Published date: April 18, 2024
Last weekend, I drove 500 miles in the Nissan Ariya Engage (63kWh with 216 miles of range) from Brooklyn, NY to Arlington, VA and back. Let’s take a closer look at my road trip charging experience! And don’t forget to see my road trip in action in the YouTube video below.
TLDR; The Ariya’s range “Guess-o-meter” scared me at first, only showing 167 miles of range at 99% state of charge. However, this was likely due to city driving from previous renters, and eventually, the EV did in fact get around 215 miles of real highway range.
The ride was smooth, and the Nissan Ariya easily connected to Apple CarPlay (thankfully, because the vehicle’s software was not super intuitive without CarPlay). The trunk also fit a large painting inside and successfully transported it to a collector’s house!
Charging performance and charging curves on DCFC was the low-light of the trip, as the Ariya never pulled more than 70-80 kW even while charging at 350 kW chargers.
In summary: A great car to commute to work or use around town, but not the most efficient or fastest option for road trips with a small battery and weak DCFC performance. Obviously, Ariya trims with larger batteries exist, but they will likely have similar charging performance until noted otherwise.
We took the Engage for a road trip. Note, this is the lowest range trim.
We arrived back in New York City to drop the car off with around 12% state of charge, and paid the Turo fee of $35 for the Turo host to charge the car.
Note, we did not have the chance to use the Autocharge+ Nissan x EVgo plug and charge features since we did not stop at any EVgo stops during our journey. Nissan advertises one year of unlimited EVgo charging with the qualifying purchase or lease of a 2023 Nissan Ariya.
In general, charging on the Nissan Ariya Engage is a bit slower than expected. For level 2 home charging, the onboard charger of the Ariya accepts a max of 6.6 kW, which would be a 32A charger.
For public DC fast charging, the Ariya Engage is supposed to accept a maximum of 130 kW meaning even on 350 kW charger one should expect peak charging speed at 130kW, at least for 5-10 minutes. The reasons why we did not get that speed could be:
In our experience, the Ariya Engage only accepted 70-80 kW from a 350 kW charger, which is slower than industry average.
Check out how the full road trip went in the video below!
Check out Nissan Ariya Engage models for sale near you, or find other EVs in our listings platform.
When deciding on a home charger, make sure it is compatible with your electric car and meets your charging needs. Read our blogpost on selecting the best home EV charger based on your EV make and model for more insights.
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