We recently got back from an ~3400 mile round trip from Metro Detroit to Fort Myers, Florida. Our route went through Nashville on the way down, and back up across West Virginia. Quite a bit of local driving in Fort Myers area.
Because of wanting to split things up to limit the amount of time in the truck every day, we took 5 days of driving to get down, and 4 to get back. We were able to stop for some day activities, but not as many as originally planned due to bad weather.
TL;DR for the trip:
-Charging was pretty much a non-issue. Overnight charges at hotels were good for less than 50% charge. Make sure you have enough charge at your hotel arrival to get to the next DCFC. At one hotel, one charger was broken, the other was in use. We left in the morning with quite a low charge level. Planning ahead by checking plugshare made us aware of a potential issue for one of the EA stations. Making sure to have enough charge to skip it worked out when we arrived and 2/4 stations were out of commission, and we would have been waiting in a line. Never had issues with unexpectedly slow charge rates. Every charge on a 350kW station was over 200kW at some point. A few were hit over 300kW but the conditions seemed to have to be perfect to hit it.
-We could reliably recover 150-175 miles of highway range with 30 minute stops. Optimizing for 30 minutes puts arrival somewhere between 10-15% and leaving with 65+. Taper starts to kick in above that, but isn’t painful until somewhere above 75%. Starting from 100% was rare, but comfortably gave us around 250 miles in cold weather before needing a charge. 275 might be a good number in good weather but the one time we could have hit it, I stopped early because of upcoming bad weather.
-Charger spacing still sucks in a lot of places. The wide range of fairly optimal charge rate, and just sheer amount of range the Hummer gets, made it a non-issue. We arrived anywhere from 3% to 44% at chargers. Most of the higher charge arrivals were due to staying longer than we needed at the station before, and having a planned activity where we plugged in.
-EV part of the truck was flawless. We had some non-ev issues crop up during the trip that the dealer is going to address.
I wanted to be able to provide a real detailed account of energy usage and charge times, but we had a lot of issues with being billed properly. One thing I didn’t account for was that turning off the vehicle resets the energy consumption page. I was going to try to rely on that for information as well and ended up losing some of it, so at some point I just stopped paying close attention to it.
----
The very first leg of our trip was the longest distance before stopping for a charge. In other EVs we would typically have to go out of our way to stop at a previous station, but I wanted to take the chance of skipping that one entirely. It worked out. Traveling the speed limit in below freezing weather we went 242.8 miles on 191 kWh. The truck stated we arrived at the charger with 11% battery left.
![Audio equipment Font Machine Electronic device Display device]()
Unfortunately, this was our first charging stop and we had both the truck and the charger bug out and stop updating charge status while we were eating dinner. This happened a couple more times during the trip and every time resulted in not being charged for the entire session(or in one case, at all). The charging sessions never got interrupted, but I really hope EA/GM fix whatever this issue is, because I'd really like EA to not go out of business from giving away free electricity. It was snowing when I got back to the truck and didn't think to snap a photo of the station itself, so have no idea how much charge we ended up getting here. We continued on to the hotel a short distance later and arrived with 66% charge. After fussing around with it a while, I was finally able to get it working. I had never seen a SemaConnect charger before so had no idea how to get it activated.
Over night, we had 75kWh delivered to the truck in ~13.5 hours. It was just enough time to hit 100% charge.
We skipped our original morning plan to go to the Cincinnati zoo because of the cold and wind, and headed out. Stopped at the EA station in Clarksville, IN for lunch. Getting here was a little strange and somewhat out of the way. In our original plan, we would have tried to skip this stop. 42%-92% over 1:04, 117kWh delivered.
After that we headed to the National Corvette Museum. I had never been there before, and having the charger available made it an obvious place to stop. My son really enjoyed all the cars there, highly recommend planning it as a stop if you are driving an EV through the area. There was an i3 just about to leave when we arrived. The first other EV we had seen at a charger on our trip so far.
![Wheel Car Tire Sky Vehicle]()
We arrived with 44% charge, and left with 90% charge after 54 minutes, and 107kWh delivered. After that we continued on to Nashville where we stayed for two nights visiting family. I used my TeslaTap to charge up there on their Tesla UMC. First time trying to use it with the Hummer and it worked fine here.
Monday we headed to the US Space and Rocket center. We were there for about 2.5 hours, only added ~12 kWh in that time. With how big the battery in the Hummer is, decided that stopping at an L2 station for an activity is basically worthless.
![Sky Wheel Car Tire Building]()
Left there and drove to the EA station in Alabaster AL. Originally had hoped to entirely skip fast charging that day. Probably could have if we drove slower, but in anticipation of maybe having charging issues at the hotel overnight, we opted not to take that chance. 22-58% in 19 minutes 12 seconds, 85kWh delivered. One of our quickest charges on the whole trip, just the time it took for bathroom breaks.
![Sky Cloud Plant Tree Road surface]()
Stopped for dinner, the continued the drive to the hotel we were staying at in Montgomery, AL. Arrived at 30% charge. I opted to use the Tesla station instead of the J1772 since it was 40A vs 32A, and knew it wouldn't hit 100% charge before the next day anyway.
![Weird looking cybertruck]()
I didn't make note of what charge level we left the next morning, it was too hectic because I changed our plan the last minute due to the forecast weather being all rain on the route down through Chipley and Tallahassee. I originally had hoped to stop at something outdoors but that wasn't going to happen. Instead, we drove across Alabama to the public Library in Leesburg GA. It would be our only non-350kW charge stop, as they had a 62.5/125kW station there. They let us hang out in the library and play with their toys while we waited for the charge. Whoever painted the lines obviously didn't anticipate an EV the size of the Hummer though.
![Tire Sky Vehicle registration plate Vehicle Car]()
We might have been able to skip this charge entirely, but my son needed some time out of the car, so it worked out okay. 26 minute charge here, ramped from 111kW to 115kW when we unplugged. Delivered 48.56kWh. Enough charge to get us to the next EA station in Valdosta GA. This was another charge that bugged out. We ended up not getting charged at all here. Walked around walmart for about 35 minutes, more than enough to get us to the hotel we were staying at in Lake City that night.
Problem there is I booked the hotel that doesn't have a charger. Didn't feel like trying to negotiate with the front desk people at the other hotel to not tow my truck for stealing their electricity, I decided to go out and get some charge at the nearby FPL fast charger to skip the next morning's charge. Didn't have to do this, but it meant only needing a single charge for our last travel day, so I opted to. After fussing with the charger for 10 minutes in the rain and not being able to get my phone to scan their QR code in their app to start the charge, I gave up and drove the
10 minutes to the nearest EA station. Saw my first Ioniq 5 who got here after I did. I arrived there with 43% charge, stuck around until 81% after 44 minutes and 87kWh delivered, and drove back to the hotel.
Wednesday morning we left with 79% charge. Google maps estimated we could make it to the EA station in Bradenton with only a few percent charge. Decided to try to take the chance, but was going to stop early if it went down too far. This was the first time taking the Hummer to 10% SoC or below. I believe when it estimates you only have 30 miles left, it will display this warning. Second time I saw it was in much colder and snowier weather at 12% SoC.
![Cloud Sky Motor vehicle Automotive mirror Automotive exterior]()
When we got to the EA station at 7%, it was confirmed that two of the four stations were out of order. One of the stations had a car that was at or nearly at a full charge, with no-one around it, and the other one had a line forming for it. Having anticipated this and not wanting to stick around, we took the chance on the drive to the EVGo station that was about 15 miles away. Ended up arriving there at 4% battery. Not having used EVGo in a long time, my phone didn't have my account password saved. Attempted to reset it to be able to log in and the app was all kinds of busted and we couldn't get that to work. Decided trying to use my Amex card but it kept getting declined. Moved off that 350kW station to the other one. The second one wasn't even recognizing my vehicle. Moved to the 50kW station. After I did this, someone in a leaf came up and plugged into the first 350kW station I left. After he was able to get it working, I realized that they didn't have an AMEX logo on the card reader. After trying my Visa it worked and the 50kW station started.
Holy cow are they slow for the Hummer. We went into the store to find something to eat, and the leaf was already gone by the time we got back. Only went from 4% to 9% over the course of about 15-20 minutes. Changed to the 350kW station and immediately was charging up at 274kW instead. By 20% it was up to 289kW, and we went to grab something to eat for real that time. After 23 minutes we had enough charge to get to our final destination.
![Watch Communication Device Telephony Gadget Portable communications device]()
If you're wondering why it slowed down so much, the Hummer will dramatically slow down the rate of charge if the cabin HVAC and battery cooling systems are competing for resources. If you are in a hurry, you can leave the car on but turn the fans all the way to off and it will return to prioritizing the battery. It was in the 80s out here at that point, hadn't seen this behavior previously. I missed the warning in the UI about this occurring but saw it again at a different charge a few days later.
Finally at our destination. We unfortunately didn't have access to a charger here at first, so I decided to run off that evening by myself and take the opportunity to take the tops off. It was awesome, totally met my expectations. I would have liked to just leave the tops off for the rest of our trip, but it didn't end up working out that way even though the weather cooperated.
![Sky Plant Vehicle Motor vehicle Cloud]()
I arrived at this 62.5/125kW chargepoint station with 17% and stayed until 74%. Over 79 minutes, the longest charge session so far for the whole trip, delivered 143.5kWh. Ramped from 105kW to 116kW before starting to taper around 72%(?). Had a chat with someone with an Audi E-tron sportback that wasn't aware GM was even selling the Hummer yet (this was a common theme from anyone who asked me about it).
Lots of little trips over the next week. Had the opportunity to do some overnight L2 charging on the included portable charger. Worked out okay that way. Day before we were going to start the return trip, we went up to the Babcock-Webb wilderness area to try to do some light off-roading. Hard to really know where we were or weren't supposed to drive here. There were some obvious signs in places were they didn't want you to drive, so we didn't go on those roads, but other unsigned roads we did a little bit.
![Automotive parking light Cloud Tire Plant Sky]()
No operation of gasoline motors here!
*Hit the 10 upload limit so I suppose this is a good spot to stop for Part 1.
Because of wanting to split things up to limit the amount of time in the truck every day, we took 5 days of driving to get down, and 4 to get back. We were able to stop for some day activities, but not as many as originally planned due to bad weather.
TL;DR for the trip:
-Charging was pretty much a non-issue. Overnight charges at hotels were good for less than 50% charge. Make sure you have enough charge at your hotel arrival to get to the next DCFC. At one hotel, one charger was broken, the other was in use. We left in the morning with quite a low charge level. Planning ahead by checking plugshare made us aware of a potential issue for one of the EA stations. Making sure to have enough charge to skip it worked out when we arrived and 2/4 stations were out of commission, and we would have been waiting in a line. Never had issues with unexpectedly slow charge rates. Every charge on a 350kW station was over 200kW at some point. A few were hit over 300kW but the conditions seemed to have to be perfect to hit it.
-We could reliably recover 150-175 miles of highway range with 30 minute stops. Optimizing for 30 minutes puts arrival somewhere between 10-15% and leaving with 65+. Taper starts to kick in above that, but isn’t painful until somewhere above 75%. Starting from 100% was rare, but comfortably gave us around 250 miles in cold weather before needing a charge. 275 might be a good number in good weather but the one time we could have hit it, I stopped early because of upcoming bad weather.
-Charger spacing still sucks in a lot of places. The wide range of fairly optimal charge rate, and just sheer amount of range the Hummer gets, made it a non-issue. We arrived anywhere from 3% to 44% at chargers. Most of the higher charge arrivals were due to staying longer than we needed at the station before, and having a planned activity where we plugged in.
-EV part of the truck was flawless. We had some non-ev issues crop up during the trip that the dealer is going to address.
I wanted to be able to provide a real detailed account of energy usage and charge times, but we had a lot of issues with being billed properly. One thing I didn’t account for was that turning off the vehicle resets the energy consumption page. I was going to try to rely on that for information as well and ended up losing some of it, so at some point I just stopped paying close attention to it.
----
The very first leg of our trip was the longest distance before stopping for a charge. In other EVs we would typically have to go out of our way to stop at a previous station, but I wanted to take the chance of skipping that one entirely. It worked out. Traveling the speed limit in below freezing weather we went 242.8 miles on 191 kWh. The truck stated we arrived at the charger with 11% battery left.
Unfortunately, this was our first charging stop and we had both the truck and the charger bug out and stop updating charge status while we were eating dinner. This happened a couple more times during the trip and every time resulted in not being charged for the entire session(or in one case, at all). The charging sessions never got interrupted, but I really hope EA/GM fix whatever this issue is, because I'd really like EA to not go out of business from giving away free electricity. It was snowing when I got back to the truck and didn't think to snap a photo of the station itself, so have no idea how much charge we ended up getting here. We continued on to the hotel a short distance later and arrived with 66% charge. After fussing around with it a while, I was finally able to get it working. I had never seen a SemaConnect charger before so had no idea how to get it activated.
Over night, we had 75kWh delivered to the truck in ~13.5 hours. It was just enough time to hit 100% charge.
We skipped our original morning plan to go to the Cincinnati zoo because of the cold and wind, and headed out. Stopped at the EA station in Clarksville, IN for lunch. Getting here was a little strange and somewhat out of the way. In our original plan, we would have tried to skip this stop. 42%-92% over 1:04, 117kWh delivered.
After that we headed to the National Corvette Museum. I had never been there before, and having the charger available made it an obvious place to stop. My son really enjoyed all the cars there, highly recommend planning it as a stop if you are driving an EV through the area. There was an i3 just about to leave when we arrived. The first other EV we had seen at a charger on our trip so far.
We arrived with 44% charge, and left with 90% charge after 54 minutes, and 107kWh delivered. After that we continued on to Nashville where we stayed for two nights visiting family. I used my TeslaTap to charge up there on their Tesla UMC. First time trying to use it with the Hummer and it worked fine here.
Monday we headed to the US Space and Rocket center. We were there for about 2.5 hours, only added ~12 kWh in that time. With how big the battery in the Hummer is, decided that stopping at an L2 station for an activity is basically worthless.
Left there and drove to the EA station in Alabaster AL. Originally had hoped to entirely skip fast charging that day. Probably could have if we drove slower, but in anticipation of maybe having charging issues at the hotel overnight, we opted not to take that chance. 22-58% in 19 minutes 12 seconds, 85kWh delivered. One of our quickest charges on the whole trip, just the time it took for bathroom breaks.
Stopped for dinner, the continued the drive to the hotel we were staying at in Montgomery, AL. Arrived at 30% charge. I opted to use the Tesla station instead of the J1772 since it was 40A vs 32A, and knew it wouldn't hit 100% charge before the next day anyway.
I didn't make note of what charge level we left the next morning, it was too hectic because I changed our plan the last minute due to the forecast weather being all rain on the route down through Chipley and Tallahassee. I originally had hoped to stop at something outdoors but that wasn't going to happen. Instead, we drove across Alabama to the public Library in Leesburg GA. It would be our only non-350kW charge stop, as they had a 62.5/125kW station there. They let us hang out in the library and play with their toys while we waited for the charge. Whoever painted the lines obviously didn't anticipate an EV the size of the Hummer though.
We might have been able to skip this charge entirely, but my son needed some time out of the car, so it worked out okay. 26 minute charge here, ramped from 111kW to 115kW when we unplugged. Delivered 48.56kWh. Enough charge to get us to the next EA station in Valdosta GA. This was another charge that bugged out. We ended up not getting charged at all here. Walked around walmart for about 35 minutes, more than enough to get us to the hotel we were staying at in Lake City that night.
Problem there is I booked the hotel that doesn't have a charger. Didn't feel like trying to negotiate with the front desk people at the other hotel to not tow my truck for stealing their electricity, I decided to go out and get some charge at the nearby FPL fast charger to skip the next morning's charge. Didn't have to do this, but it meant only needing a single charge for our last travel day, so I opted to. After fussing with the charger for 10 minutes in the rain and not being able to get my phone to scan their QR code in their app to start the charge, I gave up and drove the
10 minutes to the nearest EA station. Saw my first Ioniq 5 who got here after I did. I arrived there with 43% charge, stuck around until 81% after 44 minutes and 87kWh delivered, and drove back to the hotel.
Wednesday morning we left with 79% charge. Google maps estimated we could make it to the EA station in Bradenton with only a few percent charge. Decided to try to take the chance, but was going to stop early if it went down too far. This was the first time taking the Hummer to 10% SoC or below. I believe when it estimates you only have 30 miles left, it will display this warning. Second time I saw it was in much colder and snowier weather at 12% SoC.
When we got to the EA station at 7%, it was confirmed that two of the four stations were out of order. One of the stations had a car that was at or nearly at a full charge, with no-one around it, and the other one had a line forming for it. Having anticipated this and not wanting to stick around, we took the chance on the drive to the EVGo station that was about 15 miles away. Ended up arriving there at 4% battery. Not having used EVGo in a long time, my phone didn't have my account password saved. Attempted to reset it to be able to log in and the app was all kinds of busted and we couldn't get that to work. Decided trying to use my Amex card but it kept getting declined. Moved off that 350kW station to the other one. The second one wasn't even recognizing my vehicle. Moved to the 50kW station. After I did this, someone in a leaf came up and plugged into the first 350kW station I left. After he was able to get it working, I realized that they didn't have an AMEX logo on the card reader. After trying my Visa it worked and the 50kW station started.
Holy cow are they slow for the Hummer. We went into the store to find something to eat, and the leaf was already gone by the time we got back. Only went from 4% to 9% over the course of about 15-20 minutes. Changed to the 350kW station and immediately was charging up at 274kW instead. By 20% it was up to 289kW, and we went to grab something to eat for real that time. After 23 minutes we had enough charge to get to our final destination.
If you're wondering why it slowed down so much, the Hummer will dramatically slow down the rate of charge if the cabin HVAC and battery cooling systems are competing for resources. If you are in a hurry, you can leave the car on but turn the fans all the way to off and it will return to prioritizing the battery. It was in the 80s out here at that point, hadn't seen this behavior previously. I missed the warning in the UI about this occurring but saw it again at a different charge a few days later.
Finally at our destination. We unfortunately didn't have access to a charger here at first, so I decided to run off that evening by myself and take the opportunity to take the tops off. It was awesome, totally met my expectations. I would have liked to just leave the tops off for the rest of our trip, but it didn't end up working out that way even though the weather cooperated.
I arrived at this 62.5/125kW chargepoint station with 17% and stayed until 74%. Over 79 minutes, the longest charge session so far for the whole trip, delivered 143.5kWh. Ramped from 105kW to 116kW before starting to taper around 72%(?). Had a chat with someone with an Audi E-tron sportback that wasn't aware GM was even selling the Hummer yet (this was a common theme from anyone who asked me about it).
Lots of little trips over the next week. Had the opportunity to do some overnight L2 charging on the included portable charger. Worked out okay that way. Day before we were going to start the return trip, we went up to the Babcock-Webb wilderness area to try to do some light off-roading. Hard to really know where we were or weren't supposed to drive here. There were some obvious signs in places were they didn't want you to drive, so we didn't go on those roads, but other unsigned roads we did a little bit.
No operation of gasoline motors here!
*Hit the 10 upload limit so I suppose this is a good spot to stop for Part 1.
