SAN DIEGO — Eight days, 2,914 miles and 19 fast-charging stops after leaving Savannah, Georgia, our electric crossover rolled onto the Pacific Coast Highway with 31 percent of its battery left and no tow truck in its history. A few years ago, that would have been a small adventure. This time, it felt mostly like a road trip.
The test vehicle was a Corvane Aster, a mid-size electric crossover from the startup Corvane Automotive with an EPA-style rating of 290 miles. The goal was to see how the nation’s growing fast-charging network holds up on a southern route that leans heavily on interstates but also crosses long, empty stretches of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.
The network has grown up
The biggest change from earlier trips was simple density. Along Interstate 10 through Louisiana and eastern Texas, high-power stations appeared every 40 to 60 miles, typically at travel centers and big-box parking lots. We rarely planned more than one stop ahead, and on several days the car’s built-in route planner chose stops that we would have picked ourselves.
Average charging sessions lasted 27 minutes, usually from about 15 percent to 75 percent. That rhythm, roughly two and a half hours of driving followed by a half-hour break, matched how most families already travel with children or pets.
- Total distance: 2,914 miles over eight days
- Fast-charging stops: 19, plus four overnight hotel charges
- Total charging cost: about $412, or roughly 14 cents a mile
- Broken or derated chargers encountered: 7 of 64 plugs tried
- Longest gap between stations: 141 miles in West Texas
Where it still gets tricky
The West Texas desert was the real test. Between Fort Stockton and Van Horn, the route offered only a single station with four plugs, two of which were out of service when we arrived just after 7 a.m. We waited 22 minutes for a pickup driver to finish before plugging in. A headwind gusting near 35 mph cut the car’s efficiency by nearly a fifth, and we arrived at the next stop with 9 percent remaining, closer than we would have liked.
Reliability, rather than availability, remains the industry’s most persistent complaint. Seven of the 64 individual plugs we tried either failed to start a session or delivered far less power than advertised. In each case another stall worked, but drivers at a busy site in Tucson described waiting nearly an hour on a holiday weekend.
Finding a charger is no longer the problem. Finding one that works on the first try, every time, is the bar we have to clear next.
Alicia Romero, director, Southwest Clean Corridors Coalition
Charging operators say they are investing in maintenance. Tobias Grant, a spokesman for the network VoltPath, said the company has added remote diagnostics and regional repair crews and now aims to fix most faults within 48 hours. “Uptime is the whole business,” he said. “Drivers remember the one bad stop, not the 20 good ones.”
Not everyone is convinced the rural gaps will close quickly. Gas station owners in small towns told us they are interested in adding chargers but worry about utility upgrade costs that can exceed $250,000 per site. Some state programs offer grants, but the paperwork can take a year or more.
Cost was a pleasant surprise. Charging prices varied widely, from 32 cents to 58 cents per kilowatt-hour, but the total came in well below what a comparable gas crossover would have needed for the same distance. Free overnight charging at four hotels helped.
The bottom line: a coast-to-coast drive in an electric vehicle now requires a little planning and a little patience, mostly in the emptiest parts of the West. For most of the country, it simply requires a coffee break.
