Coffee

Stop thinking

EV road trips have a different cadence. You might need to charge an EV up to twice as frequently as you’d refuel an ICE vehicle (depending on the pair compared). However, given people need to stop too, this doesn’t necessarily mean trips take longer, and the different pattern of stops may even make the trip more enjoyable!

The trippler app helps plan where to stop and charge for resilient EV road trips, and it now has a younger sibling, the stoppler app, to help plan what to do to get the most out of each stop.

stoppler app

Motivation

EV charging takes longer than ICE refueling. But most road trips invovle regular breaks for people to recharge too. Aligning charging and breaks means no penalty for EV charging, plus opportunities to explore new places that are rarely afforded by ICE refuelling stops.

At the time of writing, many EV chargers are located near the centre of country towns. These provide great walkable amenity in terms of food and drink, shopping, parks and reserves, historic streetscapes and other tourist attractions, etc. Stopping to charge at these places can be a net benefit for drivers and the local community.

I wanted to explore what an app to get the most out of each charging stop might look like, which led me to build stoppler.

Design

Stoppler is designed around how I’ve used the time afforded by EV charging stops en-route. With the car charging, I’ll typically walk to get a coffee or a bite to eat, do any grocery shopping required, and use any remaining time to relax in a local park. Some stops may be based around further tourist attractions.

The features in this initial version reflect this. Others may have different objectives for their stops – I’d love to hear if so.

Like trippler, the app is implemented in Streamlit, which determines the look and feel. Trippler stops deep link to stoppler stops for further information, and stoppler stops deep link to the start or end of trippler trips.

Features

Stoppler inputs are a place and a duration. A walkable area is cented on the nearest EV charger to the place, with extents based on the return distance that could be covered on foot in the duration of the stop. This walkable area is the basis for determining local amentities and attractions.

Basic stoppler information, under the heading recharge, includes:

  • Charger name, power and network
  • Charge stop parameters: duration, maximum energy transferable, and the walkable return distance
  • Enumeration of key amentities within the walkable area, currently including the categories eat & drink, relax, and shop
  • Links for sharing or integrating with other apps

In future, (crowd-sourced) recommended destinations in each category could be mapped and linked, and further categories could be included. We might also develop an amenity score per charger.

Beyond the stop mechanics, stoppler seeks to provide inspiration for other activities in the locality, under the heading explore.

The first of these is a selection of interesting photos taken nearby.

Then an overview of the local drivable area, as defined by the five nearest chargers.

In future, the breadth, depth and richness of explore might be improved, listing more POIs in the local driveable area, providing LLM summaries of the area and recommended activities, etc.

Stoppler also lists the traditional owners of the land on which the charger is located, sourced from the Native Lands Digital API.

Tech stack

Stoppler is built with:

Time to stop

This has been a quick look at how we might get the most out of EV charging stops. I’d love to hear your stop thinking too.


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