Long Hauling In Our 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 6 SE Long-Range

I only charged to 100 percent once. What was supposed to be a quick jaunt into Nevada to find a DC fast charger had turned into a minor fiasco, crossing the breadth of Sparks twice after a Google Maps snafu while hunting for a decent dinner after a day of little but trail mix and miles. I had 300 miles to go to hit the hotel I’d reserved, and I was stubbornly insistent on avoiding the interstate. Between here, east of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and there, in Mt. Shasta, California, was a 217-mile stretch with zero DC fast chargers. My route planner showed I’d pull into Mt. Shasta with a single-digit battery charge remaining on our 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 6 SE Long-Range yearlong tester I’d picked up a few days earlier from the MT offices in Los Angeles.

An hour or two down the road, I realized I hadn’t looked at a topo map like I’d planned on doing back in Sparks. Maybe it was hunger. Maybe it was being tired after two long days on the road. Too late to turn back, charge again, and climb over Donner Pass. The Ioniq 6 and the route planner hadn’t let me down yet, so I pressed on.

A True Test of the Long-Legged Hyundai

The Hyundai Ioniq 6 isn’t just the sedan counterpart to the Ioniq 5 electric crossover, it also offers some notable range advantages thanks to a notably lower 0.22 coefficient of drag (compared to 0.28). Since I live and work remotely from just south of Seattle, flying down to L.A. and driving the Ioniq 6 back north would be the perfect introduction to our new Hyundai. I’ve spent a lot of time in EVs and have owned three of them, but I have little kids who don’t road-trip well, so multi-day trips that rely on public chargers are rare. Yet this 6, a rear-drive, long-range base trim with a 77.2-kWh battery and an EPA-rated range of 361 miles, is basically a road-trip specialist. I needed to see, for myself, how it’d handle it.

That includes experiencing the limitations of infrastructure. Current Hyundais don’t yet have access to Tesla’s superior Supercharger network, so I’d be reliant on the mishmash of other networks. At least in most cases I wouldn’t need to be at a charger long. The Ioniq’s E-GMP 800-volt architecture gives the car some of the quickest charging speeds around, especially at its price point. Don’t believe me? We did a real-world range and charging test, comparing the Ioniq 6 Long Range RWD against the Tesla Model 3 and found the Ioniq 6 can cover 291 miles at a constant 70 mph using 95 percent of a full charge—and recharge more quickly (from 5 to 80 percent in just 19 minutes) than its rivals. So it has the stats to back up its wind-cheating shape and big EPA range claims.

There’s also the subjective, unquantifiable aspect: Is the Ioniq 6 a good road-trip car? Would my screaming ass and numb legs insist I push it into the nearest ravine?

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The Route: Weird, but Not Too Weird

California is awfully large, north to south. The quickest and easiest way through is the I-5 corridor, which cuts through its Central Valley and is chock-full of charging stations, rest stops, and … mind-melting boredom. I didn’t have many criteria for the route, but it had to be more interesting than I-5. It also had to be feasible. One potential (and seemingly interesting) route went north out of Sparks and eventually to Idaho but was solely reliant on a single slow charger at a place that could barely be described as a town. That would be, at best, a masochistic anxiety fest; at worst, a sure-fire way to get MotorTrend’s most expensive tow ever.

A coastal route through California’s Lost Coast area seemed appealing, too. Maybe that will be the way the Ioniq 6 returns south. But this anti-interstate trip called for some spectacular scenery, and U.S. Route 395—which runs east of the Sierra Nevadas and through some spectacular high desert scenery—seemed a good compromise between making good time and making the drive less tedious. But no amount of scenery would matter much if the Hyundai couldn’t soak up enough electrons to make the journey.

A Better Route Planner—Or, Rather, Planners

There are a lot of ways to find charging stations. If you’re trying to do something highly rational, like take the shortest and most direct possible route through a known EV charging corridor, almost any of them will do. If you’re trying to be cute and stay off the interstate, things get a little tricky. I ended up juggling several route planners, navigation apps, and Hyundai’s native nav to try to optimize the experience. (Not to mention having all the major charging network apps, accounts, and payment methods downloaded and up to date—not a trivial task!)

Before heading out, I used A Better Route Planner (ABRP) to chart a course. ABRP is nice because it factors in a lot of important parameters. You can enter your observed energy efficiency to improve range and state-of-charge predictions, set arrival and departure SOC limits, and utilize real-time weather info to account for weather-related efficiency hits. You can also tell it whether you want to do lots of short charging stops or just a few long ones.

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Most important, once you have a route mapped out with charging stops, you can export the route to Google or Apple Maps, and then navigate with smartphone projection (Apple CarPlay or Android Auto) or using the ABRP’s own nav (which I generally didn’t use). With an OBD dongle and a premium subscription, ABRP can also do real-time data sharing with the car to further improve range and efficiency estimates.

One thing phone projection can’t do is tell the car to precondition the battery for the best charging performance. For that, you need to have the Ioniq 6’s native nav set to the charging station you want to go to. In retrospect, it probably wouldn’t have made too much of a difference, but in the name of science I tried to get the in-car nav to find and direct me to the next station on the itinerary. That proved to be a major hassle, with some charging stations proving very difficult to find through the car’s infotainment system. Hyundai’s is oriented to finding charging stations near your current location; trying to find something further along the route was maddening. Just entering the address of a charging station wouldn’t identify it as a charger to the nav, either, so it wouldn’t start preconditioning.

At the time, the Ioniq 6 wasn’t paired with a BlueLink account, so I couldn’t find the destination in the app and send it to the nav. That probably would have made the whole process a lot simpler—and we’ll be trying that situation on the next road trip. The dance also needed to be done in a specific order, starting the phone nav and then starting the car’s nav; do it the other way, and the native nav would cancel itself and defer to the phone projection nav. Again, less of an issue if you were taking a normal road trip on a normal corridor and fine with charging when and where needed.

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The Long and Mostly Unwinding Road

After a pit stop in Desert Hot Springs, California, to pick up some old film cameras from a coworker (including his old Pentax 645 medium format camera, which was used on countless Hot Rod shoots), I headed north and away from Los Angeles’ sprawl. Hot, in the desert? It was—111 at one point showed on the Hyundai’s display, and the A/C struggled to keep the car cool as we headed toward Barstow. Otherwise, it was damn close to the desert road-trip ideal: good music, great scenery, open roads, no traffic, and perfectly clear skies. The Ioniq 6’s HDA1 driver assistance suite worked flawlessly in these ideal conditions with clear roadway markings, few vehicles to worry about, and lots of miles to cover. Rather than disengaging me from the road-trip experience, it let me destress a bit and look around more often than I would otherwise at the sunbaked hills and vast expanses of scrubland.

The first day’s route was 477 miles, with three charging stops and no charging issues. The actual drive was a bit longer, with a route guidance miscue and a longer-than-expected pit stop, so it was a long day behind the wheel. That brought some anxiety about timing, pulling into the hotel in Mammoth Lakes well into the night, but not so much about range. Each sub-20-minute stop at a 350-kW charger netted us a triple-digit range bump, and they ended up being spaced out enough to match that “damn, I should really stretch my legs” feeling.

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I’d planned a little bit of extra time to check out some sights around Mammoth, so the first stop involved backtracking a few miles on Highway 395 to Convict Lake. With an unpromising name and just a couple miles off the highway, I didn’t have high hopes. But the second I turned onto Convict Lake Road, the view was staggering. And the lake itself was breathtaking.

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I pulled out the old Pentax 645 and my Topcon 35-JL and ran a full three rolls of film through trying to capture the color and mood of the place, and then—having burned more time than film—jetted to the other place I wanted to see.

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In fact, every photo you see here was shot on film (mainly Kodak Gold 200 and Ilford FP4+) along the way.

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No Escape From Mono Lake

If you’re the water, that is. Mono Lake sits in the rain shadow of the Sierras, at the western edge of the Great Basin—a large endorheic basin from which no water escapes to the ocean. Rainwater washes minerals and salt in, and evaporation concentrates it, creating a weird, otherworldly lake that only directly supports alkali flies and brine shrimp, but also thousands of migratory birds. Tufas—looming limestone formations created by submarine springs interacting with the alkaline waters—jut out like alien termite mounds. It’s just the sort of place to push the boundaries of any itinerary. I blasted through another two rolls, gawked at a nesting osprey through a volunteer’s spotter scope, and hit the road again.

There’s a bit of a climb out of Mono Lake’s basin, and it’s a good time to appreciate this single-motor Ioniq 6’s torque. The dual-motor cars are quick, full stop. But the single-motor’s grunt makes it feel like more than just the same car with half the motors. Like any EV, torque is ample and immediate, and with 258 lb-ft of twist it’s easy to put it in Sport mode, check for oncoming traffic, and leap around a shuffling semi ambling along at 55 mph. I wouldn’t call the Ioniq 6 sporty, but maybe muscular in the sense that it has enough power to make anything requiring it a nonissue. The dual-motor E-GMP cars, by contrast, have a “blink-and-you’re-already-there” sort of time/space warpage factor that our SE Long Range doesn’t have. I didn’t miss it; the extra range more than makes up for it.

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The Anticlimax

I’ll just spoil it for you: I never ran out of juice. In fact, my stressful leg from Sparks to Mt. Shasta, California, ended up being such a nonevent that it’s worth relating to you what happened. Given what the mostly infallible ABRP had spit out—and I certainly could have ham-fisted in some incorrect figures—I expected to coast into the city of Mt. Shasta with single-digit battery percentage left. I didn’t realize that Routes 44 and 89 don’t wind over the mountains as they wander northwest but skirt the eastern edge of the ridges as they recombine north of where the Central Valley closes off again at the aptly named Mountain Gate.

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A climb after Susanville, California, had me a little worried, but it merely put me on the gorgeous plateau that’s part of Lassen National Forest and through the pine forests at the base of Mt. Shasta. I cruised into its namesake town with more than enough juice to get to Klamath Falls, Oregon, and so rather than fall farther behind, I kept going. I patted myself on the back for saving time and stretching the Ioniq 6 closer to its maximum range.

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Since I charged to 100 percent in Nevada, I pulled into Klamath Falls with 15 percent battery and an estimated 40 miles of range remaining. That makes 297 miles after using 85 percent of the battery over about 5 hours (including a stop on the way to shoot some frames of an incredible sunset outside of Weed, California). No good deed goes unpunished, though. The only charger around Klamath Falls was an aggressively slow 62-kW unit, which took an hour to dispense the 35 kWh I needed to make it to the next fast charger. From there to Washington, it was another long and uneventful day on the road, and I hit my driveway right on schedule. The multi-day, multi-app road trip was a success.

This was the sort of anticlimax I enjoy. I could’ve avoided some sweat by doing a little more smartphone recon at the end of a long day or bugging out and taking a more boring route. But then I wouldn’t have seen some of the most spectacular places you can drive to in California, or experienced how the Ioniq 6’s real-world range can take some unnecessary stress out of an EV road trip.

And next time, on the way south? Maybe I’ll find a route over the Sierras this time and push the Ioniq 6’s luck a bit.