Two years ago when I decided to buy an electric vehicle (EV) in India as my everyday car, a common criticism I heard was "EVs are purely city cars, you cannot do road trips in them". This was a valid concern as EV charging infrastructure along the highways in India was at a nascent stage. Fast forward to January 2023 and things are very different now- my first trip of 2023 was an 2200 km road trip from Mumbai to Bangalore (or Bengaluru if you prefer that) and back in my Tata Nexon EV. This has been a great learning experience, so this is the complete story of how it went for those curious or wanting to do it themselves.

Mumbai to Bangalore - Day 1

We started from Mumbai in the morning and drove straight to Pune - 160km, a stretch we have done dozens of times and know exactly how much battery it takes and where the charging stations are. Our first planned charging stop was Tata Motors showroom on the Mumbai-Bangalore highway. I know this particular charger is finicky and, as expected, it did not initiate charging when we connected. Without wasting any time, we just went across the street to a different Tata Power charging station at a Burger King. This is the most no-damn-given charging station I have seen so far, with a standalone charger installed by the roadside with no designated parking spots, so a couple of petrol cars and bikes were blocking access to it. After moving them, we put the car to charge and spent an hour at the Burger King having lunch while refilling the car to full capacity.

Next leg Pune to Satara - 140km, easy-peasy. Our planned charging stop was Amrai Resort on the highway which has become a very popular destination to meet other EV owners as pretty much everyone driving south from Pune stops here for a refill. This is also one of the only locations I know where there are EV chargers of two different providers side by side- Tata Power and ChargeZone. By the way, ChargeZone is a fast-growing Indian EV charging provider startup with the most reliable fast chargers, amazingly helpful support staff, and an excellent growing charger network across India- they are my absolute favourite (not a sponsored post, they are just awesome!). Unsurprisingly, the charging was quick and seamless while we waited 45 minutes in the comfortable garden restaurant enjoying afternoon tea.

Next stop, Kolhapur - 122km. This is a slightly annoying drive as the highway narrows from 3 lanes to 2 lanes out of which one lane is occupied by hundreds of tractor wagons carrying sugarcane to sugar factories dotting this route. We stopped for a short top-up at the McDonald's on the highway that has a charger by a small startup named LionCharge. This is their only public fast charger in existence, but worked well so we filled for 30 minutes while snacking in the McD while the sun set. From here, it was a 104km drive in the dark to the Fairfield Marriott in Belgaum (officially called Belagavi now) where the Karnataka government has set up an expansive EV charging station with 7 charging guns of different speeds, and electricity sourced from a solar farm and windmills right behind the charger. We decided to stop here for the night, had an amazing dinner at the Spice Blends restaurant next to the charger and kept the car ready to go for next morning fully charged. A successful Day One.

Mumbai to Bangalore - Day 2

I am a big fan of fancy hotel buffets so obviously we had to do justice to the expansive spread offered by the Fairfield Marriott and started with our tummies full. Our first planned stop was Tata Motors showroom inside Hubli city for a top-up, 113km away. This is where the road condition improves drastically as the Karnataka section of the highway is amazingly maintained 3+3 lane with low traffic and an official speed limit of 100 kmph, as against 80 kmph in Maharashtra. However, a 30km stretch from Dharwad to Hubli is single lane in both directions, the only bottleneck that affected our average speed, plus the extra time it took to go deep inside the city where the charger is. Once again, finicky old Tata Power charger refused to start. Like all electronic devices, doing a hard reboot solves most problems, and once the security guard rebooted the power mains, we were good to go. This wasted 15 minutes and we spent an hour in total at the car showroom pretending to be interested in other cars on display.

Just to be on the safe side, I decided we will stop again at the next charger a mere 27km ahead to top up whatever little we use, and in hindsight this was going to be a very wise decision. This was the start of me becoming a fan of Zeon- another Indian startup in the charging provider business with excellent hardware and support. Ganesh Hotel south of Hubli has not one but two charging guns by Zeon, which was useful as another Nexon EV was already using one gun when we reached. We took a quick 15 minute break to refill and were on our way.

The excellent highway lured us into driving at 100 kmph now which started draining battery much faster than what we were using at 80 kmph, but we were not worried because there was another charging station by Jio-BP (British Petroleum) 100km ahead. We pulled in there to find another Nexon EV parked there with two guys looking worried on a phone call. Not a good sign. They told us that they were charging there and some power fluctuation put their car into a critical error and the car just won't start now! Hearing this, we wondered if we should not charge here and instead go to Davangere 39km ahead. A problem though- the Tata Power app was showing the charger in Davangere was unavailable. I called their helpline to figure out what was going on and was there any chance they could fix that charger. The Tata Power charging support team is practically useless to be honest, and to no surprise they told us "we don't know what's going on, you go there and figure it out".

Now we were in a dilemma- should we try charging here and risk getting stuck if we also encounter error like the other car? Or do we risk going to Davangere and get stuck there with a non-functioning charger? We decided if we are going to be stuck somewhere, we rather do it in a city than at a remote petrol pump, so we decided to crawl at 60kmph to reduce battery usage upto Davangere and reached with 24% battery remaining. On reaching there we found out that the entire city had a scheduled power outage since morning for a planned maintenance and there was no expected time of resumption of power! This is a problem as the next charger is 52 km away and we have only 24% battery. I know our car does 2km per 1% in normal usage, so 52 in 24 was maybe doable at a slow speed, maybe not. As a Plan B, we started looking up petrol pumps and restaurants along the highway ahead and calling them to ask if they have a regular wall plug where they would let us slow charge to gain at least a few km of extra range. To our luck, a petrol pump owner 11km ahead agreed but with skepticism as he had never heard of how EVs charge. We decided to risk it and crawled now at 50kmph and reached with 19% battery remaining. Turns out he did not have power either, but he had backup power from solar panels and was willing to let us use some of that. We spent 20 minutes slow charging and gaining 3% when the owner said we were taking up too much of his limited power so we stopped and decided to move ahead.

Once again a patient slow crawl at 50kmph with cruise control giving us an excellent efficiency and we reached the next charger at Mysore Cafe Chitradurga with 7% battery remaining. Phew! The fast charger at Chitradurga was occupied by a pre-release test car of Mahindra XUV400, which is poised to become the main competition to Tata Nexon EV in 2023! Luckily they were already at 95% so we convinced them to let us start charging immediately. This was a blessing as right after we initiated our charging, a Hyundai Kona EV came to charge too. Within minutes another Nexon EV joins the party, and then another! There were now 5 EVs wanting to charge, and only one fast charging gun available. This location clearly needs more chargers- startups and investors are you listening? This was our longest break as we spent 72 minutes charging our car from 7% to 95%, and also completed our dinner in the meantime.

Bangalore was 209km from here, possible to do in a single charge if we go carefully. We decided to go at 60kmph the entire way as it would affect our arrival time by only 15 minutes as compared to going to 80kmph which is the most one could safely do on that highway at night anyway. Along the way, we tried stopping at Tata Power charger in Hiriyur located inside a creepy truck service station in the dark, but Tata Power decided to be third time unlucky for us so we just continued on to Tumkur 158km away where another reliable Zeon fast charger at Hotel Nanjudeshwara gave us a quick 20% top up within the time it took to drink one piping hot filter coffee on a cold night. Final stretch of 61km got us to the Fairfield Marriott in Yeshwantpur Bangalore at 0:45am, we made it!

Bangalore to Mumbai - Day 1

In the one week we were in Bangalore, four new fast chargers opened up along the Bangalore-Pune highway. Armed with this information, and knowing the route and reliability of chargers, this time we started more optimistic and decided to go at 80kmph, not slow crawl. We planned to top up at the Zeon charger in Tumkur 65km away just to give us some extra margin to manuever around any unavailable chargers ahead. Unfortunately this time this usually-reliable charger had lost connectivity with its backend server. A couple of calls to their support and 15 minutes of time wasted but they fixed it and we topped up. Good to go! We decided to try our luck at the Tata Power charger at Hiriyur 106km ahead one more time. Once again, it did not start at the first attempt, and as usual the Tata Power call centre staff gave us standard template responses that did not help. We figured it was not able to send the signal to the car to lock the charging gun to initiate charging. This is where the tricks I have learned over 2 years of EV ownership came to help- we knew it is possible to manually lock the gun by moving a pin under the rear wheel well so we tried that and it worked! We can charge now! But not for long as the location had a power outage 15 minutes later, so we moved on. This was the last time we would be fiddling with unreliable old Tata Power chargers on this trip so things looked upbeat now.

We wanted to stop again at Mysore Cafe Chitradurga like the last time, but this time around they had a power outage too, and more amusingly, there was an electric bus waiting to charge there when power restores! A bus! With a 500kW battery pack, it would take him over 10 hours to charge using the small 30kW charger meant for cars, but he was adamant he would charge there so we left him there and continued on to Davangere knowing that now there is a second charger live there in addition to the Tata one we could not use last time. Our reliable friend ChargeZone was ready with a brand new fast charger commissioned just the previous day at Hotel Raastha where we had a delicious lunch while the car had its lunch too. Now we were high on confidence, so I decided to at least make some good use of the amazing 100kmph-limit highway and drove at 100-120kmph to test how the car performs at higher speeds. We found at this speed we were consuming 1% for every 1.5km so decided to come down back to 80-90kmph driving.

Time to test out a second new charger also commissioned just the day before by ChargeZone at Hotel Panchvati 100km ahead. Unsurprisingly the charging was flawless but the hotel was the shadiest den of alcoholics I had come across ever! Not a great place to wait with family so we stayed in the car for the 40 minutes we spent there. No need for more charging stops, we went 155km straight to Belagavi where we were going to be the first EV to use a third new ChargeZone charger, this one just started at Ramdev Hotel which is apparently the most famous landmark in town. They had decently clean rooms for overnight stay so we decided to call it a night there after a sumptuous meal. We did Bangalore to Belagavi in 4 hours less than what it took us for Belagavi to Bangalore thanks to the new more reliable chargers.

Bangalore to Mumbai - Day 2

No breakfast buffet here, instead we decided to start early and go 110km to Kolhapur to reach the McDonald's charger there for breakfast. The LionCharge charger was sitting idle with connectivity lost to server. We called their support centre which went to an on-call engineer who was probably woken up abruptly by our call. He tried remote debugging and got the charger online in 15 minutes but we noticed we were getting half of peak charging speed from it, so decided to not waste time there and instead continue on to test the fourth new ChargeZone fast charger (yes, also just commissioned!) at Hotel 7/12 which is a very interesting village-themed resort, great to hang out for an hour. Needless to say, the charging worked flawless and we were off to do another 100km to Satara. For the first time in the entire trip, we now decided to take one halt for food that was purely for food and not tied to the car charging- because we absolutely had to have traditional Kolhapuri Misal when driving in that part of Maharashtra!

The next stop at the popular Amrai Resort to top up was again uneventful with our trusty friend ChargeZone filling up the battery as expected. Another 142km of normal driving and we were back in familiar territory in Pune! We needed one last charging to make it home, so decided to test out a relatively new fast charger by another recent startup called goEgo, installed inside the basement parking of a fancy office building in the IT hub of Hinjewadi. We filled up a bit more than what we needed to make it home, so the last leg was time to let loose and I drove the Pune-Mumbai expressway at 100kmph like every other conventional car (any faster would result in a 2000 rupees fine which I was not interested in getting) and made it home by dinner time.

What did we learn?

• It is now possible to do long road trips in EVs along major national highways in India, as long as you plan properly. This in itself was a fun activity for me as it felt like being an airplane pilot who always file a route with planned alternatives before every flight. Plugshare app which has crowdsourced listing of all chargers across India is a great asset in making this easy.
• Public fast charger reliability varies a lot. Tata Power has the oldest equipment as they were the first to seed EV charging infrastructure in India, but now their reliability and customer support is getting questionable. On the other hand, dedicated startups like ChargeZone and Zeon are raising the bar in providing quality fast charging infrastructure. Support them and rely on them! Things will only get better from here.
• Frequent stops for charging definitely adds more time to the total journey, so if you are impatient or on a tight schedule, this is not for you. However, if you like to enjoy chilled out road trips with breaks for meals anyway, the extra time taken is not much more overall
• The model of EV matters on road trips. My EV is an early model Tata Nexon with a tiny 30kW battery and 21kWh peak charging speed which is perfectly fine for daily use, but on a long road trip it increased the number of charging stops we had to take. If you are buying a new EV today (in 2023) and will be doing long trips, go for Tata Nexon Max or Mahindra XUV 400 with 40kW batteries and 30-50kWh charging speed which will significantly reduce the number of stops and the time spent at each stop.
• There are far more adventurous EV drivers already doing long trips in India than you would think, evident by the number of EVs we encountered at every charging station we stopped at. There is a growing community of EV enthusiasts across India who are very knowledgeable and help each other out. You will not be alone!
• There will always be people who will claim "but I can do this drive so much faster in my petrol car!" Yes, you can. This is not a competition, there are no prizes being handed out. Adopt new technology if you like it, ignore it if you don't. Cheers!