Rachael wanted to go to Ruby Falls for Mother’s Day, so go to Ruby Falls we did. We decided to take our 2023 Chevy Bolt EUV on its first road trip outside of town, figuring the roughly 100 miles to Chattanooga from our home in Knoxville would allow us to test DC Fast Charging on the way home whether we really needed it or not.

The night before we left, I adjusted the charging settings on the Bolt from its normal 80% to 100%. I’ve read mixed opinions about whether limiting regular charging to 80% is necessary, or a good idea, but since we bought the Bolt with the expectation that it would primarily be our “around town” vehicle, with our 2022 Honda Accord Hybrid for long trips, charging to 80% is more than enough to handle our 2-3x / week commute of 50 miles. 

We’ve been driving pretty efficiently during the Spring months, and that’s helped our average miles per kWh rise to 4.3. Since we also drive primarily in town, with a mix of 60% highway and 40% main and side roads, I wasn’t surprised to see the Bolt’s Guess-o-Meter suggest we could drive more than 300 miles on this full charge. Chevy lists the range as 247 miles, and I’d say we typically beat that, especially since we’ve never needed to go more than 65 mph.

My wife does nearly all the driving when we’re together, so on the way to Chattanooga I setup an account with Electrify America. I used A Better Route Planner on my iPhone to plan our route, and it was suggesting we stop on the way back at a Wal-Mart and use DC Fast Charging to get back to 78% in order to meet my configured goal of arriving home with 40% state of charge. That’s likely a bit too conservative, but until we have access to the Tesla SuperCharger network, conservatively is how I intend to plan our trips.

I also looked up Ruby Falls in PlugShare and it told me there were two Blink Level 2 chargers in the parking lot. I’ve seen Blink chargers all over in other cities and states, including a city in Alabama where we visit family, so I signed up for a Blink account as well. I noted that the price for Blink charging at that location would be $0.02 per 30 seconds for a member or $0.04 per 30 seconds for a guest, so if we charged for 90 minutes, it would cost $3.60. When we arrived at Ruby Falls, we parked at at the charger rated for 8.3 kW instead of the one rated for 6.x. One mildly annoying thing is that I had to “charge up” my Blink account with a minimum deposit of $20, kinda like a toll beacon, and allow the charger to pull from it. I’m sure Blink prefers to have money sitting in customer accounts, and as a bit of foreshadowing, this likely saved them a second credit card charge from me later in the day.

When we left the Bolt, it was sitting at 61% charge and considering we’d driven the entire way on the interstate at 68 mph, the car estimated we had another 171 miles left. I figured that was pretty good considering some of that driving was up a mountain.

Here are the details of our first charge of the day. We’d headed back to the car to leave our jackets and photos we’d purchased in the car and as we approached the vehicle, I was notified our Bolt had hit 85% charge. Blink also notified me it was time to move, or that I’d be charged to stay there. The parking lot was full other than the charging stations and we’d decided to let our son do the zip line and rock climbing, so I changed the charging settings on the Bolt to allow it to go to 100% and started a new session.

After the zip line and rock climbing, we returned to our vehicle. The first thing we noticed was this large ICE truck parked in the other Blink charging spot. Not cool, especially since there is a sign saying those spots are for EV charging. 

Our second charging session brought the Bolt’s battery to 100%. Notice the drop in estimated range to 291 from 319 at home that morning. I don’t put a lock of stock in the Bolt’s abiity to estimate range, which is kinda sad because our Honda Accord Hybrid does a pretty good job of it. Still, it isn’t like we run either vehicle down to E before “refueling” - be it with electrons or gas.

Here are the details of the second shorter charging session from Blink. For a combined 27.6 kWh, that brought our total amount for going from 61% to 100% to $8.76, or 32c per kWh.  That’s the cost of around 2.5 gallons of gas, and about what our hybrid would cost to drive to make that leg of the trip. So for “slow” Level 2 charging, it looks like I paid about what I’d pay to drive my hybrid. Where the savings really come in are on the first leg of the trip, as we pay roughly 11c per kWh to charge at home. To be fair, if I’d been willing to give it a shot, I’m sure we could’ve made the trip back home without charging, but I wanted to try out Blink and given that EV chargers aren’t as ubiquitous as gas stations, I’m not quite ready to run that close to the wire. I’m curious to see what DC Fast Charging costs, but I assume it will be more expensive than 32c per kWh.

After a side trip out of the way for lunch in Chattanooga, a truly terrible meal at Sticky Fingers, and another side trip to get some ice cream at one of our favorite spots in Loudon, Tic-Toc, we made it home. Total distance driven was 203 miles and we used just a tad more battery capacity come back as going down, which makes sense as it was warmer and we ran the AC the whole way.

All in all, I enjoyed our first road trip in our EV. Next time, I plan to take it to Nashville or Huntsville to visit family and experiment with DC Fast Charging. 

And to wrap things up, here’s a pic of us in front of the falls inside the cave at Ruby Falls.