My daughter and her family live in a small town inside the I495 corridor in Massachusetts. We usually visit several times per year. It is a 9+ hour trip with variations in traffic, weather, stops, etc. Leave by 9 and arrive for dinner. This year, however, we were driving a new Hyundai EV.

Driving around town in a battery-electric car is really quite nice. You never have to stop at a gas station (or get an oil change, worry about anti-freeze, etc.) since you merely plug in at home every few days and wake up to a ‘full tank’. An EV is comfortable, reliable, quiet, easy to maintain, fun to drive and cheap to operate.

You do, however, have to think a little bit differently when travelling in an EV because, in the US, the EV charging infrastructure is still behind other nations. The Hyundai has a range of about 250 miles; theoretically, we could make the 500 mile trip with 2 recharges, but we planned on 3. In this car, a recharge from 10% to 80% takes about 45-50 minutes on a fast charger. So our usual trip of 9 to 9 and a half hours became one of 10 to 10 and a half.

There are many websites and apps that show the location, capability, and availability of charging stations along the route. Even Google Maps now has that feature. Research showed there are at least 36 DC Fast chargers along the I-90 route from Jamestown to Boston, roughly 18 in each direction and we only need 3. It is not (yet) as convenient as gasoline stations, but we did not see any difficulty making the trip.

We planned the first leg to the DeWitt Service Plaza, 217 miles from home. We’d be starting with a 100% charge (a ‘full tank’) and had been averaging more than 250 miles of range so we thought we’d make it. Unfortunately, the day of the trip was windy and raining, which cuts a little into your mileage (even when using a gasoline engine). Around Batavia we were having 2nd thoughts. The information on mileage and battery consumption in an EV is quite good and we saw that we’d be cutting it close. Since this was our first road trip and lacked experience, we decided to hedge our bets, stopping at the fast charger at the Waterloo Outlets near Rochester. It is conveniently located but off of the Thruway and that added a little bit to the trip. It also was not conveniently placed for the ‘incidentals’ of traveling so we stopped again at DeWitt to take care of those.

The next leg took us to the fast charger by the municipal building in Amsterdam, NY. This one was operated by the New York Power Authority, it was very quick but again, off the Thruway and lacking access to the ‘incidentals’, requiring another stop once we were back on the Thruway. We could almost make it to my daughter’s with the charge we had, but decided one more quick stop in Massachusetts would get us there. Unfortunately, the charging station at the Lee Service Plaza was being serviced, so we stopped, again off of the Turnpike, at a Dunkin Donuts fast charger in Springfield.

With all of the off thruway stops and inability to attend to the incidentals while charging, the trip took 90 minutes longer than it would have in a gasoline car. Inconvenient, yes, but also non-polluting. Building out the charging infrastructure at the Thruway Plazas will eliminate much of the delay. Having faster charging times, as the newer models do, will make the travel time almost equal to the old-fashioned gasoline cars. The upside is that while recharging, we were not outside in the weather with our hand on a frozen gas pump. We were sitting inside the car, on heated seats, surfing the web or listening to the radio. Filling up an EV is much more relaxing.

We still had to get home from Boston and found traveling westbound much easier. One stop in Herkimer (again, off the Thruway) and one at the Ontario Service Plaza and we made it home in just over 1 hour beyond our usual time.

What I learned from this first road trip was that long distance traveling in an EV is not only possible, it is more relaxing. Even a slight build out of the charging infrastructure will get EVs pretty close to parity with gasoline cars since you can leave your car charging while attending to other business. Some may say an extra hour relaxing on a heated seat listening to the radio is unacceptable. I say it makes traveling more enjoyable and is well worth doing to avoid spewing a half-ton of CO2 from your exhaust pipe for future generations to deal with.

Tom Meara is a Jamestown resident.