This Guy Did A 300-Mile EV Road Trip Using Only Free Public Chargers. Here

• A British EV driver decided to see what it’s like to plan a trip around using only free public chargers.
• Such a trip is still possible today, even though there are only a handful of these free chargers and a lot more EVs than a decade ago.
• The trip didn’t go as planned because a hotel claimed it had free public charging stations, which turned out not to be the case.

When electric vehicles started becoming popular around a decade ago, much of the public charging infrastructure was free. They weren’t especially fast chargers, sure, but they didn’t cost anything to use. That was true in the United States as well as in Europe.

Today, you have far more chargers available, but a much smaller proportion of them are free. In many European countries, they have mostly disappeared, but in the United Kingdom, you can still find them around, mainly in supermarket parking lots.

Efficient Alex, a driver and YouTuber from Great Britain, wanted to see how far he could drive his ten-year-old Nissan Leaf in 24 hours using only free publicly available chargers. He had planned a 281-mile loop to get him back home, but unforeseen circumstances cut the journey short.

Like Alex, you can plan a route around these scarce but still available free public chargers—but be advised that you may arrive at your destination much later than you were hoping. That’s because most of these public stations don’t provide DC fast charging, so your newer big-battery EV will take a long time to charge, as well as the fact that someone else will likely already be plugged in when you arrive.

Alex’s journey didn’t get off to a good start, although it highlights that relying only on free charging can turn into an unpredictable endurance test. The first charger he pulled up to was already occupied and he had to wait for over an hour for the driver of one of the other cars to return so that he could plug in.

But given that it was in a supermarket parking lot, there was a two-hour time limit, so by the time that expired, he didn’t actually charge that much.

Next was another charger near a supermarket, which had four stalls and one was free. This one had a three-hour time limit, so he could have left the car to charge all the way up. However, since the goal of the challenge was to see how far you could get in a day, he decided to leave and drive to the next location, which was a pub.

He changed his mind about the location and went to an alternate place where he could charge in exchange for having a meal there (presumably at a restaurant). This gave the car more than enough juice for the trip to the hotel, which was advertised as having free parking. However, even with Alex calling in advance to double-check and the hotel staff confirming it, when he arrived, it turned out the chargers didn’t belong to the hotel and weren’t free, thus ending the challenge.

Now, had he used a newer EV, he possibly could have completed the entire journey without needing to charge. But that wasn’t the point. Using his old Leaf, which got maybe 70 miles of range on a full charge, allowed him to prove a point without going hundreds of miles away from home. It also shows that you can still buy and use one of these early EVs and run it cheaply. If you learn the chargers in your area, you could drive around in a car worth a couple of thousand for next to nothing, all without harming a single blade of grass with your tailpipe emissions.

Traveling vast distances through Europe in an EV is no longer a problem. I drove EVs from Romania to Switzerland and back this fall, and it was way easier than I expected, especially charging. It was just like driving a combustion car, only you have to wait around that little bit longer for an EV to top up.

But if you have a newer EV with more charging power, wait times for charging are becoming very low. And once megawatt charging hits Europe, compatible EVs will be just as good as gas cars at crossing the continent in the least amount of time.