Charging During Road Trips: The Best Planning Tools and Apps

EV road-trip apps at a glance

Why one app isn't enough

EV road-trip planning has a division of labour. Route planners do the maths but can't see whether a charger is broken right now. Crowd-sourced maps know what's broken but won't optimise your route. Network apps handle payment but only cover their own stations. The drivers who never get stranded use all three in sequence.

Step 1: Plan with A Better Routeplanner (ABRP)

ABRP is the engineer of the group. You select your exact car from a library of hundreds of models, and it factors in the battery's charging curve, elevation changes, wind, temperature and even your driving style to predict your arrival state of charge at each stop and suggest where to charge and for how long. Crucially, it optimises for total journey time - sometimes a quick splash-and-dash at two chargers beats one long stop, because of how charging slows at high states of charge.

It's free with the essentials; a premium tier (around $5 a month or $50 a year) adds live charger data, weather-based range adjustment and saved vehicle profiles. For serious road-trippers, premium is worth it.

Step 2: Verify with PlugShare

ABRP tells you where to stop; PlugShare tells you whether that stop is actually working. It's a community-driven map of hundreds of thousands of chargers across every major network, with recent user check-ins, photos and comments that flag broken units, long queues or stations hidden behind locked gates. Before you commit to a planned stop, read the latest check-ins - a charger that was fine last month may be down today. PlugShare is a map, not a route optimiser, which is why you pair it with ABRP.

Step 3: Use native navigation if you have it

If you drive a Tesla - or a NACS-equipped car charging on the Supercharger network - the built-in navigation is the gold standard for that network. It auto-routes through chargers, shows live stall availability so you avoid full stations, estimates charge time at each stop and predicts your arrival battery level. Several other manufacturers now build similar planning into their in-car systems. Use it as your primary tool on supported networks, with PlugShare as a backup check.

Step 4: Have the network apps ready

You still need the relevant network apps (or RFID cards) to start and pay for sessions on most non-Tesla chargers. Before a trip, install the apps for the networks on your route, set up payment, and confirm your account works - discovering a billing problem at a remote charger is a bad time. Some regions are moving toward contactless card payment at chargers, but app coverage is still the safer bet.

Smart charging-stop strategy

1. Arrive low, leave at ~80%. Charging is fastest from roughly 10-50% and slows sharply past 80%, so topping to 100% wastes time. Stop at 80% and drive on.
2. Match the charger to your car's max power. A 350 kW charger only helps if your car can accept high power; otherwise a 150 kW unit is fine.
3. Precondition the battery. Set the navigation to the charger so the car warms the pack for faster charging, especially in cold weather.
4. Build in a buffer. Plan to reach each charger with at least 10-15% in reserve in case a station is down or busy.
5. Have a plan B. Note an alternate charger near each planned stop.

Common road-trip charging mistakes

1. Trusting a single app and assuming every planned charger is working.
2. Charging to 100% at every stop and wasting the slow final fifth.
3. Not setting up network accounts and payment before leaving.
4. Ignoring weather - cold cuts range and slows charging more than people expect.
5. Cutting the buffer too fine and arriving at a broken or full station with no margin.