I took the Ocean on a proper California road trip, from the Bay Area toward Southern California, through rain, heat, freeway monotony, and mountain roads. I expected the journey to produce either evidence of a brilliant bargain or an interesting breakdown story. Instead, it produced a great deal of pleasant driving and one deeply unsettling taco.
The numbers from the road
I left with a full charge. My stop in Lost Hills at Electrify America added 52.1283 kWh in about 40 minutes and cost $29.17, with a peak rate around 96 kW. I ate and used the restroom during the stop, so I wasn't sitting around solely because of the car.
The food was another matter. A Taco Bell taco contained enough unexpected water to raise questions no reasonable person should have to ask of lunch.
My Irvine hotel charger contributed 90.5855 kWh overnight for $50.07. A later ChargePoint session added 45.9487 kWh for $14.27. At that point in the trip I had purchased 188.662 kWh over 564 miles, about 0.3345 kWh/mile, costing $93.51. Compared with the premium gasoline my Volvo would have used for the same miles, that left enough in the budget to justify a rather nice dinner.
The non-factory Android Auto solution
I also tried a standalone Android Auto screen and used A Better Routeplanner for the sort of road-trip planning the Ocean's original software wasn't handling elegantly. It wasn't integrated or glamorous, but it worked, and it reduced my urgency to make a major ecosystem change just to get functionality I already had in a little add-on screen.
At the time, my car's inability to complete cloud pairing was still constraining the official over-the-air upgrade path. It was frustrating that a capable EV could be held back by account plumbing while the hardware itself continued to perform so well.
Road-trip verdict, mid-journey
The episode was a dispatch from the trip, not a heroic retrospective of every mile afterward. So the verdict was limited but encouraging: the Ocean handled the conditions well, stopped where I needed it to, and got on with the job. I still wouldn't recommend buying a bankrupt-company EV on fuel savings alone. But I was beginning to suspect that my slightly questionable purchase had genuine everyday value.