The road trip is where most people's EV anxiety peaks.

Local driving, commuting, the school run — these feel manageable. You know the distances, you know your home charger is there at the end of the day, and you rarely push anywhere near the limits of your range.

A long road trip feels different. You're away from your home charger. The distances are significant. You're dependent on infrastructure you don't fully know or trust yet. The what-ifs multiply.

Here's what six years of EV road trips has taught me. It's not as complicated as the anxiety suggests. But it does require a different approach to planning — and the sooner you embrace that difference rather than fighting it, the better every long journey becomes.

THE MINDSET SHIFT THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING

Petrol drivers think about fuel once. They stop when the tank gets low, spend four minutes filling it, and continue. The stop is an interruption.

EV road trip planning works differently. Instead of one reactive stop, you plan two or three proactive ones. Instead of filling completely each time, you top up to a comfortable level and move on. Instead of stopping at the nearest available option, you choose stops that coincide with places worth stopping anyway — a good services, a market town, somewhere with coffee worth drinking.

The total time difference on a long journey between an EV and a petrol car, when planned well, is often thirty to forty five minutes. That's real. But it's also one extra coffee stop. Framed correctly it stops feeling like a penalty and starts feeling like a rhythm.

BEFORE YOU LEAVE — THE PLANNING TOOLS

A Better Route Planner — known universally as ABRP — is the single most useful tool for EV road trip planning. Free to use, available as a web app and mobile app, it takes your specific vehicle, your current battery level, your target battery level on arrival, and the current weather conditions, and plans an optimised route with charging stops, estimated charging times, and arrival battery levels at each point.

It is more accurate than your car's own navigation for long trip planning in most cases because it aggregates real world data from drivers of your specific vehicle. It knows that your EV5 uses more energy on the M6 in January than the official figures suggest. Your car's navigation doesn't always know that yet.

Zap-Map — as covered in the public charging issue — is your live status checker. Before committing to a charging stop, check Zap-Map for recent user reports. If three people have flagged a charger as out of service in the last 24 hours, adjust your plan before you're standing in front of a broken unit.

PlugShare is worth having as a third option, particularly for finding community shared charging in locations where commercial networks haven't reached. Less relevant on major routes but invaluable on more unusual journeys.

PLANNING YOUR CHARGING STOPS

The golden rules I've arrived at after years of EV road trips:

Never plan to arrive at a charger below 10 to 15 percent. Buffer is everything. A charger that's occupied, out of service, or slower than expected is a minor inconvenience at 20 percent. It's a crisis at 3 percent.

Charge to 80 percent and move on. Battery charging speed drops significantly above 80 percent — the last 20 percent takes almost as long as the first 80. Unless you have a specific reason to need a full charge, stop at 80 and make your next stop sooner. Your total journey time will be shorter.

Plan for two backup options at every stop. Know where the next nearest charger is before you arrive at your planned one. If your first choice is broken or occupied you want a plan B in your head, not a frantic search on a phone while standing in a car park.

Align stops with places worth stopping. Gridserve Electric Forecourts often have decent food. Some motorway services have improved considerably. A twenty five minute charging stop in a place you'd choose to stop anyway feels completely different to twenty five minutes in a bleak car park watching a charging cable.

ON THE ROAD — MANAGING YOUR RANGE

Speed is the single biggest variable in real world EV range. At 70mph you're using significantly more energy than at 60mph. On a long motorway run where range is tight, dropping to 60 or 65mph on a quiet stretch can recover meaningful battery percentage. It's not always practical but it's worth knowing.

Heating and cooling cost battery. In winter, pre-condition the cabin while plugged in at home before you leave — as covered in the software issue — so you're not drawing on the battery to warm a cold car from the motorway. Once the cabin is at temperature, heated seats are more efficient than blowing hot air. Use them.

Hills work both ways. A long climb costs energy. The descent on the other side recovers some of it through regenerative braking. In hilly terrain the net effect is less severe than people expect, particularly in a modern EV with an efficient regen system.

Eco mode on long journeys is worth using. It typically softens the throttle response and increases regenerative braking — neither of which matters much on a motorway cruise but both of which add up over a two hundred mile run.

WHAT TO DO WHEN THINGS GO WRONG

Broken charger — check Zap-Map for the nearest alternative before panicking. Report the fault through the network's app. Most networks have a phone number on the unit for exactly this situation. Move to your backup plan calmly.

Charger occupied — this is the most common friction point on a long journey. If all units are in use, check whether any cars finished charging some time ago and the driver hasn't returned. Some networks allow you to report this. Wait briefly or move to the next location depending on your battery level.

Range anxiety on approach to a stop — slow down, engage eco mode, turn off unnecessary electrical loads, and trust your range estimate. Modern EVs are conservative in their predictions. If it says you'll arrive with 12 percent you'll almost certainly arrive with 12 percent.

Complete charging failure in a remote location — this has happened to me once in six years. The AA and RAC have both been rolling out mobile EV boost chargers across their patrol fleets, but coverage still isn't on every van, so towing to the nearest charger remains the standard fallback if a boost charger isn't available nearby. Know your breakdown provider's current EV policy before you leave. It's a genuine backstop, just not a guaranteed one.

THE HONEST VERDICT

EV road trips require more advance thought than petrol road trips. That is simply true and worth accepting.

What they don't require is the level of stress and complexity that EV sceptics suggest. Plan with ABRP, check live status with Zap-Map, follow the 10 percent floor and 80 percent ceiling rule, align your stops with places worth stopping, and have a backup plan at each charge point.

Do those things and a long EV journey is not an ordeal. It's a different rhythm. And after a few trips that rhythm becomes second nature — to the point where the elaborate petrol station dance of pump, card, receipt, cap starts to feel oddly primitive by comparison.

NEXT ISSUE

The complete honest cost of EV ownership — everything beyond the fuel savings that nobody puts in the brochure.

See you in a fortnight.

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Charging Up
chargingup.uk

P.S. What's the longest EV journey you've done — or are planning? And what's the bit you're most nervous about? Hit reply. Real questions from real readers shape what I write next.