Waze Is Finally Adding Route Planning For EV Owners And It’s A Big Deal

Great news for EV owners: An intuitive way of finding electric vehicle charging stations is finally coming to Waze this Spring. Expect U.S. availability in April. What’s more, the excellent navigation app won’t just let you easily set a charger as your destination, it will also help you plan on-route charging for road trips based around your actual car. It’s a huge leap forward for EV route planning, especially when you look at the options.

First, what makes Waze so great? Well, if you are driving in an area with a bunch of active Waze users, it’s the best navigation app for getting around by car because of how it approaches routing. While Google Maps has plucked features like speed camera reporting from Waze, the two apps operate using different strategies. Google Maps bases re-routing off of existing data and factors like fuel economy while Waze crowdsources traffic and road information to get you everywhere faster. It’s honed-in on one thing, which makes it an indispensable tool for drivers.

So what about other alternatives? Let’s start with A Better Route Planner, an app that’s been a darling of the EV road tripping community. While it mostly does what it says on the tin and will help you plan along-route charging, several key features like real-time traffic re-routing and compatibility with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are locked behind a €50-a-year premium membership. Most people buying cheap EVs need another subscription service like they need another hole in their heads, so A Better Route Planner gets a failing grade compared to what the new Waze update promises.

So what about ChargeHub and PlugShare? Well, PlugShare often displays charging stations that aren’t active yet, and ChargeHub just routes through Google Maps. A Better Route Planner genuinely earned its name because early route-planning efforts required so many steps. Granted, PlugShare works well as the charging station equivalent of Yelp, but there are far easier ways to plan an EV road trip. Waze should be victorious here as well.

How about native navigation systems? You know, the maps that already come installed on electric cars. Many electric cars like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 use native navigation to precondition their battery packs, enabling faster charging once at a pre-selected charging station. This is all well and good, but what if your EV is old? What if the newest map software you can have the dealership load on is several years long-in-the-tooth and your car ran on 3G? The lab coats at evadoption crunched the numbers and found the number of DC fast chargers in America increased from 17,460 in 2020 to 21,676 in 2021. That’s 4,216 chargers that just won’t show up if you drive a sufficiently-used car. Third-party mapping software is going to be critical as EVs age, so it’s good to see Waze stepping up to the plate.

While EV route planning on Waze likely won’t take advantage of preconditioning on navigation, it promises to be a powerful friend for EV owners. After all, Waze already has a huge user base and many EV models come with either Apple CarPlay or Android Auto which offers great Waze integration. While this new update won’t make initiating a charge any easier, at least it’ll get you closer to necessary stations without too much hassle. It’s about damn time.

(Photo credits: Waze, A Better Route Planner, Mercedes-Benz)

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