EV Road Trip Planner – Charging Stops & Charging Time

EV road trip planner: how many charging stops, and how long?

This EV road trip planner works out how many charging stops an electric car needs for a long drive, roughly where they fall, how much to charge at each and how long each stop takes. Enter the trip distance, your battery’s usable capacity, the car’s energy use and the charge window you like to use — for example arriving at a charger with 10% and leaving with 80% — plus the charger’s power.

You get a stop-by-stop plan, a chart of the battery level along the route, the time spent charging and driving, the energy used and, if you enter a price per kWh, the charging cost. It is free, needs no account and runs in your browser — a quick check before you open a charger map.

How to plan an EV road trip

1. Enter the Trip distance by road (the road distance calculator gives it), your cruising speed and the charge you start with and want on arrival.
2. Enter the Usable battery capacity and the car’s Energy use in Wh/km, kWh/100 km, Wh/mi or mi/kWh.
3. Set the charge window — Charge when down to and Charge up to — and the charger power. The car’s own maximum DC power caps it.
4. Optionally tick Adjust energy use for motorway speed, cold or heat and extra load.
5. Read the plan, then find real chargers near each point before you go.

EV Road Trip Planner features

How the plan is worked out

Range per per cent of charge = usable kWh ÷ 100 ÷ energy use per km. The planner drives until the battery reaches your “charge when down to” level, then charges to your “charge up to” level. At the last stop it charges only to what the rest of the trip needs plus your arrival reserve, which saves time. Driving time is the distance divided by your cruising speed.

Charging time uses the model of the EV charging time calculator: power is the lower of the charger’s rating and the car’s maximum, constant up to the slow-down point (80% by default), then falling in a straight line to 20% of that power at 100%. The battery receives the charger’s energy less the charging loss (5% by default).

Worked example: 700 km in a car with a 60 kWh battery using 160 Wh/km (375 km per full charge), starting at 90%. The first stop comes after 300 km at 10%; charging to 80% adds 42 kWh, about 44 minutes on a 60 kW charger. The second stop comes after another 262.5 km; charging to about 52% is enough to arrive with 15%, about 26 minutes. With 5 minutes per stop and driving at 90 km/h, the trip takes about 9 h 07 min, of which 1 h 21 min is charging.

Getting the inputs right

• Use the usable capacity (often 5–10% below the gross figure) and your trip computer’s average from similar roads, not the official test figure.
• Motorway speed and cold weather raise energy use a lot. Tick the adjustment, or use the EV range calculator to see each effect.
• A charger’s rating is a maximum: shared cabinets, a cold battery or a busy site can halve it. Lower the charger power for a cautious plan.
• Charging from about 10% to 80% is usually the fastest part of the curve; going to 100% on a DC charger can take as long again for the last 20%.

Limits of this planner

It does not know where chargers are, the hills on your route or the weather on the day, and it assumes the same energy use throughout. Use it to judge how many stops and how much time to allow, then plan the actual stops with a charger map such as Open Charge Map (open data, CC BY 4.0) or your car’s own route planner, keeping a margin for a busy or broken charger.