Lessons Learned While Road Tripping an EV

"Here I am," I thought as I whooshed more than 700 miles across Germany and France at the wheel of an all-electric Audi Q4 Sportback 50 E-Tron Quattro, an old dog learning new tricks. I was becoming a true 21st-century road warrior, juggling efficiency and range against average speeds and charge point availability.

But as I calculated whether the 6 percent charge left in the battery meant I should slow down from my 85-mph cruise to ensure I reached my coffee stop with its 300-kW charge point or if it would be better to have a five-minute "park and spark" stop at a 350-kW charger to make sure I could go the distance at speed, I realized I grew up driving like this.

Australia is a big, empty country. It's the size of the lower 48 states, but with less than one-tenth the population, most of which is huddled along the eastern and southeastern coasts. When I got my license in the mid-1970s, the 3,173-mile route from Perth, on the west coast, to Darwin on the north coast, via my hometown of Adelaide—like going from San Diego, California, to Duluth, Minnesota, via New Orleans—was still a dirt road for more than 1,000 miles. Why go the long way 'round? Because it was pretty much the only way 'round.

The route from Perth up the west coast and across the top of the country was dirt for 1,300 miles up north and was often washed out by heavy rains during the tropical wet season. The diagonal route, the equivalent of, say, going from San Diego to Duluth through Kansas City? It didn't exist. Today you can drive almost directly from Perth to Alice Springs—like Kansas City, it's located in the middle of the country—and then north to Darwin. But the 700 miles through the heart of the Gibson Desert is still dirt and used by fewer than 30 cars each day.

With isolated roads and 24-hour gas stations few and far between, almost any long journey outside Australia's capital cities required forethought and planning. Motoring organizations recommended packing a spare fan belt and radiator hoses, extra water, oil, and even gas. You watched the weather, too. A hot, dry tailwind meant a danger of overheating; heavy rain meant water running across the main road could hide an axle-breaking hole. Australian-made Holden and Ford and Chrysler family cars from the '50s through the '80s were simple, tough things with good ground clearance and big gas tanks for a reason.

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A modern EV is anything but a simple thing. The Q4 Sportback E-Tron's nav system not only tells you where you are and where you're going but will also plan your journeys to take the most efficient route. It considers everything from road gradients to traffic density to ambient temperatures to the location and speed of charge points. Combined with active driver assist features such as adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist, the Q4, like many modern cars, takes a lot of the brainwork out of road trips—provided you're happy to go the way the car wants to go, in the manner it wants to go there, that is.

When deciding to take an interesting shortcut on quiet back roads through the Vosges Mountains or Baden-Württemberg hills, working just from the map and not using a route-guidance system programmed to find the road of least resistance, I found I still had to manage the Q4. Just like the old days, I mentally calculated the likely impact on battery charge and range, using the nav system to scout the locations of 150-kW and 300-kW chargers, and figuring out likely points of no return that would commit me to one route or the other.

Germany has 70 times Australia's population density, and it has already built a charging infrastructure that makes it possible to road trip an EV the length and breadth of the country. But if you want to take the roads less traveled, the old tricks still come in handy.