Hokkaido 2026
A 12 day Hokkaido road trip with the Honda-e
The thought of doing a road trip around Hokkaido has always been there. After going to Hokkaido numerous times, all of them in the winter, I always wondered what it would be like in the summer. PP and I had always thought about escaping to the north (Akita, Aomori, Hokkaido) to avoid the brutal summers in Tokyo and down south.
A few months ago, we had done an inpromptu road trip to celebrate my retirement from Google. It was really fun in the Honda-e because of the short EV range (220km max on 100%) meaning that we'd have to charge the car every 150km to comfortably make it and not have range anxiety. Turns out, also constraining us to only 150km (about 2 hours of driving) allowed us to spend a lot of the time exploring rather than just sitting in a car.
Hokkaido seemed like a pretty fun challenge for the Honda-e. Known for how wide and vast it is, I wasn't sure how good the EV charging infrastructure was there, how far could we go?
The first challenge is how do we even get the car to Hokkaido. Of course, renting a car in Hokkaido would of been the most simple choice, but being able to drive your "own" car there was exciting. I realized quickly that no matter what you did, you had to take a ferry across the strait that separates Hokkaido from Honshu. If that's the case, why try to drive on the expressway from Tokyo to Aomori. If we could take a ferry from Tokyo that would be a new experience and less time on the road.
After an easy search, I realized there were two closest routes -- either from Niigata to Hokkaido (Niigata City being 320km from Tokyo), or Ibaraki to Hokkaido (Oarai being 140km). The obvious choice is from Ibaraki, which we could easily make with one single charge, jump on the ferry and end up in Hokkaido.
The ferry leaves twice a day, journey takes 18 hours. They leave at 19:45 or 01:45. The midnight departure seemed more like a commercial cargo ferry with one floor of accomodation, whereas the 19:45 one has three floors of accomodation. But because there is only practically one ferry a day, unlike the Shinkansen where you just book tickets on the day, we were constrained on which days had availability for the car.
The second challenge was where in Hokkaido would we drive. I'd always wanted to go to the Northern most point of Hokkaido, but looking at the charging situation, it seemed a little too ambitious for the first go at this. The Eastern most point of Japan was also a possibility. Japan is shaped diagonally from the south west to the north east, so Hokkaido is both the northern most prefecture and the eastern most prefecture.
Our final plan, before we set off was to drive in a clockwise direction from Tomokodai (port that we land at south of Chitose Airport), and then through Sapporo, Ashibetsu, Furano, Asahidake, Asahikawa, Kurodake, Kitami, Shibetsu, Shari, Nemuro, Kushiro, Obihiro, Tomamu and then back to Tomakodai.
Route