Charger hopping EV trip planner

Taking a trip in an EV with limited range or a region of really sparse chargers, you might find insufficient charging options on the direct route. A roundabout route instead, hopping from charger to charger, might be what gets you from A to B.

You can now plan trips like these with hoppler.

Hoppler simply requires you to choose the longest hop you’re willing to make between chargers, and will then find what’s likely the fastest route under that limit, wherever that takes you. Likely the fastest because it depends a little on how much you charge at each stop, but hoppler is only concerned that you do charge enough for the next hop.

I think this approach makes sense when:

1. Your EV has limited range, such as a compact city EV, or a larger EV towing a boat or caravan,
2. You’re driving in a remote area where the charger network is really sparse, like a lot of Australia,
3. A remote location has multiple approach or departure options, and you want access that preserves the most range, or
4. Optimised trip time or charging time is otherwise a secondary concern, as long as you can get a fast-ish charge on the road.

For instance, hoppler can take the direct route from Melbourne to camping in (somewhat) remote Beowa NP, with stops in Traralgon and Lakes Entrance.

But with smaller hops, it can also approach via Mallacoota instead of Cann River (which incidentally can be busy), even though Mallacoota means a detour from the highway drive from Melbourne.

In the trip visualisation, the overlapping charger range circles suggest more options in the whole reachable area near the route. I resurrected this visualisation from the very first trippler experiment, and I think it has more potential for resilient trip planning.

I’ve been planning to incorporate this charger hopping capability into trippler for some time, but decided to make hoppler a sibling app for now. It’s nice to simplify decision-making again, reducing the many new features of trippler to a single choice, and use hoppler explore what other new features might be useful from here. I still plan better integration of charger hopping and charger skipping in resilient EV road trip planning.

If you’re curious, read more about how charger hopping works in the earlier post, and let me know if hoppler has legs!