I decided to purchase a full electric Nissan Ariya and because I am specific about what I want in my vehicle always, I ended up finding the car I wanted in Panama City Beach, Florida.
At first, I was planning to have the vehicle deliver to me because:
- The drive from Florida is 14 hours
- Driving an electric vehicle on a long road trip is not ideal
-BUT-
We ultimately ended up going on an adventure to pick up and drive my Nissan Ariya back home to Illinois.
I decided to come up with this amazing idea (in hindsight it wasn’t the smartest idea, but it ended up being a huge learning lesson) to fly to Atlanta, Georgia with the kids using Frontier miles I had, rent a car in Georgia to drop off in Florida after, visit Six Flags Over Georgia and take advantage of our Six Flags Diamond passes before they expired.
After a successful visit to Six Flags Over Georgia, we drove about 5 hours to Pensacola Airport where my salesperson brought the Nissan Ariya to me and I took official ownership of the car finally. It was late and dark, but we made it! We left the rental car there, got comfortable in the Ariya and we were on our way.
Everything up to this point was great and smooth sailing. We went to our hotel, Sugar Sands Beachfront Hotel (meh 🤷♀️), in Panama City Beach to spend the night before taking off for home the next morning. Quick walk on the beach in the AM and then we embarked on our adventure with plans to stop somewhere else for the next night.
Not having planned any specific route or truly understanding this electric vehicle, we decided to follow the route the car suggested with the first stop being in a little city just outside of Florida. We found our first charger behind what seemed like an empty building, plugged in and went to grab some food. We were thrilled and everything felt great until we got back to the car and realized that we barely got any charge to continue on.
We couldn’t sit in this one spot forever and had to get on our way so I decided to find a supercharger to get to for our next charge. Walmart in Troy, Alabama.
I plug in and try to charge at this supercharger, but get an error so I unplug and try again. Still get another error so I unplug again, take a moment and try for a 3rd time. Yet again I get the same error so at this point I decide to get into the car to try to move to a different charger.
Guess what… my car has now officially locked up… the whole electrical system completely locked up!
I’m sure you can only imagine the anxiety that is washing over meat this moment and this is where one of my lessons comes into play because normally I would totally freak out, but I had to be calm for my kids sake. Secretly, I was completely unhinged on the inside, but on the outside I made everything feel like it would be A-OK.
I called the dealership I purchased the car from and thankfully my salesperson was extremely helpful.
Good News/Bad News: It was seemingly an easy system reset fix/the car had to be towed to a dealership for this system reset.
Wonderful 🙄
I was able to contact Nissan to send us a tow truck and fortunately they put a rush on it so we didn’t have to wait long, but neither the tow truck driver nor I knew how to put the car into neutral (I definitely know how to put it into neutral now), but luckily, he figured out how to do it so we didn’t have to completely damage the vehicle. He gets the car on his tow truck bed, we all get in the front seat and we head off to the nearest Nissan dealership – Merchant Nissan in Troy, Alabama.
This whole entire time I couldn’t help but think how I needed to keep calm, go with the flow and continue with this lesson experience. What can I possibly do now?
At the dealership I’m sure they were able to sense my feelings of concern, stupidity and hopefulness.
It was explained to me that the percentage of my actual car battery was so low that it could not take on the supercharger I was trying to use so the electrical system shut itself down to avoid further complications.
The process at the dealership in Alabama took a long time, but the staff was so amazing and even stayed later than their shifts to help us out. Ultimately, they charged my battery to full, reset the system and although they couldn’t guarantee anything specifically, based on the conversation with the EV tech who worked on my car, he said that if it was his family, he would feel confident to continue on this journey. Done! I had already been looking for flights back home and to have the car delivered from there before I got this feedback, but once we had this conversation I felt just as confident as he did.
As hard as it was, I did find a lot of gratitude from this whole scenario and ended up sending a gift card to a food establishment that hopefully the staff was able to enjoy as a huge thank you from us because we really were so fortunate that they all went out of their way to help us. They even followed up once we were back home to ensure we were safe.
The angels were absolutely looking out for us though because:
- We were towed to the dealership that has a technician that is trained to wok on EV’s on site since the other local dealership did not
- The EV technician was on site at the time to help with our situation that day
This whole situation took a lot of time away from our road trip unexpectedly, but luckily I never reserved any other hotels along the way home because we would have indeed lost out on those reservations.
We hadn’t stayed at any other hotels along the way to save time and also charge as much as we could along the way while sleeping in the car. Being fearful of encountering the same issue along the way home charging at another supercharger we avoided them almost the whole time and focused primarily on trying to get just enough charge at various Nissan dealerships along the route to get us as far to the next one as we could.
That is, until we got to Indiana when we realized we couldn’t keep going on slow chargers if we really wanted to get back home in a more realistic timeframe.
My husband, who stayed back during this road trip, was such a blessing from afar. He was constantly looking up chargers for us to go to and trying to keep us calm. He provided us with some solid options for along our route and some not so solid options too. There was even one point that we were driving and the charge got all the way down to 0% 😬 Similar to gas cars, there is some reserve which I knew was enough to get us to the charger in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, but I can’t say that I wasn’t super duper concerned and praying along the way.
Anyway, eventually, being that Indiana was SO much closer to home now in a worst case scenario, I decided it would be a good time to give the supercharger another chance.
The moment of truth!!
We plugged into an EV Go supercharger at Walmart in Indiana and all signs pointed to SUCCESS!
Having the battery charged at the dealership in Alabama I think truly saved us and we could have used more superchargers after that, but the fear was real.
We stopped into Walmart and since it was getting late, but I still have a few hours to drive, we got snacks, I got coffee and went back to the car to check our progress.
Full charge = we can now make it all the way home with no more stops! Words cannot even describe the feeling of gratitude I had at the point for EVERYTHING!
Finally, our last leg of the trip. Let’s go!
We made it home and with not much charge to spare, but at this point I was so exhausted that I knew I’d figure out everything else the next day.
This adventure was all the feels, but honestly, once we were back home safe I appreciated all of it.
There were moments where I was so upset with myself and wished I had never even purchased this car and I don’t think I’d ever want to do it this same way again, but I absolutely love my car NOW and the silver lining was being able to visit Six Flags Over Georgia 🤪