Volvo EX30 vs Tesla: Which EV Trip Planner Reigns Supreme?

The Volvo EX30 has a great feature which makes it easy to find nearby electric car chargers fast or slow as well as navigating to places on road trips and weekend holidays while charging in between.

Most electric cars have some kind of central screen and you can use maps on it by connecting your phone wirelessly or wired and using Android Auto or Apple Carplay.

What makes the Volvo and Polestar EVs different is that they have Android Automotive built in.

Click to expand

What does that mean? I know Android Automotive sounds very similar to Android Auto. Google isn't really great at naming things they should have named it something clearly different.

Android Automotive is an operating system built into the car that means you don't need to have a phone with you to be able to use apps like Waze, Amazon Music, Spotify etc.

Click to expand

Android Automotive can also find really close electric car chargers to where you are and give you really great industry leading (similar to Tesla) EV route planning and electric car charger suggestions along the way when you're going on long road trips.

I'll show in the video below how it works. Or you can look at the photos instead.

Once you've got Google Maps on the home screen of the EX30 open let's pretend that we need an electric car charger right now.

So we press on the charger button and these are some nearby electric car chargers for some of the brands like Evie.

The EX30 Android Automotive built in can also tell how many chargers there are at a location, what speeds they support and if the charger owner shares the status, whether they are working (green) or if they're busy.

Click to expand

If you want to narrow options down because you're in a rush you can choose Super Fast. There aren't that many Super Fast Chargers within the metro area of Sydney. They tend to be on highways or at the edges of cities.

What about Medium Fast? There's a lot more of those, Kogarah, Tempe, Green Acre, Lakemba etc. You can even choose ones that are open now because some of them have restricted opening hours.

Click to expand

There's a really great industry leading feature in the EX30 (also similarly in Tesla EVs).

Courtesy of Android Automotive the car can see what the live state of your battery is and accurately calculate how long it will take to get to somewhere such as Melbourne from the inner west of Sydney where I am now.

You can see how long the drive will take, when you'll arrive, how much it'll cost in tolls and how much battery you'll be left with at the end.

Click to expand

You can add more to the target destination battery left percentage if you want to make sure you have extra battery at the end. It's finding charging stops that's how much time you'll spend charging along the way.

Let's zoom in and see what the suggestions are okay so we're driving on the main Motorway the first stop it suggests is at Chargefox.

This is how you see which charge stops are recommended : Chargefox Goulburn, Evie Tarcutta and BP Glenrowan.

Click to expand

You can edit these and add your own options for example I'm on 82% maybe I want to leave after a snack at Ikea so I'm going to fill up there.

Then I want to stop at Evie Mittagong for afternoon tea, then I like to stop at Tesla Yass ... it's very customizable.

You can either take what it gives you automatically as suggested stops or optimize it based on wherever you want to stop and your favorite charging stations.

This is definitely much easier to use than a lot of other other electric cars which require owners to look on their phones at every rest stop to see which charger to stop at next and use software like a A Better Route Planner app and an OBD reader to plan which charger stops to stop at during a long drive.

Is the Volvo EX30 EV route planner and charging stops suggestion tool better than Tesla? I'd say Yes because Volvo shows all available charging networks whereas Tesla route planner software favours recommending stops at Tesla owned Superchargers.

If you've used a Volvo or Polestar EV with Android Automotive built-in software to plan EV road trips and charging stops let me know in the comments what the experience was like.