What It Really Costs To Road Trip Europe In An EV

• An Audi A6 Sportback e-tron Quattro averaged 3.32 miles/kWh, driving 2,862 miles across Europe.
• Its average range for the trip was 318 miles, which is a good result since the trip involved a lot of 80 mph highway driving.
• You would need a very frugal diesel car to come close to matching the total charging cost of the trip using combustion.

For many people, their choice of propulsion often boils down to money. If running an electric vehicle is cheaper than combustion, they will be much more inclined to choose one. We know charging at home, especially if you charge at night when electricity rates are lower, is considerably cheaper than refueling a combustion car. But what about if you only use public DC fast chargers?

For two weeks in September, I took part in an EV road trip from Romania into the Alps and back called Eurocharge by Schaeffler. We took eight new EVs and drove them hundreds of miles each day, relying solely on public fast chargers, and we also tallied up all of the numbers. We also charged the cars overnight at the hotels where we stayed, which was free, so we started each day with a fully charged battery.

Autocritica, the Romanian publication that organized this EV grand tour, added up all of the numbers for one of the cars on the tour: the Audi A6 Sportback e-tron Quattro, the Porsche Macan’s more comfort-oriented fastback cousin, which rides on the same 800-volt PPE platform. It was one of the most expensive and powerful cars in the tour, but it also proved surprisingly efficient, with an average electricity consumption of 3.32 miles/kWh (18.7 kWh/100 km).

That gives the electric A6 a real-world range from its 95-kilowatt-hour (usable capacity) battery of 318 miles (512 km). That’s not close to its official WLTP range of 445 miles (716 km), but considering much of the road trip consisted of highway driving at 80 mph (130 km/h), it’s still a very good result for the Audi.

If you want to get the most range out of your EV, you will have to drive at lower speeds. On the fifth day of the tour when the A6 e-tron drove exclusively on national roads with a lower speed limit no higher than 56 mph (90 km/h), its average efficiency was much better, coming in at 3.75 miles/kWh (16.6 kWh/100 km), even though that day also included a lot of uphill driving on winding mountain passes.

The A6 e-tron drove 2,862 miles (4,606 km) in the road trip, and charging it up totaled 978.9 kWh, of which just over 300 kWh came from free charging at hotels. This means charging it up for the trip (not including hotels) would have cost between €265 ($311) and €536 ($661), depending on which charging network was used and what the price was per kilowatt-hour. You would need an ultra-efficient diesel car capable of doing over 40 mpg to even come close to matching that with a fuel price of €1.7 ($2) per liter.

Throughout the entire trip, the electric A6 used public chargers 12 times, totaling 4 hours and 42 minutes of charging and it was also fully charged overnight five times. It didn’t need to juice up from a public fast charger on three separate days, and when it did DC fast-charge, it needed an average of 24 minutes per session.

It also exceeded its maximum charging power rating of 270 kW, often pulling over 280 kW from the station, and maintaining a very good charging curve. Its 800-volt architecture really helps it shine at the chargers.

If you only relied on overnight hotel charging, which is either free or considerably cheaper than public DC fast charging, you could do the trip even cheaper, but for this trip, we wanted to come as close as possible to the combustion car experience and do it in the least possible time. The A6 was the range champion of the group and it also had one of the best average efficiency ratings, so having a modern big-battery EV with a slippery streamlined body that makes it frugal even at higher speeds certainly helps when you’re planning to do a trip like this.