Driving 1000 Miles in 3 Cars: Gas vs Electric!

[Music] hey what's up mkbhd here so have you ever wondered how much longer it would take to do a road trip in an electric car versus a gas car in 2021 and does it matter which type of electric car you take it's an interesting question i'm sure many of us have wondered this and most reasonable people would probably stop there but not me nope nope my team and i decided to actually find the real answer by really doing it and running it like a sort of a scientific experiment so you know it's one thing to go by the numbers on paper which we all have and the chargers on the map which we can all look at but it's another thing to actually go do it but we're just gonna find out we're gonna do this uh the hard way by actually going on a massive road trip with gas cars and electric cars to actually put this to the test so it's it's a little bit unscientific but we've got a set of rules and we've got a route we're gonna take to make it happen so here are the cars first we have tesla model s plaid you're probably familiar i've already done videos about this car with the 21 inch wheels on it right here it has a 350 mile range on 100 battery next to it here we've got ford mustang machi california route 1 edition has about a 305 mile range charges that electrify america chargers and then last but not least we have a gas car control this is what's going to make the results of the test i think pretty interesting so we've got an audi q5 here on a full tank of gas it'll get about 460 miles of range and uh we're gonna start them off from the same place at the same time there happens to be a spot near our studio with a gas station a tesla supercharger and an electrified america charger we're gonna leave with a full tank and a full battery all at the same time from there we're gonna do a route that hits uh ithaca new york lake placid new york niagara falls scranton pennsylvania we're gonna do this whole circle you've probably already seen a lot of this on twitter by the time this video goes up but we've got members we got the whole team most of the team here we're going to be in these cars probably trash talking a little bit and turning it into a bit of a race but to see exactly how much time charging at these different infrastructures adds to a road trip so mile one of a thousand starts now so yeah that's it pretty simple the goal just treat it like a normal road trip you're obviously trying to go around the loop as fast as possible but two rules one no speeding we have a hard cap limit to our speed for all the cars that's the same but two uh just hit all the waypoints just get all the pictures we want out of all those different waypoints until you do the thousand miles we added an overnight break for sanity so we have a hotel in niagara falls to break the trip into two days but everyone wakes up on the second day with the same state of charge that they want to sleep with and we'll add up all the time deltas at the end so at this point you know the route you know the cars go ahead and guess how you think it went go ahead and guess what you think happened what order did the cars come in and how far apart did they finish the thousand miles now go ahead and tell you right off the bat your guests about the order of the cars the way they finish one two three it's probably correct your guess about how far apart they finished probably wrong so we're putting together a whole video on this road trip experience on the studio channel so if you want all the details and every single thing that happened at each stop to each team if you want to go on the road trip with us go ahead and hit the subscribe button to the studio channel to see that when it comes out but this video is the breakdown of exactly what happened so the gas car the gas car had the most predictable trip right so they stopped for five minutes for a break and gas on the way up to lake placid got there in four hours 49 minutes then they took two short breaks on the way to niagara falls one was 20 minutes for food and then the other was 10 minutes for gas and used in the bathroom that was their day one they arrived at niagara falls at 11 hours eight minutes so then the tesla trip took off at the same time right off the bat it gets interesting i was driving and i decided to be kind of bold and go all the way from the starting point to like placid up those mountains on one charge without stopping we actually passed by the sign without stopping to take a picture because our battery was so low that we weren't sure if we were going to make it but we did make it to the top and there's a supercharger up there i had one mile remaining on the battery but that was our first stop for half an hour where we got some snacks we got passed by the gas car but then we doubled back a bit to take a photo of the sign and then headed over to niagara falls and we stopped two more times to charge on the way once for 46 minutes where i actually filled up the battery and another quick eight minute stop for safety before arriving at niagara falls with about 70 miles left on the battery in almost exactly 12 hours then the mustang maki okay so they headed up towards lake placid along with the tesla again at the same time but with the smallest range they had to pull off first and the car routed them to an evolved new york charger that was out of order so with 36 miles on the battery they had no choice but to head the wrong direction into vermont to the nearest available charger there they had to sit for almost two hours before they left with enough battery and at this point they had gone so far out of the way and they're so far behind that they just decided they could just skip lake placid just to make it to niagara before the end of the day so that's what they did they skipped it and went straight across west they hit one more charger for 41 minutes which brought them to near 80 battery then at 9 30 they arrived at another charger stop that was also broken so they navigated for another half hour to find another charger this turned out to be a barely working trickle charger where it only added two percent to their battery so they drove another half hour precariously to an electrify america charger where they arrived with five percent left and this one worked perfectly for 46 minutes which gave them enough juice to finally get to niagara falls by 12 40 in the morning after 16 hours and 40 minutes on the road that's about five hours behind the gas car so that first leg taught us a lot so we're sitting about 650 miles in at this point the gas car as you probably predicted is in first place the tesla as you may have also predicted isn't second it's about half an hour behind after this first leg and the mach e in third is now about five hours behind so i mean we've seen we've seen we've read the articles before of of horror stories of charging trying to do a road trip in a porsche thai can getting to a broken charger and all that we've seen that online in the past but now that it's happening to this team as we're doing it it's a whole nother thing to actually live through it and actually both the the members of that maki team are ev drivers now in an attempt to even it out a bit on the second day uh the the gas car and the tesla wouldn't really change much but team machi would now operate under their newfound knowledge that the in-car navigation on the forward could not be trusted so they would be using their own apps they would be essentially trying to only hit electrify america chargers for this leg of the trip ignore what the car tells you to navigate to ignore the forward approved stops because that clearly didn't work last time they're just going to do it on their own more advanced way and that shocker went much better so all cars took off at the same time again and the gas car went straight to the cornell clock then after that photo they took a short 10 minute gas stop and then an hour later took another quick 10 minute food break didn't even add gas during that stop just stopped to eat then they went straight to scranton for the paper building photo then all the way to the finish no range concerns at all no problem this second leg took them seven hours 51 minutes so the tesla the tesla arrived at niagara with pretty low battery 70 miles left so we actually started off going right to a charging stop at cheektowaga 15 minute stop there then we drove to another supercharger at ithaca for 25 more minutes of charging then from there we got the ithaca photo and then went all the way down to scranton took that photo and then took one last charging and food stop at bartonsville which gave us plenty more than enough to get home in our total which was eight hours which was pretty impressively less than an hour behind the gas car again then the maki with their newfound confidence in only using electrify america chargers this time had a much better time today so they went to waterloo for their first charge where the first charger didn't work but the second one did and they charged for 32 minutes here then they got to ithaca took their cornell photo then they drove to scranton with one brief coffee break in the middle then nearby stopped at another ea charger where three of the four chargers didn't work but the last one did so they charged there for 32 minutes and made their way back to the studio just about half an hour behind the tesla so for a total of eight hours 49 minutes so the order was still the same but the day two deltas were a bit smaller so i'd say i learned a few things from this whole thousand mile road trip actually things that we we kind of already knew but that are much more crystallized now that we've gone through it now to answer the question straight from the beginning how much time does switching to electric actually add to the road trip first of all i want to acknowledge that there are plenty of different variables that could contribute to some of the deltas not only could i have used a different car or different wheels for a different range on each of them but there are also things like different traffic different amounts of time taking photos at the waypoints different navigation routes and habits and things like that so i'm gonna i'm just gonna give like a plus or minus ten percent delta just on how long these things took so at the end we got the tesla added one hour 32 minutes per thousand miles of road tripping it's really not bad and the mustang machi added seven hours and 32 minutes although six and a half hours of that was on the first day and then it was an hour and three minutes on day two so i think it's safe to say that if you do a lot of road trips the tesla road trip experience is currently pretty far ahead of any other electric car especially here where we did the test in the us uh but not for the reason you might be thinking like there's a couple variables in here and part of it is the slightly longer range of the car sure and part of it is the supercharger network versus the other networks used by the machi sure but the biggest thing that contributed to our results was the accuracy of the information displayed in the car so for range differences it's actually interesting it seems like the tesla goes by the max epa estimated rating they can possibly quote which is mostly based on highway driving and there's even some other official ratings in europe there's a wltp rating which has different ratios of city mixed in with highway there's another called nedc but generally i've found that achieving tesla's quoted range would require pretty much perfect conditions perfect weather perfect temperature outside perfect roads perfect traffic not driving too fast you pretty much never get it perfect so the plaid model s that i've been driving that we use for this test has a full battery rating of 345 miles on those wheels it's right between the long range model 3 and long range model y but i would never ever attempt to try to reach a charger 345 miles away because as you're driving you can see the range dropping off of the battery faster than you're covering them on the road matter of fact on the first leg of that trip we just did we went from the studio up to lake placid that went from 345 miles full battery all the way down to one mile left when we pulled in 0.3 battery and that was only a 293 mile trip so that's a 15 difference between the range you're quoted on paper with perfect conditions and what we actually got and i feel like all tesla owners i know have really started to calibrate for this like if your car says you have 40 miles left you better get to a charger in the next 30 miles or so like that's just the way it is especially in winter or if it's particularly cold you know despite the new heat pump it doesn't take zero energy to get the battery to the temperature it likes so that's just the tesla range and efficiency factor now the mustang mach e on the other hand very very consistent with the number being displayed on the dash and the range you actually got it actually consistently outperformed that number just a little bit which leads me to believe ford isn't quoting the maximum epa rated range possible and we found this to be true of some other electric cars too the porsche tycan is one that actually consistently way outperforms its quoted range by a pretty big margin and you might remember also ford told me their f-150 lightning their quoted range will be with a thousand pounds of cargo in the trunk so it may even go further when it's empty so these are all different ways of going about quoted range but i think the general philosophy you're seeing with the forwards and porsches of the world is under promise over deliver just so your customer doesn't have to worry too much about the range that they say they're going to get in the car but here's the the crazy part of all this is tesla model s plaid on those 21s 345 miles of quoted range ford mustang machi california route 1 edition 305 miles of quoted range i would expect those cars to go about the same distance something to think about so the tesla may have a bit more range sometimes but that clearly doesn't make nearly as much of a difference as the infrastructure or the charging network to fast charge and go on road trips now if you don't go on road trips that much none of this may really matter to you in your ownership experience and that's fine but if you do the tesla supercharger network is built and owned by tesla and it's built to the exact spec of their cars works great with them and then there's every other ev and all the other public charging networks that kind of all have somewhat variable experiences i kind of think of it a little bit like lightning versus usb type c so right now today there are about 1100 tesla supercharger stations in the u.s and they're mostly along major roads either at rest stops or in mall parking lots or around food things like that and then with the mock e you will use the fordpass charging network and if you look on ford's website for the maki it says that that's the largest public charging network in north america offered by a car manufacturer which is it feels like they're trying to loop in a couple different things there to make that statement true they definitely want to be able to say they've got the biggest network but it's a public network too and it's clearly it's not built by ford and so the fordpass network is looping in a bunch of different other public charging networks into one it streamlines the payment experience so you only need one ford pass account it's convenient for the buyer but that includes about 600 electrify america super fast chargers some of them up to 350 kilowatts when the car supports it that's amazing but that also includes some slow chargers some offline chargers some out of order broken chargers and that's the difference and because these chargers aren't built by four they aren't managed directly by ford there's a bit of a communication gap between when one of them might go down and that information actually showing up to the driver in the car usually doesn't know until he gets there so the difference is literally when i sit down to plan a road trip in the tesla on the screen i'm getting all of my information this is what they've done so well with their software it's telling me whether or not i can make it to my destination on one charge if i can't it's going to route me through superchargers along the way tells me how long i need to charge at the supercharger to continue my trip and how much battery it'll leave me with when i arrive but even better yet for each charger it tells me how many stalls there are the speed of the chargers how many are out of order and how many are literally currently being occupied by other cars charging right now ford is able to tell you about as much as they know but they often don't know if there are charges that are down or broken or offline or something which is what happened during our trip the trip in the car navigated them to a charger that was offline i think it was for maintenance it was being updated or something but that would have been really bad if they'd arrived there with like one mile of battery left like i did when i arrived at lake placid knowing trusting that the superchargers would be there and working that's the difference i could really trust what was being shown in the car and when i arrived there i'd have charges available and that's just not the case in the ford so i kind of felt like if lightning is the tesla supercharger network it's tightly controlled by apple the same way the tesla supercharger network is tightly controlled and you have the vertical integration and that helps the experience but then on the other side there's usb type-c a more open standard kind of like ccs which is the charger but like there's some that are faster there are some that are slower and there's a whole mix in between so just i'm getting in the weeds but that's what it reminded me of but then last faq i know we were wondering what's the cost difference actually between these two trips electricity is typically cheaper than gas after all but how much cheaper so i wrote this down all the cars started from roughly 100 percent like we said leaving that initial stop the gas cars spent 84.79 during their trip just on gas the tesla which had free supercharging credit but i went back and calculated how much it would have cost 66 dollars and 35 cents and then the mock e same idea we had ford pass charging credit but we used about 61.25 of that credit so they all charge per kilowatt it was something around 30 to 35 cents per kilowatt so overall take from this what you will you you might not be someone who does road trips like i said and a big part of the electric car owning experience is like starting every day with 100 battery in your garage that's a totally different part of this but if you do a lot of people do frequent road trips maybe an annual road trip maybe even more than that then you start to think about this stuff and this situation is also constantly changing we're constantly going to be getting faster and faster chargers we're going to get more chargers all over the world we're also going to get longer and longer ranges in these evs and so i'd be curious if we did another one of these tests in a year or two how it would fare you know the 4680 batteries are around the corner allegedly for some of these cars so we'll see but again if you want to see how this entire experience actually went if you want to feel like you're going along the road trip with us studio channel link below is where you should go for that but in the meantime i'm curious now that you've seen this now that you know i want to know what you think your next car purchase will be do you think it will be a gas car or an electric car we'll use the comment section as like a polling and if you want to tell us why let me know why but you think your next car whenever that is will be gas or electric alright that's been it thanks for watching this experiment talk to you guys in the next one peace [Music]

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 3,243,291

Keywords: electric car, road trip, 1000 miles, Tesla vs, Tesla Model S vs, Tesla Model S PLAID, Tesla PLAID, PLAID Model S, Mach E, Mustang Mach E, Mach E vs, MKBHD

Id: vXzuFprlyrw

Length: 19min 23sec (1163 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/timelessblur]

umm basically the only non Telsa Fast charger to really use is EA. The others need a lot of work up to par.

Using EA only it is pretty good.

[u/TheInitialGod]

$84 for 1000 miles?! American fuel is so disgustingly cheap.

The same trip in my car would've cost around £170 (about $235), and my car is pretty efficient!

[u/Two_little_fish]

One thing they didn’t do, stay at a EV friendly hotel. One of the benefits of driving an EV is the ability to charge overnight. Most trip I would look for a hotel with chargers and charge up overnight before heading out. This would have saved them at least 30 mins.

[u/_dakdaddy_]

This was honestly a fantastic breakdown of EV vs ICE road trip travel. It really shows just how crucial confidence in your charging network makes or breaks a road trip.

FordPass had a terrible look here. The lack of control over functioning chargers (or even just lack of updated info in Ford's navigation) is brutal. Surprised Ford hasn't updated their in-car navigation to show this type of info. Seems like it should be a high priority.

[u/Kuchenblech_Mafioso]

Is the charging network in the US really such a mess outside of Superchargers? Here in Germany if one HPC charger doesn't work you would usually find another in 30 miles and a 50kW charger probably in not even 10 miles

[u/colawarsveteran]

Through a rural area?

[u/angrysnarf]

This is why everyone should be able to charge at any charger.

[u/MCReader69]

An interesting experiment. But also, this is NOT how you use your car 99% of the time.

[u/baconkrew]

Honestly why do people in EVs drive so long before they charge? MBK could have made his trip a lot easier by just charging maybe 60% in rather than driving all the way until he had 1mile left on the estimation. If you always aim for the most reliable charger halfway through
the trip, you won't get be hunting charges at low battery