My current favorite car, the Honda-e has a reported range of 259km (lowest number). For the weekend, I decided to rent one Honda EveryGo and see if I could do a road trip. The destination, the eastern most point in Chiba Prefecture.

The car started at 98% full, the whole trip was about 295km total distance. I charged the car twice using a fast charger for 30 mins each (both getting from about 40% to 80%). I got the car home at 13% battery remaining. This means I went through nearly 1.8 times the battery capacity.

So what is the range? It definitely is not 259km. On the last leg, I got from 85% to 13% (72% used) over 114km, which extrapolates to about 150km range on a full charge to empty. (The numbers probably are lying to me though about capacity just like a regular petrol car lies about the fuel tank though.)

It's definitely something a little stressful about driving an EV with a short range on a road trip. There were a lot of charging stations en-route, so stopping to charge was easy, finding something to do while it was charging is a little harder. All the chargers would do 30-min increments.

There are also "slow" chargers — it reportedly wanted to take 7 hours to charge the car up from about 50%. I let it charge for 15 mins while we went for a stroll down the beach, came back to it only increasing the charge by 2%.

Road trips are very do-able though even with a 150km range, you'd likely want to plan to hit a charger every 100km and take a break.