Check out the prototype of trippler, an interactive charging planner for resilient EV road trips.
Based on my own EV road trip experience, trippler is as much about easily understanding charging options and contingencies, to reduce charger anxiety, as it is about coming up with a single best plan.
Features
Simply enter the start and end of your trip and trippler will generate driving directions including recommended charging stops.
There are also many options to review and customise.
Select chargers
trippler will find candidate chargers along the route and automagically select the best for charge planning. You can review the selection and add more candidates by increasing the detour distance, or adjust the number selected up or down. The selection will always get you from A to B, and it will include the fastest chargers and the most isolated (those that you wouldn’t want to miss).
I’ve found this pretty useful in its own right, providing a quick overview of the best charging options to keep in mind. There is more below on how this works.
Review route
The route review provides a summary and overview of the route, with candidate and selected chargers overlaid.
Advanced plan settings
I’ve grouped the charge plan settings I change less frequently into “advanced settings”, mainly to keep the resilience playground (below) cleaner.
Advanced settings include:
- Departure State of Charge (SOC),
- Minimum SOC at any point on the trip (arrival at charger or destination),
- EV battery capacity in kWh, which only affects charging time calculations,
- Whether charging is available at the destination, which determines if range must be reserved to return to the very last charger, and
- Ignore charging time, to preserve an interactive experience, as described below.
Resilience playground
The resilience playground groups the main inputs with the charge plan and visualisation. Here it’s easy to make changes to effective vehicle range, and specify how to achieve resilience to faulty chargers by either proceeding to the next, returning to the previous, or both.
The visualisation area provides a trip summary, lists charging stops and shows a chart with arrival and fill SOC at each stop. With skipped chargers shown, it’s easy to see previous and next options and their SOC on arrival, should a targeted charger be faulty.
Native Lands Digital integration
The traditional owners of the lands the route traverses are listed via the Native Lands Digital API, based on a simple intersecting polygon created from the route.
Differentiation
Why would you use trippler instead of A Better Route Planner? It’s better for resilience.
- trippler automatically plans around charging being unavailable
- trippler lets you explore many different scenarios interactively
- trippler gives you confidence to skip certain chargers if your plans change
- trippler easily plans trips over 5,000km
Why wouldn’t you use trippler? It’s only a prototype.
- Prototype relies on open charger data that is incomplete and not as current
- Doesn’t include a large library of vehicles with defined data
- Driving directions are not tightly integrated
- Doesn’t support vehicle telemetry
Take trippler for a test drive and let me know what you think! (Comments below)
If you’re interested, read more in the trippler development notes.