My wife and I just completed a 30-day 6665 mile cross-Country trip in our EQS 450 4Matic SUV. We traveled towards the West Coast beginning on 25-Mar on a relatively cold Northern route and returned to Philadelphia on 23-Apr mostly on I-40 where temperatures reached 90F. I kept a log of our charging stops and thought other forum members might find the stats from our adventure helpful in planning their own trip.

We used 2600 kW of power for the entire trip which averaged 2.56 MPkWh. During the first eleven days we averaged 2.25 MPkWh over 2878 miles. Never once did we drop below 400 Wh/mile until after we got beyond Cedar City, UT. We averaged 2.87 MPkWh for the last 3787 miles of the trip.

We made 41 DC charging stops, mostly at Electrify America stations. We only called EA twice for help with the chargers, once in Council Bluffs, IA and again in Cedar City, UT. We topped up for a total of 81 kW at residential stops (friends and relatives) and 460 kW at hotel and restaurant destination chargers. About 20% of our charging was with L1 and L2 chargers. Most of the DC charging was done at EA with the MB 30-minute free charging program. We did spend about $40 running over the 30 minute window and an additional $73 at non-EA DC chargers. I estimated that it will cost about $1000 for DC charging to make this trip once the MB 30-minute free program expires.

Our worst mileage was in Nebraska and Colorado when we averaged 619 Wh/mile for a 102 mile drive in a Winter storm. Our best mileage was along the trip from Cedar City, UT to Zion NP when the average was 268 Wh/mile for the first 40 miles of that mostly downhill 56 mile stretch. On the return trip to Philadelphia along the mostly warmer Southern route we only exceeded an average of 400 Wh/mile for a total of 200 miles.

I estimate that we drove with the ECO+ Climate setting for about half the trip. This probably would not have been possible if we made this journey in the Summer or Winter.

 

One of our better mileage days driving across Texas and Oklahoma. We were getting an assist from 20 mph Westerly winds.


3.0 MPkWh for 205 mile stretch.

 

Here we are charging in Fort Morgan, CO after driving 90 miles from Nebraska without encountering a single car on the road. The road dirt on the side of car was adhered to a 1/8" thick sheet of ice on the car and fell off with the ice a little further down the road. This was the part of the trip where we were only getting 1.6 MPkWh.


Charging in Ft. Morgan, CO.

 

This is us in Greenriver, UT at a coffee shop with a 350 kW EA charger. If you need to use the restroom you need to stop by during business hours which are 7:00am to 11:00am, but not on Tuesday or Wednesday when they are closed the entire day.


Greenriver, UT EA charging station.

 

The first time we encountered another EQS SUV on the road other than at a dealer parking lot was in California. This one happened to look a lot like ours. The driver of this EQS 580 SUV was a first time EV owner who had just purchased the SUV at the beginning of April. I was surprised to learn that CA MB dealers were still getting a $20K dealer markup. The same EQS in Philadelphia would have been $30K less.

Comparing notes with another EQS SUV owner in California.

 

@fgwinn nice writeup thx!
When you go over 30 minutes charging allowance at EA.. end the session by plugging out and restart again.. you will get another 30 minutes. They don’t restrict 30 minutes per day.. hence no need to spend $$

 

I realize that it's possible to string 30-minute free sessions together and I have done that occasionally. However, when you are at a station where 50% of the chargers are non-operational you start wondering if your current session is the last one that the charger you are using will do that day. During our trip we saw plenty of EV owners struggling to charge their cars. Although we did not have any serious issues ourselves, we had a few sessions stop abruptly and we were genuinely relieved every time the charger would reconnect. I considered unplugging and reconnecting the charger to start another session, but I usually just left well enough alone and paid for the few extra minutes. The reason I believe that EA and MB don't enforce the 30-minute limit is that they realize that the chargers are unreliable. Drivers frequently restart a new session and they don't need to be frustrated further by a charger telling them to wait an hour before restarting a charging session.

 

this is a great writeup - and looks like a wonderful trip!

Two questions.

1. If you had to "ballpark", how much extra time do you think you spent driving/charging because you are in an EV vs. if you did the same trip in an ICE car? On my 1400 mi road trip in spring break, I think it was about 30% more, but I probably could have reduced it down to 20-25% if I had planned better so that food breaks and charging time would have been together. But you still have to account for more time due to non-optimal routing with chargers on the routes and charging time.

2. What was your preferred route planning app(s)? I found that no one app does a great job. I ended up using plugshare to see the best chargers on my route and using ABRP to get its suggestion along with Google maps (with no EV awareness), but then ultimately selected my own route based on a good buffer between charging stations and then just put each charger destination I chose into google maps. ABRP does not seem to present the most efficient routes. For example, when I put in Austin, TX to Fort Stockton, TX (near Big Bend NP), I got a route that took me down to San Antonio and then on I-10W, but my normal route would be US 290 W to I-10W. The ABRP route is 50+ mi longer and 1.25 hr longer. My own route (which is what Google also gives me) worked just fine to get me to charging stations along the route. The map routing in PlugShare is very hard to use and makes you do most of the routing work anyway. The routing in the car navigation sometimes just does not find a route with chargers or only shows EA chargers which may not be the best route. For example, if I put Austin to Denver in the MB Navi, it does not find any route to get me there.

 

Oh and one more question.

Has anyone figured out how to get the battery pre-conditioning to start happening if you are going to a non-EA charger? It seems like only if I put an EA charger in the MB Navi destination then I can get it to say that battery preconditioning has started when I start getting closer to the station. Is there a manual way to turn on the pre-conditioning so that when I am say 50 miles away from the charger, I can just get the preconditioning going?

 

1) I would estimate that there was a 20% EV time factor penalty. On travel days we ate breakfast before hitting the road, skipped lunch, and had dinner when we called it a day. With few exceptions we paced ourselves at about 400 miles per day and tried to arrive early enough at hotels to plug into available L2 chargers. We did not combine charging stops with meals, but we managed to do 20% of the total charging while we were sleeping.

2) I spent a lot of time mapping out the route before we started the trip. I printed a separate Google map page for every day along our route with the addresses of the charging stations and hotels. I relied upon PlugShare to suggest a few alternate routes by creating trips with the starting and ending addresses for each day. If it became apparent that we would need a non-EA charger I downloaded the the required apps so I would not have to do that when we arrived at the charger. When the MB Nav app did not select the same route as PlugShare, I would add some stopovers to the MB Nav app. I would also adjust the Desired Percent SoC at the day's destination to get the MB system to select the same charging stations that I identified on PlugShare. One thing that frustrated me a few times was the way MB drops a charging stop from the route if all of the chargers are in use. Before the very last charging stop of the trip, MB dropped the EA location in Bedford, PA because all four chargers were in use. Then it told us we did not have enough power in reserve to make the next EA charger in Carlisle. We scrambled to re-enter the EA address in Bedford and then waited in line for 30 minutes when we arrived before we could charge.

 

For chargers like ChargePoint L3 chargers you can precondition the battery by selecting the charger icon on the map and then selecting "ChargePoint" when prompted. I have not been able to precondition the battery unless MB Nav recognizes the charger as a valid place to charge.