Wellington to Dunedin roadtrip - the warts and all EV review

Our holiday kicked off with a bang! We were in Wellington. We needed to get to Dunedin to visit my mum for a couple days and drive her to the airport ... to fly to Wellington. Long story (that Angela will expand on). But how will it go?

The short answer is, long and tiring. Overly long, and overly tiring. It showed up the deficiencies in a long roadtrip with a shortish range, loaded-to-the-roof EV.

It all started with my "favourite" 2am red-eye ferry trip. It's great, in theory! Get an early night. Wake up at 12:15am, just enough to drive down and get in the queue. Park on the ferry. Go back to sleep. Wake up at 6am, having had a full but broken sleep, and get straight on the road which is nice and clear in the early morning. 

Well, nah. Not this time.

Early night? I got myself distracted fighting the DOC website and didn't get to sleep until 10pm - a  whole two hours of sleep before the midnight alarm sounded. Sleep on the ferry? Christmas meant the ferry was full to the brim, unheard of at this time of the morning. Cabins were already sold out when I booked, and we had to sleep as best we could on cafe seats - no cabin, no comfy seats, luckily we had our pillows and could wedge ourselves okay and get a fitful sleep. We were right on the bow and could lean on the wall with our pillows too. 

It was a 'sporty' sailing - I didn't notice other than the feeling of being rocked to sleep - but Angela just napped once or twice so she saw how people who didn't manage the swells so well were getting on. A family of a couple in the 30s and a bit about 10 and a girl about 3 were on a table next to us in the middle.  The dad was so pale.  And he was puking a lot.  A steward came to move them around 3am. As they left, another man trotted to the Rubbish bin and flung a bag of puke in there. 

If our sailing was uncomfortable and with fitful sleep - it was luxury compared to theirs!

6am came around, and on the road we got. Nine hours' drive to Dunedin, in theory. Three charging stops, in theory. How will practice match theory?

5:20am, the lights of Picton are ahead

First stop was social, to see Iona and Col in Blenheim. We brought coffees from Grove Road Coffee House. They had breakfast on for us! Coffee and scrambled eggs recharged us somewhat. We were back on the road at 8am, watching parkrunners run past us as we drove out of town.

We made good time to Kaikōura for our first recharge at 9:30am. Second breakfast at the Diner and Car museum. Shopping at Hunting and Fishing. Back on the road at 10:30am.

Pohutukawa flowering in Kaikōura

Pancakes for second breakfast

Back to continue south. Angela just might have fallen asleep. At one point she woke to see the 50km sign for Cheviot. And then missed Cheviot entirely. 

We got into Christchurch around 1pm and went straight to Little Poms.  Toby and Tessa joined us almost immediately and Steph and Sam were only a little behind them. A slightly confused run to Steph & Sam's to shed our camping gear that we didn't need to take further south. We needed a lot more planning for this stop! Captain Hindsight says we should have left our stuff at Toby & Tessa's place, much closer to Little Poms. 

Great to see Toby and Tessa at Little Poms

Christchurch charging options are sparse and inconvenient. I had to leave Angela chatting with Toby and Tessa at their place and do a specific trip to an (also in hindsight) very slow charger. Another hour lost charging, and dead time when we should have been driving. 

We spent 3½ hours in Christchurch when 60-90 minutes should have sufficed - put the car onto charge, have lunch, drop stuff off, resume our journey. A big chunk out of our trip. We didn't get back on the road until after 4pm - with Toby in the back seat and Angela driving.

Angela says we got smashed by a storm near Ashburton.  Lots of lightning and heavy rain.  I think I vaguely noticed but I fell asleep in the passenger's seat pretty quickly. 

I also completely missed this guy tied to a lamppost in Ashburton
His mates were waving a 'KISS ME' sign just up the road

Tīmaru was our next charging stop, just in time for dinner. We went to the Bullock pub over the road - we had our doubts, but the service was great and the food was tasty with generous portion sizes. A bonus was that they had bought lots of the Fortune Favours beer kegs in their liquidation sale! 

The Bullock, a nice family pub

In theory we had enough juice to make Dunedin. In practice, we needed a quick 15 min topup at Palmerston, about 60km short, to be sure of getting there. As we got close to our destination and the battery ran down to the last 20km or so of range, the car put itself into a sluggish economy mode. Going up the hills just before Dunedin was slow! However the cruise control system didn't get this memo and could drive the car along normally. 

Finally into Dunedin at 10:30pm - still in daylight, making it obvious we had driven a long way south - and west as well. We were all quite exhausted. My mum was up and said hello and got us all settled in. We all slept very, very well.

So, a nine hour drive turned into 16½ hours. I ran the numbers - 9 hours driving, nearly 4 hours charging, over 3½ hours doing stuff like eating and socialising along the way. Three charging stops plus that 15 min topup in Palmerston.

Lessons? Our car is short on range (320km WTP). What does that mean? Probably 250-280km of real range at highway speeds, but you only charge to 80% on the road and you don't want to use every last km of range before stopping. So 200km between stops is about right in our car. With 450km WTP range and a faster charging speed the journey would be much more convenient. 

What is "WTP range"? It's a standard measure based on a specific test cycle. Don't expect to get that range in NZ! Round down at least 10%. It's just a good way to compare one car's range to another, just like a published L/100km or mpg figure also isn't realistic. Another difference that's important for road trips is that an EV is most efficient in stop-start city traffic and less efficient on the highway, the opposite of a petrol car. 

Planning is more important with an EV. Past trips have worked around finding a charger in a town and eating somewhere convenient nearby. With this trip we were catching up with whānau and going to specific cafes we like - and that wasn't necessarily at places close to chargers. That meant we were often doing stuff while the car was just parked, and then waiting or filling in time while the car charged up. The South Island seems to have fewer chargers, slower chargers and different brands (so now I have a couple more apps on my phone).

This trip was pretty gruelling. But I think a lot of that had to do with not getting a cabin on the ferry and being pretty tired even from the beginning. Starting out with a decent night's sleep would have made it a fun and social trip, with lots of stops and catching up with lots of folks. 

By the numbers:

Where	When	Start	End	Duration	Rate (c/kWh)	Cost	kWh
Kaikoura Chargenet	20-Dec-2025	09:36	10:25	00:49	$0.90	$26.99	24.3
Christchurch Jolt	20-Dec-2025	16:09	17:23	01:14	$0.41	$12.12	29.4
Timaru Z	20-Dec-2025	18:33	19:57	01:24	$0.88	$35.55	40.4
Palmerston Chargenet	20-Dec-2025	21:44	21:53	00:09	$0.85	$4.37	3.7

708 km
8h 54m driving time
4 charges
3h 36m charging time
97.7645  kWh charged (133.81 kWh total)
$79.03 charging fees
Plus RUC ($76.00/1000km) $53.81 = total cost $132.84

Versus the Forester, at $2.57/L for 95 petrol, would have cost $181.96