A Great Way States Can Encourage EV Drivers To Take Safety Breaks

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Normally, we think of EV charging as something you need to do to get your car down the road. But, there’s a way that it can be used to help YOU get down the road safely. You’ll have to read a long article for me to explain it, but in short, states should consider adding charging to rest areas for safety.

Rest Areas Are For Resting, Not Just Pooping

For most people, a rest area is a lot like a restroom. The “rest” part is a euphemism meant to cover for less polite words, like “toilet” or “poop”. Nobody sleeps in a restroom, so naturally, the average driver probably thinks of rest areas as a place to take a leak and then get back on the road. But, if you’ve done much road tripping, you’ve probably noticed that semi-trucks, RVs, and sometimes even people in small vehicles really are using the place to sleep.

For the drivers of over-the-road trucks, rest areas aren’t only a good idea. They’re mandatory. Drivers are supposed to take a certain number of hours off after driving a certain number of hours. There are, of course, people who find ways to cheat the system, take illegal stimulants, and keep driving far longer than they should, but it’s a terrible risk to take. Instead, the average law-abiding trucker who doesn’t want to die or lose their CDL uses the big part of the truck cab behind where they sit to sleep.

In most cases, the sleeper is a more basic version of what you’d find in a motorhome. There’s a small bunk to sleep on behind the curtain, along with maybe a fridge, a microwave, and a few other basic amenities. Some truckers who don’t haul the max legal limit use some of their weight limit for a larger sleeper that has a much nicer living area with a kitchen, bathroom, shower, and larger bed.

RVs are also a common sight at rest areas, which makes sense because most of them are comfortable, self-contained, and have hard-sided walls for safety. Rest areas tend to be kind of noisy because of all the traffic that passes by, but many people get used to it or cover the sound with a sound machine or loud fan for white noise.

At a rest area, you’ll also sometimes find people sleeping in cars and pickup trucks. For some people, this is a matter of getting sleepy and needing a quick nap to get one’s alertness back up. For others, spending hours at a rest area was the plan all along. Hey, it’s infinitely cheaper than hotels! This isn’t nearly as comfortable or nice as an RV or a semi-truck’s sleeper, but it works in a pinch.

It’s important to note that rest area rules for sleeping differ from state to state. In the harsher states, sleeping in the car is only allowed for a very limited time, like 4 hours, before a state trooper will knock on your door and tell you to leave or write you a ticket. Those states consider the rest area more of an emergency stop for non-commercial drivers, and sometimes have different rules for trucks because they’re required to stop by federal law. In other states, a rest area will let you stay for 8 hours, 12 hours, or even 24 hours without a problem, making them easier to use for planned sleeping overnight.

Equipment is also regulated at rest areas. In most states, sleeping in a vehicle (including RVs, trailers, and semi-trucks) is allowed, but camping is prohibited. This usually means that climbing into the back seat or into a bed is allowed, but setting up a tent, putting down stabilizers, putting awnings or tables and chairs out, or putting up a pop-up camper runs afoul of the rules. In-between stuff, like a rooftop tent, hard-sided popup, or pop-top van may or may not get you into trouble, so you’ll definitely want to check on that with the state’s DOT before trying it.

For a long time, nearly every vehicle, be it a car, RV, or semi-truck, was powered by combustion. This meant that the penalty to your travel time for stopping to rest at a rest area was exactly however long you spent doing that. The gas stations down the road were still there to get in and out of fast.

The Situation With EVs Is A Little Different

In an EV, people trying to make good time end up thinking a little differently. Instead of getting in and out of gas stations or truck stops quickly, EV drivers have to spend some time charging. The faster EVs might be in and out in 20 minutes, but in many cases a fast charge is going to take 30-45 minutes. For slower charging EVs and EVs pulling trailers, it may be necessary to stay for more than an hour.

However long it takes, making good time means trying to slam as many things into the charging time as possible. If you take bathroom breaks during charging, the bathroom break doesn’t make you arrive at your destination later. The same is true for meals, buying snacks, and taking naps.

I’ve talked to a lot of people who road trip EVs, and one phenomenon that emerges is sleeping around the clock. I’ve never tried it intentionally, but I know some EV drivers try to nap at every stop and delay or completely avoid stopping at hotels for a night’s rest. As close as I’ve come to trying this was when I couldn’t find a hotel on a trip and ended up pressing on for most of the night to get to the next stop, and it was pretty rough. But, it worked! Having a 45-minute nap every hour and a half of driving (this was pulling a trailer with a Bolt EUV) kept me alert and safe getting to a place where I could sleep.

In fact, the featured image for this article is one of the places I slept!

This having been said, the whole thing breaks down if you start to get too tired before you reach the next charging station. For safety’s sake, a smart driver will pull over regardless of how late it will make them. Better late than dead, right? But, the temptation to press on and attempt to reach the next charger is still there, and could get you to drive past a rest area.

To eliminate this temptation and encourage drivers to stop and take an actual break (sleeping or not), state departments of transportation should consider adding some charging stations. They don’t need to be Level 3 chargers, and Level 2 may even be a better idea because it would encourage people to take longer naps for more range. Some of these stations should be pull-through so that electric pickup trucks pulling trailers or emerging electric RVs will be able to take advantage of it.

Federal law prohibits commercial operations at rest areas on federal funded highways, and there are some very good conservative and/or libertarian reasons for opening up rest areas to commercial activity. That would solve the problem for good and allow states to give or rent space to EV charging companies who would want to make a buck.

But, until such time as the law is removed from the books, there’s nothing stopping states from providing the charging for free or providing it at cost to encourage EV drivers to take a break for safety’s sake. Preventing abuse of these rest chargers could be accomplished by providing access to the stations via an app that limits the time you can spend charging at them or the number of them you can use in a given period of time. With Level 2 or 50 kW charging, the stations could be built for relatively cheap, too.

Featured image by Jennifer Sensiba.