Usually not. On most long drives an electric car adds stopping time, not driving time, and much of that stopping lands where you'd have taken a break anyway. It's genuinely worse in two cases: a very long single day of driving, and a region where fast chargers are few and far between.
Everywhere else, the bad reputation comes from how the trip was planned, not from the car. Here's why.
Why do people think an EV is a bad idea for a road trip?
Usually because the trip was planned like a petrol one. You draw a line from A to B, set off, and start looking for a charger when the battery gets low. That puts each charge wherever the battery happens to run down: a retail park a few kilometres off the exit, sometimes behind another car, with nothing to do for half an hour.
Do that three times in a day and you arrive late and tired, sure the car was the problem. It mostly wasn't. The charge took about as long as the spec sheet said it would. What ran long was everything around it: leaving the road, finding the chargers, waiting for a free one, getting back on.
A petrol car forgives that kind of plan, because a fill-up takes a few minutes and you can do it almost anywhere. An electric car doesn't. That's the whole difference, and it's a difference in planning, not in range.
How much time does an EV actually add?
Less than the charging time, because you were going to stop anyway.
Britain's Highway Code recommends a break of at least 15 minutes after every two hours of driving. A fast charge from 10 to 80 per cent takes roughly twenty to forty-five minutes, depending on the car and the charger. So the real cost of a charging stop isn't the whole charge. It's the gap between the break you owed yourself and the time the car needs, and if you put the charge where you wanted lunch, that gap all but disappears.
In daily terms, our rule of thumb is to budget roughly 30 to 45 minutes of charging per day of motorway driving. On a day with four hours behind the wheel, which is about as much as a trip you want to enjoy should ask of you, that's one proper stop in the middle of the day. Make it lunch and the charge fits inside it: a fast charge is a coffee and a walk, not a meal.
When is an EV genuinely worse for a road trip?
In two cases, and neither is rare enough to wave away.
A very long single day
If one day of your trip is about covering distance, say 800 or 900 km to reach the start of the holiday, an electric car costs real time. You'll charge several times, every stop is on the clock, and none of them is somewhere you chose. Three charging stops on a long day add up to about an hour and a half when each one goes smoothly, and closer to three hours when they're the ordinary kind, a few kilometres off the motorway. A petrol car stops on that day too, just not for as long.
If you can split that day in two, it's usually the better trip anyway. If you can't, go in knowing what it costs.
Where the fast chargers thin out
Along the EU's main road corridors, the rules now require a fast-charging pool of at least 150 kW every 60 km. On those roads, "will there be a charger?" is close to a settled question.
But plenty of the best road-trip driving is nowhere near them: a mountain valley, a long coast road, the far north. There, the distance to the next fast charger is whatever the local networks have built, and in some places that's a long way. This is the one situation where the chargers really should come first. Plan the day around them, top up whenever you pass one that works, and treat a slow charger at your guesthouse as part of the plan rather than a fallback.
Is range anxiety still a real problem?
On the main corridors, much less than it was. The worry has moved from "will I make it?" to "how long will this stop take?" That's a timing problem, and timing problems are planning problems.
How do you plan an EV road trip that doesn't feel slow?
Plan it the way the car wants to be driven, which turns out to be how a good road trip gets planned anyway:
- Sleep where you can plug in. A slow overnight charge means every morning starts full, and the first charging stop of the day simply disappears.
- Put the fast charge where you'd stop anyway. Lunch, a viewpoint, the old town you wanted to walk around. A charge that fits inside a break you wanted costs you almost nothing.
- Budget the stop, not the charge. Plan from the moment you leave the road to the moment you're back on it, not the minutes on the charger's screen. The difference is bigger than it looks.
- Keep the long days rare. Four hours of driving a day is a good ceiling for a trip you want to enjoy, electric or not.
That order, with the nights first, then the stops you won't skip, then the charging fitted into the legs between them, is the one we'd recommend for any trip.
Where Fernweh fits
In Fernweh a charging stop is a stop like any other, with a length of its own. Add one from a charger and it starts at thirty minutes; change that to what you actually expect, and the plan re-times the arrivals after it, apart from any time you've pinned yourself. From any leg's directions you can search for chargers and see each one's connector count and maximum power, which is usually enough to tell the pool on your route from the faster one down a side road. The free plan caps those searches each month; a subscription lifts the cap.
That won't make an EV the right car for a 900 km transfer day. It just makes the other days, the ones the trip is actually for, feel like a trip again.
The short answer
An EV is a poor fit for a trip that's mostly one very long day of driving, or one that spends long stretches far from fast chargers. For everything else, the slow part was never the car. It was where the plan put the stops.
Charging times and stop estimates come from our earlier posts, A charging stop is longer than the charge and How to plan an EV road trip with charging stops; they're typical published figures and illustrative estimates, not measured trips. Charger spacing is from Regulation (EU) 2023/1804, the Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation. Break guidance is Rule 91 of the Highway Code. Fernweh behaviour described here reflects version 1.24.0 for iOS, released 14 September 2026. Header photo by Bernd Dittrich on Unsplash.