Kia EV9 vs. Two Toddlers, Single-Digit Temps, and Holiday Travelers

I call it the final-boss battle of EV adoption: If you can conquer your most extreme road trip in an EV, you can easily live with it on a daily basis. For me and MotorTrend’s yearlong review 2024 Kia EV9 Land, that was a 1,100-mile road trip amidst a frigid cold spell during some of America’s busiest travel days with two toddlers, a high-energy dog, and a wife who definitely did not sign up for this. She wanted to fly. I wanted to defeat the EV bogeyman by proving it’s possible to take a family road trip in pretty much the worst possible conditions without anyone—or at least the adults—succumbing to tears.

We left Ann Arbor, Michigan, for Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, 530 miles away, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving with a pretty good idea of what to expect. Seven months into our EV9’s stay, I knew it could cover as much as 270 miles at a steady 70 mph in temperate weather, but that 200 miles was more likely at higher speeds in the cold. I knew that it could replenish up to 134 miles in 15 minutes of charging or 225 miles after 30 minutes based on MotorTrend’s testing. And I knew the EV9’s built-in trip planner was never going to deliver the flexibility I needed to time my charging stops with food and bathroom breaks for the kids. Weeks before embarking, I plotted our best options and a long list of alternatives on PlugShare.

What I didn’t know was precisely what—or who—I would find at those charging stops. You’ve probably seen stories of EV owners waiting an hour or more just to plug in during peak travel times. My family got a taste of that on Labor Day weekend when I waited nearly 40 minutes to start charging as we returned home from Northern Michigan. With AAA projecting a record 71.7 million Americans would hit to road for Thanksgiving, I feared we’d be running into bottlenecks at every stop.

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A Civilized Start

That anxiety, though, was soon replaced with concern for automakers and the charging industry the further we drove. We encountered just one other EV, a Ford F-150 Lightning, during the three charging stops we made while traveling south. It was a clear reminder of the chicken-or-egg problem the EV industry faces. Installing and maintaining expensive, high-power DC fast chargers will only be a viable business when there’s a critical mass of EVs on the road. But to get to a critical mass of EVs, America needs reliable fast chargers to be nearly as common as gas pumps. That tension is likely to persist for at least the next decade, but for the moment it looks like the infrastructure along Middle America’s interstates is running ahead of EV adoption.

As the EV charging industry matures, the EV road-trip experience is also becoming properly civilized. At a Casey’s gas station in Ohio, I marveled at the basic amenities—trash cans, windshield squeegees, drinks and snacks, and clean bathrooms—within a few steps of two 400-kW chargers operated by Francis Energy, the largest beneficiary to date of Joe Biden’s National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program. In Georgetown, Kentucky, a collaboration between Pilot, EVgo, and GM Energy improved on the idea with a canopy over the chargers and a Wendy’s attached to the convenience store.

Most important, these newer installations don’t appear to be plagued by the same reliability issues that made older charging stations so infuriating. Of the twelve plugs I saw during the trip south, only one was offline. (Unfortunately, PlugShare users reported that particular port at the Pilot gas station had been down for weeks.) We had made things easier on ourselves by splitting the drive down over two days, but everything went so smoothly that I was feeling optimistic about the real test three days later when we’d make the 550-mile return trip in a single shot.

The Adventure Begins

We started the drive home at a disadvantage. We’d spent the holiday in the mountains with no nearby EV charging, and despite plugging the Kia into a 120-volt household outlet whenever it was parked, we rolled out Sunday morning with just 84 percent charge.

It hardly mattered, though. Just 100 miles into the drive, our four-year-old called for a bathroom break. By sheer luck, his timing was perfect. We were one exit away from another Pilot where four unused plugs waited for us. We took our time—because there’s no such thing as a five-minute stop with kids—and charged from 44 to 91 percent in 26 minutes.

Keeping your pace up on an EV road trip is as easy as ABC: Whenever you’re stopped, Always Be Charging. Gotta pee? Plug it in first. Hungry for lunch? Find a charger and make do with whatever grub is within walking distance. Everything had worked in our favor this time, but when your kids are still learning their ABCs, sticking to that rule is a challenge.

The Kids Take the Wheel

Despite my efforts to plan the perfect charging stops, the kids were actually driving the bus. Near lunchtime, we took a potty break at a Walmart with an Electrify America station, but because I like my kids to actually eat the food I buy them, we waited the 23 minutes to charge and only then drove a little over a mile to a Jimmy John’s for another 30 minutes of stalled forward progress.

A couple hours later, to keep our youngest napping in the back of the EV9, I passed the 350-kW charging station I’d planned to use, fully aware there were no good charging options within reach ahead. We continued until we couldn’t risk going further, which put us at an Ohio GMC dealer with a 50-kW charger where 27 minutes on the plug gave us a pathetic 40 miles—just enough to make it to a proper fast charger down the road.

There—at our last charging stop—we had our only brush with the crowds that occasionally overwhelm the EV infrastructure. I parked the EV9 in the only open spot, and for the 26 minutes the EV9 charged, the four-port station was full. Notably, though, no other EVs pulled up during that time.

We now had the juice to make it home, but once again we detoured to a kid-approved restaurant where we lost an hour feeding the little ones and walking the dog while the EV9 sat idle in the parking lot. Returning to the road, I set my speed based on the Kia’s efficiency readout, driving as fast as possible while making sure I had the energy to reach our destination. We pulled into the driveway with the instrument cluster showing a 12 percent battery charge.

Would We Do It Again?

We had turned what Google Maps calls an eight-hour, 10-minute drive into a 12-hour journey. It’d be unfair to blame all that extra time on the Kia EV9, of course. Our four charging stops added one hour and 42 minutes to the drive. The rest of that time was squandered on food stops that didn’t involve charging—side quests that we would have taken in a gas car, too.

A couple weeks later, I asked my wife if she’d take another EV road trip. “I wouldn’t do it without the kids,” she said, surprising me. The kids, with their fickle palettes and rigid nap schedules, added more time to the trip than the EV9 demanded. But the way she sees it, bringing children along takes all the time urgency out of a long drive. When you go into it accepting that your kids will inevitably spend 20 minutes in a gas station inspecting all the 1:24-scale toy cars, you don’t agonize over a half-hour stop.

I see it the other way. I’d rather reserve the EV for child-free road trips, which would allow me to stick to my planned charging stops. Without kids, I could have done the one-way trip with little more than an hour of charging in all. If we had taken our family trip in a gas vehicle, we could have chosen our stops based on the restaurants and refueled just once wherever it naturally made sense—no preplanning necessary.

I’m still declaring a victory for our Kia EV9 here. Of course the drive took longer than in a gas car, but the electric SUV carried us from door to door without any real hardship or drama. We had enough range for our needs and easily found stations that reliably delivered the 210 kW the EV9 can accept. Just as important, the kids handled it like champs. I tried to explain that one day they’ll tell their grandchildren how they drove 150 miles at a time and then charged for almost 30 minutes during the infancy of the electric era, but the novelty of our adventure was lost on them. When you don’t know anything else, the cadence of an EV road trip feels normal, apparently.

EV road trips will only get easier as next-generation vehicles deliver longer range and faster charging. I’m looking forward to that, but what I really wanted on this trip was more options for charging. The convenience of a gas vehicle isn’t just filling the tank in five minutes, it’s that you’ll pretty much always pass a gas station on your way to somewhere else, no matter where it is you’re going. That flexibility will revolutionize the EV road-trip experience, and the good news is that new charging stations opening every week are bringing us closer to that reality.