Electric vehicle road trip

Can you get there in an electric vehicle?

Yes. 

Even on a road trip in the lightly-populated eastern two-thirds of Oregon.

Tam Moore tells the story of a road trip in "Oregon Trail" country. Settlers in the 1850s traveled across the high desert Mountain West, including land in what became the state of Oregon, and kept moving. They wanted to get through that land all the way to the fertile and well-watered valleys west of the Cascades. That population distribution hasn't changed. There is about one congressional district's amount of people in the eastern two-thirds of Oregon, but only if the district boundary reaches west at the southern boundary to grab the population spikes in Western Oregon's Rogue Valley, my home. Eastern Oregon has agriculture and conifer forests and lots of sagebrush, but not a lot of people. 

It doesn't have a lot of charging stations, either, but it has enough.

Population density map of Oregon. 

Tam Moore made the road trip in an electric vehicle. He never ran out of charge. It helps to do a little planning. Moore has been a journalist for seven decades, starting with the campus newspaper at Oregon State University, then as a journalist for KOBI television, and then as a print journalist at the Capital Press.

Moore

Guest Post by Tam Moore

You can teach an old dog new tricks.

The mantra of our times includes “electrify” again and again. A transition to electricity, thought to have less impact on Earth’s atmosphere than that caused by burning fossil fuels, is a good thing of course. It’s also a political mantra you see occasionally in this blog. Peter wrote that the 2024 election would be decided on wedge issues, and among them he listed the transition to electric vehicles. Not everyone is on board with EVs. Trump encourages rally crowds to jeer at the mention of electric-powered cars and boats. 

I got my first hybrid car, a Prius, in 2005. I figured to depreciate it as a work car over two years, then make it the family’s retirement vehicle. My wife, Barbara, got a little all-electric Chevy Spark in 2014. It had a range of about 80 miles before needing a recharge. The Prius, with its combination of gasoline and battery energy, was good for over 400 miles, sometimes up to 550 miles, before it needed a drink or a charge.

This spring Barbara switched to a low-mileage Chevy Bolt EV, an all-electric vehicle, which, at full charge, boasts a 300-mile range. We are mid-way through Bolt-testing the discipline of long-distance electric vehicle travel in Eastern Oregon — where charging stations are fewer and far from standardized. It is certainly a different mind-set from planning a trip with the plug-in hybrid Prius. And there’s even more thought needed Eastside. It is a more challenging place for EV-tripping than is the I-5 Interstate, where charging stations have proliferated in the past decade.

Before setting out, I consulted my longtime friend Courtland Smith, who has EV-traveled from his home in Corvallis, Oregon to New Mexico and back.

Then we did our own EV round trip of nearly 500 miles on I-5, with charges at a Walmart 180 miles from home and at a Dairy Queen one-third of the way into the return trip. The DQ charge was a hint that extra time needs to be part of trip planning. The Bolt did just fine taking on juice while we ate our dinner. But the guys who pulled in next to us at the charging station with a brand-new Nissan EV had nothing but trouble. As we ate, I kept seeing their car moving around to different chargers. “It kept cutting out,” explained the Nissan guy, as we unplugged and headed home with a battery 85%-charged.

Photo of the charger and accidental photo of the author

Learning new tricks for distance-EV travel includes savvy use of a smart phone along with learning the correct charging station configurations. Chevrolet gives us a smartphone app that designs a route, locating compatible charging stations within range. It even computes in the background the terrain elevations — a factor in the energy needed to get from point A to point B — before suggesting where to recharge and how long you need to stop at the charging stations.

Also added to the phone are a half-dozen apps for electric charging station networks you might come across en-route. At one stop, an Electrify America station at the Bend, Oregon,Walmart, I started and stopped the charging process with taps on the app. At another, in Burns, with ChargePoint, I learned to use my phone itself to tap the charging station.

Without that phone, I’d be out of juice when the battery fully discharged.

The Chevy app also takes the finalized route and, through a cable, transfers it to the car navigation system. By the time we get home, we’ll have a whole bunch of new tricks. And I might be able to tell you how paying for electricity at public stations compares with buying gasoline for the Prius. My guess is it’s going to be close because we ran up a $27 charging bill in Burns, to say nothing of the misery of hanging around in 97-degree heat while our Bolt took on that expensive juice.

Learning new tricks is fascinating, but you can bet a lot of drivers in this auto-centric country aren’t going to tackle EVs if they can’t figure out the technology.

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