EV Charging Stop Planner
Planning an electric journey has two numbers that people get wrong in opposite directions. The first is range: arriving at zero is not a plan, so only about eighty per cent of it is usable. The second is charging time: the last twenty per cent of a battery can take as long as the first sixty, which is why long trips charge to eighty and move on rather than waiting for full.
What this generator does
Treats eighty per cent of the rated range as usable, works out how many stops that requires over the distance, and estimates each stop as a twenty to eighty per cent charge at the charger power you specify.
How to use this tool
- Enter the distance, your range, battery size and charger power.
- Read how many stops are needed and how long each takes.
- Compare driving time against charging time in the total.
- Try a faster charger — it changes the time without changing the stops.
Understanding the controls
- Distance
- The whole journey in kilometres, between 10 and 2000. Motorway routes are usually longer than the straight-line distance between two places.
- Range
- The full-charge range. Only eighty per cent is treated as usable, because arriving at zero leaves no margin for a diversion, a closed charger or cold weather.
- Battery
- Usable capacity in kilowatt-hours. This decides how long a charge takes, together with the charger power.
- Charger power
- How fast the chargers you will use are. This changes the time at each stop but not how many stops you need.
Common use cases
- Planning a long journey in an electric car
- Comparing the real door-to-door time against driving a petrol car
- Working out whether a faster charger is worth a detour
- Understanding why usable range is less than rated range
- Estimating a journey before committing to it
How this generator works
The check treats this as a covering problem: the legs between stops must reach the destination, and no single leg may exceed the usable range. Both are verified against the finished plan rather than assumed from the stop count, which is what catches an off-by-one in the number of stops.
Randomness and fairness
Nothing here is random. The plan follows entirely from the distance, range, battery and charger power you enter.
For how randomness is produced across the whole site, see how Generate Random works.
Limitations and good to know
- Assumes chargers are available where you need them, which is the actual hard part of a real journey.
- Charging speed is treated as constant, whereas it tapers as the battery fills — twenty to eighty is used because that is the roughly linear part.
- Cold weather, motorway speeds, hills and a loaded car all reduce range considerably and none is modelled.
- Average speed is assumed at 100 km/h, and queueing for a charger is not counted at all.
Privacy and your data
The plan is computed in your browser. Nothing about your journey is transmitted or stored.
Related generators
- Journey Fuel Cost CalculatorWhat a journey costs in fuel and what each passenger owes, split in whole pence so the shares add back exactly.
- Unit Price ComparatorCompares pack sizes on price per unit and names the genuine best value, which is not always the biggest pack.
- Travelling Salesman Problem GeneratorTour instances on random coordinates, solved exactly by Held-Karp, with the nearest-neighbour tour shown for comparison.
- Great Circle Route GeneratorThe shortest path between two points on the globe, with waypoints along it and the constant-bearing route shown for comparison.