Which Is Better For an EV Road Trip, Built-In Route Planning or "A Better Route Planner" App?

Road-tripping an EV through America’s heartland driving anything but a Tesla can be an exercise in frustration, but savvy route planning should minimize the grief. After a few years of production with continuous over-the-air updates, how does the native navigation in our Ford F-150 Lightning fare against third-party stalwart A Better Route Planner (ABRP)? To find out, we compared the systems on a 1,500-mile drive from Detroit to Memphis, Tennessee and back.

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Southbound on Native Nav

We got off to an interesting start. Having previewed the route the night before, observing a first stop in Dayton, Ohio, we were surprised when the navigation routed us to an exit just 43 miles into our journey. With the battery capacity still showing 86 percent, we were advised to charge to 96 percent. Okay. For the sake of science, we made the stop at a Red-E DC fast charger beside a BP gas station. At least it connected, accepted a credit card, and began charging immediately. But of course, charging any EV above 80 percent is extremely slow. After 10 minutes we’d used the rest room, reached 90 percent, and decided to press on. Ford notes that chargers can be added either automatically or after asking (per an infotainment setting) if it appears the vehicle will arrive at the next destination at less than 10 percent charge. Maybe our Lightning suspected what was in store for us.

Full Midwestern Charging Mayhem

That Dayton stop was scheduled at a tiny, out-of-the-way Blink Charging DCFC tower on the side of an electrical repair contractor’s building. One of its two fast-charge plugs was in use, but as dual charging was allegedly supported, I plugged in. But as with the only other Blink Charger I’ve attempted to interface with (in Traverse City, Michigan), 10 minutes of fumbling with credit cards and the Blink charging app failed to produce anything, so we bailed. After recalling our destination from recent places because the nav had forgotten it(!), we drove out of the way 7 miles back north and east to the Huber Heights Walmart’s bank of Electrify America chargers, plugged into a 350 kW unit, waited for Plug-and-Charge to work, and then authorized it with the EA card in my smart-phone wallet when it ultimately didn’t, and began charging.

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Climbing back in to see the target charge level (54 percent), we again had to recall the destination. But for reasons unknown, the instrument cluster was estimating time to reach 90 percent. Wouldn’t it be infinitely more helpful to transfer the target number to this display? (Two more Ford nav demerits).

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Power at this charger peaked at a paltry 69 kW after 5 minutes, so I relocated to another 350 kW unit. This one (and the others at this location) still refused to acknowledge plug-and-charge, and now also refused my wallet card, requiring direct app swiping to continue. (Ford’s plug-and-charge shows to be enabled in our FordPass app.) This tower gave me 138 kW immediately, but—as with the next five attempts—inexplicably faulted out after just a few minutes. Customer service reset the tower, fruitlessly, then advised I try a nearby 150 kW tower (which luckily had just freed up). That one completed our charge in one go. The entire Dayton debacle had cost us well over an hour, so when the nav suggested another stop in Cincinnati—despite the dash indicating our destination was well within range—we blew that recommendation off, added another demerit to the Ford nav, and pressed on.

Deficient Database

While we had plenty of juice to reach our hotel, it offered L2 charging only, which we couldn’t count on to top up our big battery overnight. So, as we approached Louisville, Kentucky, we began looking for another DC fast charger to get us past the half-full mark. Ford’s map showed one at a BP just off I-71, but my navigator double-checked on his smart-phone mapping apps, all of which showed no charging there. Google Maps DID indicate a bank of EA chargers at a Meijer just a few miles from our hotel that was conspicuously absent from Ford’s nav database (which we’re told is updated monthly, but this station had been open for well over a month). We thought OTA updates meant never suffering out-of-date maps. For the record, we had to plug three different cables in to get a working one at this very new EA station too. Electrify America: It’s lovely that you back every kWh dispensed with renewable energy certificates, but could you just make the damned chargers work?

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Day Two—No Worries

Today, before setting out, we checked both the Ford and ABRP routing suggestions, and they agreed on the exact same two Tennessee charging stops: EVgo stations in Nashville and Jackson. The first, familiar from our Christmas 2022 trip in a Lucid, still offered no local dining options, so breakfast donuts were sourced from Sav-A-Lot.

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The second, a GM Energy-branded station co-located at a Pilot truck stop, was the nicest I’ve experienced. It featured two towers with two plugs each, a canopy for weather protection, gas pumps nearby with windshield washing gear, dining, restrooms—the works. And both of today’s EVgo stations worked flawlessly.

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Returning Via "A Better Route Planner"

While in Memphis we downloaded ABRP Premium ($7.95/month or $50/year), which is required to use the app via Apple CarPlay. This initially seemed to improve accuracy of the range prediction because the screen indicates a battery state of charge. And indeed, when stopping and charging to the level recommended by ABRP, it reported that level when resuming the drive. But once underway, the ABRP’s battery charge level quickly dropped to a lower state of charge than what the dash indicates (ending up at the next planned stop with ABRP showing 5 percent remaining and thedash saying we had 20 percent). Still, at least once ABRP offered a revised mid-journey recalculation that saved a charging stop.

Turns out, that was all estimated. Ford only shares battery state of charge info with Apple Maps. ABRP was just guessing.

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Before departing on the second morning, my FordPass app showed we’d charged to 60 percent overnight. I plugged that into the ABRP app up in the room, and got a route home with two charges, the first in Cincinnati. But upon plugging into the truck (now at 61 percent), the system recalculated with an initial stop at the same new Meijer EA station in Louisville. Asked to charge to 75 percent, we actually charged to 76 percent, but when we left to resume the trip, ABRP kept routing us back to this same charging station. We had to close the app on the phone to resume the trip. There was also no obvious way to manually update our battery’s state of charge in the app (Big demerit.)

More ABRP Quirks/Glitches

Another minor ABRP demerit: Upon arrival at the next charging stop, the screen displayed the target charge level, but then quickly obscured this message with the next navigation instruction. This prompted us to begin snapping a photo of the target charge level before exiting the truck. Like any decent mapping program, ABRP lowers the audio volume while giving a navigation prompt; but on one occasion, ABRP neglected to resume our audio volume. We were forced to navigate away from ABRP to the audio page to resume the normal set volume, then back to ABRP. That’s when we noticed that ABRP never appears as a “recent app” on the leftmost column of the CarPlay screen, so if you navigate away from it, you must always scroll through the CarPlay screens to resume it.

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The Last Straw

ABRP directed us to the same bank of EA chargers that bedeviled us on the way down, though this time we knew which towers to avoid. As it was nearly lunchtime, we dined in, charging well past the target level, to 86 percent (231 miles range indicated). But ABRP showed us with 76 percent charge and therefore recommended two more charging stops to make it home (220 miles away via the direct route; 233 miles via ABRP’s route). Furthermore, at noon it was predicting we’d arrive home at 8 pm. We took this as ample evidence ABRP had lost its mind and reverted to the Ford Native nav, which showed us making one more stop and reaching home at 3:11. A better plan indeed.

Home at Last

The stop Ford wanted us to make was once again at that little Red-E charger in Newport, Michigan, but by the time we reached that exit we had confidence we could reach home, so we skipped it, arriving home at 3:00 pm with a comfortable 15 percent battery charge and 34 miles of range remaining.

Bottom line: Both Ford’s native navigation and A Better Route Planner have a long way to go to match the excellence of Tesla’s native route planning software—features of which I was being constantly reminded of during this trip via an ongoing email conversation with a Model S early-adopter friend in Silicon Valley. Neither app ever gave us any indication of the number of chargers at the next stop, not to mention how many were currently availability or functional (the FordPass phone app does, however). Might these other systems eventually adopt some of Tesla’s best practices once those charging stations become available? Here’s hoping. Neither system was great, so there was no compelling reason to pay for the ABRP premium version that works with CarPlay, and well just live in hope of a Ford over-the-air update improving the native nav system’s performance.

For More on Our Long-Term 2023 Ford F-150 Lightning XLT:

• Off to a Bumpy Start
• Navigating Midwest Charging
• Forestry Service
• Range Strategies
• Offroad Adventure
• Understanding Range Prediction White Lies
• We Gave Our Ford F-150 Lightning a Fastback Roof
• The Coolest EV Range-Extending Tech at CES 2024
• 2023 Ford F-150 Lightning XLT Yearlong Review: AeroX Fastback Roof Road-Trip Range Results Are In
• AeroX Cd Test Results