robles, so if we needed a charge, that's where we'd go. Once in Paso Robles, we'd fully fuel both vehicles, turn south, and start out again.
Before the trip I was a bit apprehensive that the Kona Electric would only make the journey with great difficulty. Truth be told, though, the experience couldn't have felt more normal. . . .
After a sole half-hour stop near Bakersfield, with me snacking at an Electrify America station and Reynolds at a Taco Bell, both the Kona Electric and 1.6T arrived no worse for the wear 4 hours and 25 minutes after we'd set off. Ducking an illegally parked non-electric Mazda CX-5 and Mercedes-Benz C-Class (no respect!), we plugged into Paso Robles' sole remaining free Electrify America fast charger space, charged the Kona Electric's battery to full—in retrospect an expensive decision—and went off to brim the gas Kona's tank and grab lunch.
The return trip, this time with me in the gas Kona and Reynolds in the electric, went much the same as the first—uneventful. Although I missed the electric car's smoothness and quietness, I didn't hate getting back to L.A. about 90 minutes before Reynolds, whose 5.5-hour journey included a stop at an Electrify America station to charge and grab a late lunch—and heavier late-day traffic. . . .
Our over-reliance on Electrify America stations, which charge a $1 session fee plus a per-minute fee based on the charge rate your vehicle is capable of accepting (which, in our case, works out to $0.69 per minute for up to 125 kW) to fully charge the Kona's battery is largely to blame for the massive cost—especially because EV charging rates slow significantly once a battery exceeds 80 percent capacity.
Our two times charging to 100 percent were blow-out expensive, Reynolds said, calling the decision "stupid" in retrospect. Per-minute charging by Electrify America and EVgo puts a preposterous penalty on charging to 90 or 100 percent, particularly Electrify America, which has higher dollar-per-minute rates.
"Our loosey-goosy planning exposed how eye-wateringly expensive minimal planning can be if you choose to travel across Electrify America's network," Reynolds said. "The Kona Electric cost us over double what the gas version did to do basically the same trip—even while using far less energy. This is completely upside down from the usual situation where the EV is about half the cost per mile of a gas car, based on far cheaper home charging. If we fumbled like this all the way across the country, we'd be broke by Brooklyn."
It would break with the spirit of our story, but a little planning would've gone a long way. Although there's no app available for other EVs as easy to use as Tesla's Trip Planner (because it's built into Tesla's infotainment system), free websites like ABetterRoutePlanner.com show that we could've easily saved $40 or so if we'd fast charged the Kona's battery only enough to get us to our destination and then opted for slower Level 2 charging overnight at our hotel. Hindsight and whatnot.
The Verdict?
As with all things in life, both gas and electric powertrains have their compromises. The former offers a less refined experience, is generally more expensive to run day to day around town, and pollutes more. But there are refueling stations everywhere.
The latter is generally more expensive up front, will cost more to travel with, requires some planning before embarking on a long journey, and will take longer to refuel on the way (though we predict that ever speedier fast charge times will soon enough minimize the recharge/refuel time difference).
We set out with our two Konas to answer two questions: All things being equal, is gas or electric better to drive? And can the average American household get by with an EV as its only car?
When it comes to driving these two Konas, we prefer the electric one. "Just about every minute you drive the EV is better than that minute in the gas car, except for braking to a stop," Reynolds said. The Kona Electric is silky smooth, powerful, and refined. The Kona 1.6T is good, but the Kona Electric is better.
The latter question has a more complicated answer, but we think the answer is yes, with some obvious caveats. . . .