Because the number on the screen is the drive, at the road's usual pace, with nothing else in it. An EV day adds the time around every charge, the pace you actually drive, the breaks and the meals, and every change you made after you looked.
None of that is the app getting the maths wrong. It's the app answering a narrower question than the one you asked. Here is where the missing hours go, on one ordinary day, and what to tell a plan so it comes out right.
What does the estimate on the screen actually measure?
A route estimate is a driving time: how long the wheels turn between two points, at the speeds that road usually carries. It doesn't know you'll stop. It doesn't know how fast you drive. If you planned a day or a week ahead, it can't know about Friday's queue either.
That's a useful number. It's just not the length of your day, and on an electric car the gap between the two is wider, for one reason above all.
Why do the charging stops take so much longer than the charging?
Because the stop starts when you leave the road, and the charge starts when you plug in.
We went through this in A charging stop is longer than the charge: leaving the motorway, finding the chargers behind a retail park, finding a stall that works, the coffee, the way back. In our estimates there, a 25-minute charge at a services is about a 32-minute stop, and the more ordinary charger 3 km off the exit is about 57 minutes.
If the number you looked at was a driving time, every one of those minutes is extra. If it came from a planner that adds charging, it most likely added the time on the cable, and the rest is still extra.
Do you drive slower than the estimate assumes?
Quite possibly, and on a long motorway day it adds up.
The estimate assumes the usual pace on each road. Plenty of drivers sit below it: in a van, in a car with a roof box, or easing off to make a charge go further. Take 360 km of motorway that the estimate covers at an average of 120 km/h. That's three hours. At 110 it's 3 h 16 min. At 100 it's 3 h 36 min.
The gap is small per hour and steady all day, so it never feels like a delay. It only shows up at the hotel.
Where do breaks and meals go?
Nowhere, unless you put them somewhere.
Britain's Highway Code recommends at least 15 minutes' break after every two hours of driving, and almost everyone stops for lunch. On an EV the good news is that many of those can happen at a charger, so they cost you nothing extra. The ones that don't still count.
One day, added up
Here is one ordinary EV driving day, with the app saying five and a half hours. The extra items are our planning arithmetic, not a measured trip: put in your own.
| Time | |
|---|---|
| The drive, as the estimate has it | 5 h 30 min |
| 360 km of it at 110 instead of 120 | + 16 min |
| Two charging stops, counted as stops | + 1 h 54 min |
| Lunch, not at a charger | + 1 h |
| Door to door | 8 h 40 min |
Leave at nine and the estimate says half past two. The day says twenty to six. Eat lunch at one of the chargers and most of that hour overlaps with charging you were doing anyway. You'd still arrive more than two hours after the estimate.
Nothing in that table is a surprise once it's written down. The surprise is only that it wasn't.
Did the times move while you weren't looking?
On a multi-stop trip, the arrival time at the end of a day isn't something you typed. It's a sum: the departure before it, plus the drive, plus every stay along the way. Change any one of them and everything after it moves. We wrote about this in Who owns the numbers in your trip plan.
So a lunch that ran twenty minutes long on day one is twenty minutes on every arrival after it. The plan you looked at last week isn't wrong. It's describing a day you no longer had.
How do you plan a day that comes out at its estimate?
Four habits close most of the gap:
- Budget the stop, not the charge. Write down how long you expect to be off the road, not how long the car says it will charge.
- Tell the plan your pace. If you drive slower than the road's usual speed, the plan should know, so every leg stretches by the right amount instead of you remembering to add some.
- Keep an hour of slack per driving day. It's the cheapest insurance there is against the closed road and the slow town.
- Pin only what's real. A booked sailing or a check-in window is a fixed time. Most other times are better left to the plan to work out.
What Fernweh does with each of these
Your pace. A vehicle in Fernweh has a driving style, Normal, Cautious or Slow, and an optional max speed. Give the trip that vehicle and every leg's time is adjusted to it, and so is every arrival after it. Cautious adds more time on a motorway leg than on a town one, which is how it goes on the road. The section is still marked beta. It works on the free version; only vehicle dimensions, for routing around low bridges and weight limits, need Road Trip Pro.
Your stops. A stop's stay can be a length of time, and for a charging stop the quick picks are charging lengths rather than nights. Forty minutes at a charger becomes part of the day, and everything after it re-times around it.
Your fixed times. Pin an arrival, at a ferry or a hotel with a check-in window, and Fernweh paces the day that leads up to it. If the drive can't make it, the plan says so before you leave. If you're early, it tells you the latest you could set off and still make it.
What Fernweh can't do is know about the queue at the charger, or the roadworks that weren't there when you planned. Nothing can, a week ahead. But a plan that knows your pace, your stops and your fixed times starts the day much closer to the truth.
The short answer
The estimate was never the length of your day. It's the driving part of it, at someone else's pace. Put the rest in the plan, and the number at the end starts to mean what you thought it meant.
The door-to-door table and the motorway example are our planning arithmetic, not measured trips; the charging-stop figures are the estimates from A charging stop is longer than the charge. Break guidance is Rule 91 of the Highway Code. Fernweh behaviour described here reflects version 1.25.0 for iOS. Header photo by Rebecca Reece on Unsplash.