2022 Chevy Bolt EV Road Test | Time to play EV, gas or airplane?

PORTLAND, Ore. – My sister-in-law is being kind enough to trek up to Portland to give us a hand as we pack for our move back down to California. Originally, she was going to fly (you know, ‘cause it’s 1,000 miles away), but a fear of ongoing flight cancellations made her decide to just drive. So, instead of five-plus total hours and a 6% chance of a flight being canceled, if that, she would take the better part of two days. Alrighty then, to each her own, road trips are great. But then I remembered that she just bought a new car: a 2022 Chevy Bolt EV.

“Ah, you’re going to want to talk her out of that,” I told my wife. “The chance of flight cancellations has nothing on what could delay her while recharging all those times on the way up here.”

Running through my head were suddenly visions of her parked in some Walmart parking lot, battery at 5% and an Electrify America station being “Unavailable” despite totally being unoccupied. Of the in-car charging app sending her on a meandering mess of a goose chase for some weak-sauce charger (as Zac Palmer experienced road tripping a Jaguar I-Pace). Of me needing to drive 6 hours down to Yreka, Calif., to rescue her … and back.

But, to be absolutely fair, I gave her the benefit of the doubt that she’d be up for doing the necessary electric charging research and doing far more planning than in the past. I then opened up the Electrify America app on my phone to see just what the state of that network’s chargers were on the Interstate 5 corridor between Southern California and Northern Oregon. Turns out, it’s pretty darn good! The longest gap between charging stations was 105 miles, between Redding and Yreka. Most were far less than that.

Is the one in the middle simply unoccupied? Or does it not actually work? Pull up and find out!

If she kept her Bolt topped up between the optimal 10-80% range and stopped at a charger for an electron splash any time she needed to stop for something else, she’d be in good shape. Basically, go for a bunch of 30-minute pauses rather than giant full recharges. And definitely don’t assume you can just divide the car’s range by the distance traveled.

So, she could do it. Electrify America has built out its network in this part of the country enough that it wouldn’t be completely foolish, and there are obviously other networks as well (plus the possibility of a charger at a hotel, though beware of hotels advertising “electric car charging” when it’s really a Tesla proprietary charger). Her Bolt also has an above-average amount of range at 258 miles, meaning she’d be in better shape than the drivers of many other EVs.

All that said, this still sounded like a giant pain in the ass to me. Especially when you consider the Bolt is hardly a quick charger these days – in the half-hour Chevrolet says the Bolt EV will recoup 100 miles, a Hyundai Ioniq 5 could regain 200 or more. That’s admittedly the best of the lot when it comes to not-egregiously-expensive EVs, but you get the point. When I’m on a road trip, I like to stop as infrequently as possible and try to check off as many needs as possible per stop. I’ve already documented my dream EV stop scenario. Maybe stopping every 100 miles or so for 30 minutes wouldn’t be so bad, but maybe it would be hair-pullingly atrocious. Don’t know, I’ve never tried.