You aren’t supposed to road-trip the Fiat 500e. Then again, you also probably aren’t supposed to lease a Fiat 500e if you live in a rural area, and I already did that, so why not take it on a road trip? I’d get to do something interesting, you’d get to enjoy my suffering and everyone would win except for the poor Fiat PR person whose boss is mad I keep calling it the worst new electric vehicle you can buy today.
In my defense, though, I’m only referring to the numbers when I say the 500e is the worst new EV. It has the lowest range of any new EV on the market and also has the lowest charging speed. It also has the fewest doors, unless you count the liftgate as a door, which I do not. If you do, technically, the Rolls-Royce Spectre takes the award for fewest doors. It’s a little crazy to think that if you don’t want a sedan, truck or SUV, your only options for EVs in the U.S. are the Fiat 500e and the Rolls-Royce Spectre, but nevertheless, here we are.
In reality, the Fiat 500e has been an outstanding daily driver. The numbers may be smaller than other alternatives, but it’s perfectly sized for two people, and unlike with my 2015 500e I barely think about range on a daily or even weekly basis. I keep the cabin at a pleasant 70 degrees, drive wherever I need to go, accelerate quicker than most other drivers and have even thought about autocrossing it (if I can ever justify buying a new set of tires) because it’s actually pretty fun to drive.
Even if other EVs have better numbers, the only time I wish it had more than roughly 150 miles of range is when I have to charge on the way back from the airport after a work trip. Its 85-kW DC fast-charging power could also be better, but by the time I pop into the bathroom and get some food it’s usually already at 80%, so it’s not like I regularly find myself sitting in the car, waiting for it to charge. So, again, why not take it on a road trip?
Mistakes were made
Well, for a while I didn’t have a road trip to take it on. Recently, though, my family celebrated my parents’ 40th anniversary with a week on North Carolina’s Oak Island. That’s about 380 miles from my apartment, meaning the entire trip would be about 760 miles if I can still do my math correctly. So while there are certainly longer road trips, it’s also much further than my previous trip to Charlotte on the Zero S. It’s also important to note that my girlfriend wasn’t able to come, so I did this trip solo. If she’d come along, there’s no way I would have forced her to put up with my shenanigans like that.
Since I also hate myself, apparently, I decided to start the trip by doing zero prep. Anyone who owns an EV knows you should plan out your stops before you leave, but at least on the way there, I wanted to go in blind. I soon realized that was a bigger mistake than you might assume, but oh well. Lesson learned. It wasn’t like the car let me down — it was the charging.
That said, I did start with a full charge, so I wasn’t in the worst possible position when I set off. I may hate myself, but I don’t hate myself that much. I left at about 10 A.M., and for the first 100 miles or so, everything went swimmingly. I just turned on a podcast, set the cruise control and cruised down the highway.
My first real mistake came about the time I hit Augusta. I was paying too much attention to the podcast and not enough attention to the traffic, which meant I missed my exit to charge. I still had plenty of range left, so I figured I’d just keep going and stop to charge somewhere else. Big mistake. I found a fast charger in a McDonald’s parking lot near Aiken, SC, that looked great, but after spending at least half an hour trying to get it to work, I gave up. The charger had a hand-written sign on it promising it worked if you used the app, but I couldn’t get the app to work.
More problems
At that point I was faced with a choice: If I kept my speed down, and the range prediction didn’t drop too much, I could maybe make it to a charger outside of Columbia. Alternatively, I could drive back to Augusta to charge. Ultimately, I chose to drive back. I was going to be cutting it close either way, but I really wasn’t confident I’d make it to the Columbia charger, so back to Augusta it was.
Unfortunately for me, the first charger I stopped at ended up being at a dealership, which wasn’t ideal, but at least it would charge my car. Except I couldn’t get that charger to work, either. That meant heading to a nearby slow charger to recover enough range to get me to a fast charger. Eventually, I made it to the fast charger, and luckily no one was using it. Thankfully it was also close to a Kroger, so at least I had somewhere to hang out and use the bathroom while my car charged.
Once the Fiat got back up to 80%, I hit the road again. I’d had enough of charger shenanigans, so I made sure I had a good fast-charging option lined up in Columbia before leaving, which was smart. This time the charger actually worked on the first try, and another 30 minutes later I was off to Florence, where I found some fast-chargers in a Walmart parking lot. Had I planned my trip better, I would have stopped at the Buc-ee’s, but at the time, I missed the fact that the Buc-ee’s existed. I was also pretty burned out on charging at that point and knew I’d be getting in late.
What I didn’t know at the time was just how much more miserable charging problems would make me.
Even more mistakes were made
In order to actually make it to the beach, I only had to charge one more time in the little town of Hallsboro, NC. But a storm kicked up on my way there, and the wind absolutely killed my range. That meant by the time I pulled into town I only had a handful of miles remaining, but they had a fast-charger, so what could go wrong? As it turned out, too much.
It wasn’t raining when I arrived at the charger, but the store was closed, it was already dark, and the parking lot wasn’t exactly well-lit. I also really had to pee, but I could figure that out after I got my car charging. Except the charger didn’t work. And about the time I figured that out, it started to rain. Or more accurately, it started to pour. A little water is no big deal, but when I moved to the second charger, that one also didn’t work. Nor did I have enough range to get to a different charger. There also aren’t any hotels in Hallsboro, at least that I could find, so as the parking lot started to flood, I realized my only option was basically to figure out how to get the charger working. Plugshare said it should work, so at least there was that.
After doing a little investigating, it looked like the problem was that the charger thought the cable was in use when it wasn’t. So I just started messing with everything I could to hopefully make the charger realize it wasn’t actually in use. I also broke down and snuck behind a dark building to pee because I was that desperate and already soaked. Eventually, though, the charger that supposedly worked stopped not working, and I was able to start charging my car.
One last push
Temporarily. About halfway through my charge, the charger stopped charging, forcing me to get back out in the rain and mess with the cable again until it decided to play along. Once I had about 100 miles of range, though, I figured that was enough and hit the road yet again.
At that point, it was about 10 P.M., and it was still pouring. In fact, I’m pretty sure it started raining harder just because I was leaving, as I basically couldn’t see. The last thing I wanted to do was crash in the rain after all that, so I drove about as fast as conditions allowed. If there was one advantage of driving slowly, it’s that I didn’t have to worry about range. The disadvantage was that not everyone has an astigmatism, and other drivers really didn’t like me driving below the posted speed limit.
Considering how hard it was raining, I half expected to find at least one of the cars that passed me upside down in a ditch. Instead, I ended up catching up to one of them, presumably after they realized how reckless they were being and slowed down to, you know, actually see the road. I did finally make it, and I didn’t even crash once. About 13 hours after leaving on what would have been a six-hour drive without any stops, sure, but at least I made it.
The thing about road trips, though, is that eventually, you have to go home, which means making the exact same drive again. Well, maybe not the exact same drive. At that point I knew where the reliable chargers were, and with a full charge I could also skip Hallsboro. To get that full charge, though, I needed electricity, and the house we stayed in didn’t have any outdoor outlets. So I did what any enterprising EV owner would do and ran my charge cable through a window and plugged it in that way. It wasn’t ideal, but I checked on it regularly for the first couple hours to make sure my car didn’t throw a breaker. It didn’t, which meant the next day, I’d be fully charged.
Charging still sucks
On the return trip I made sure not to miss the Buc-ee’s, but while I made it with maybe 20 miles to spare, I also wasn’t prepared for just how crowded that particular Buc-ee’s would actually be. I could’ve sworn a church bus had dropped off several hundred people all at once, but no. It was just that busy. Still, they had unsweet tea, brisket sandwiches, clean bathrooms and a hunting section that the crowd didn’t seem interested in for some reason. I looked at flashlights until it was time to go.
From that point on it was actually pretty smooth sailing, or at least as smooth as things get in a 150-mile EV. I charged in Columbia again, then Augusta and finally, all that stood between me and my girlfriend’s house was about 100 miles of open road. I cut it close range-wise, but still, I made it. In fact, I made it nearly four hours faster than it had taken me to drive out a week earlier. Not because the Fiat magically gained more range, or I drove faster on the highway, but because that time, I didn’t have any charging issues.
Ultimately, that’s the biggest issue with EV road trips. The good fast chargers are often clustered in cities instead of along the highway, and when something goes wrong, it can add multiple hours to your drive time. In my case, charger issues more than doubled how long it took to get there compared to driving a gas car, and again, I cut nearly four hours off my return trip by simply stopping at chargers I knew worked.
Stupid apps
Of course, if I’d driven an EV with more range, that drive would have gone by even faster, and literally every single other new EV has more range than the Fiat 500e. It is, after all, a city car that I insisted on using for the exact opposite of its intended purpose, and the car itself did just fine. I won’t pretend the seat offered Mercedes levels of support, but it wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as you might have guessed. My back definitely hurt the next day, but I’ve definitely road-tripped cars that were less comfortable before.
The biggest downside of road-tripping the Fiat is that the navigation system’s charger-finder sucks. I mean, it does work, but it doesn’t work well, forcing me to rely on Plugshare to find fast-chargers. I can’t imagine anyone else is going to take their 500e on a 760-mile road trip, so it’s probably good enough for everyone else currently leasing one of these cars, but I feel like I shouldn’t have to depend on a separate app to find the fast chargers when I need them.
Really, as bad as the charger issues were on the drive to the beach, I think my biggest problem was just how many apps you need to take an EV on a road trip. By my count, that drive required using five different charging networks, which meant using five different apps, plus Plugshare, which is basically an EV road trip necessity. It’s ridiculous, obnoxious, frustrating, and completely unnecessary, and anyone who comes up with a universal charging app can have my money, even if it costs $25 or requires a subscription. I don’t care. I just want one app that does it all, simply so I don’t have to deal with the headache of downloading a new app just to use a charger that may or may not work.
But the little Fiat can still road trip
That said, while I wouldn’t recommend road tripping a 150-mile EV, there is something to be said about the fact that it’s currently possible, even without any planning. The dudes who tow trains from Miami to Anchorage twice a week still won’t be happy, but they’ll never be happy, so who cares? As for regular people who road trip a few times a year and don’t have extensive knowledge of which external catheter is best, it’s hard to see how basically any other new EV would have a problem doing what you need it to do.
Sure, you’ll want to plan your route ahead of time, just to be safe, and you’ll probably need to download a few apps, which is annoying, but I’d still bet your first EV road trip will go far more smoothly than you might assume. And, you know, if you really do want to compete in the Iron Bladder Olympics, you can always buy a Lucid and see where more than 400 miles of range and much faster charging can take you. As for me, that one trip put about seven weeks’ worth of miles on my car, so I’ll be sticking close to home for a while. Ideally, a very long while.
