After happily being all-electric for almost four years, we sold our Leaf and, until early September ’23, have been driving a gas truck for the last 18 months!
What possessed us to do such a thing? After all, we sold a perfectly functional Subaru Forester (when we bought the Tesla Model 3 in 2018) that was already capable of traversing the forest service roads we like to access for hiking…
In short, “life happens”, and as so often happens, such changes necessarily cause you to re-evaluate your personal and family priorities. When we went full electric in 2018, we had a vague thought that “in the future”, there will be more of an “adventure EV” on offer eventually that we could then purchase and go back to accessing hikes, and we also dreamed about towing a small trailer. After we both lost our fathers within a few years, both very shortly after retiring, we started thinking we’d better not wait on getting back out hiking, and maybe we should pursue that trailer dream too! We also had that moment of realizing our kids were getting older quickly, and wouldn’t necessarily want to travel with us for much longer into their teen years.
And so with all these thoughts running around our heads through 2020 and 2021, we placed a deposit on an electric truck in summer 2021, and spent several months looking at used trailers until finding the right one in January 2022. It stayed in winter storage in Calgary until April, when we found the smallest truck capable of towing it, a Honda Ridgeline, and headed north-east to pick it up.
Choosing
However, just because we were planning to tow a trailer, and with a petrol vehicle no less, we didn’t want to throw all of our previous values out the window! This meant selecting a trailer shape and size that minimized fuel consumption, was big enough to sleep all 4 of us in a pinch, had a proper kitchen so we could “eat-in” and avoid excessive dine-out waste, yet was still small enough to be pulled by a mid-sized vehicle.
We settled on a trailer first, a 20’ Airstream with a very functional layout and large kitchen (rivalling that in much larger units), though admittedly not the best sleeping arrangement for the parents (one of us [read: me] has to crawl over the other, and it is only double-width; this is fine for us in our 40’s… we’ll see as we age!). Importantly, the trailer shape has been shown to reduce aerodynamic drag over comparable boxy-trailers by 25% (the largest component of energy consumption on the highway). The other benefit of this is safety – the trailer is much more stable, particularly in cross-winds or when large trucks drive by. Interestingly, anecdotally it seems to fare about equally well as “teardrop” style trailers of roughly the same size, which seems related to most of the edges of the Airstream being rounded, whereas “teardrops” usually have a very sharp edge between the roof and sides, and sometimes even have too tight of a radius for the “teardrop” to work as intended. Clearly there are still improvements to be made in trailer aerodynamics, and the next decade should turn out some interesting designs with the aid of computational fluid dynamics. Airstreams tend to age well and many of them are still on the road (even several decades old! check out dedicated vintage sites), and when they are eventually retired, the shell is all aluminum and readily recycable (as opposed to most trailers out there).
Second was to choose a mid-sized vehicle; given we like to bring our mountain bikes with us on most of our trips, we relatively quickly decided against an SUV, as the idea of putting bikes on the roof was not appealing, nor the fussing around with having a bike rack on the rear of the trailer and moving it to the SUV – so, truck it was (as an aside, pre-trailer, I’ve never previously considered trucks because of the lack of covered storage in conjunction with carrying bikes – as you’ll see in a post or two, that is one major reason we considered a truck again when placing a deposit on the EV we chose).
Because we had already put a deposit on an EV truck, we also wanted to buy something older to minimize subsequent depreciation between buying it and selling it in a few years. As I dug into mid-sized truck specifications, it quickly became apparent that the Honda Ridgeline was really the only choice when considering towing as a use case like we were – it has the highest payload (by far) of all mid-sized trucks from the 2010’s, it comes with a tow package (transmission cooler, beefy 650lbs tongue rating, 7-pin harness), and it is reasonably fuel-efficient with its V6.
18 months of adventures
We hit the road quite a lot in the last 18 months!
Let’s get the nerdy stats out of the way:
We towed just under 10,000 km (+4,000 km of incidental driving on these road-trips without the trailer [i.e. left it at the camp site while exploring])
The truck consumed 2500 L of fuel for a mixed consumption of 17.5 L/100km. CO2 emmitted of ~5800 kg (ouch…)
I tracked our fuel consumption when towing vs not towing, and depending on the terrain / speed (we generally kept it to 95 km/h max, sometimes 100); we saw values ranging from 18.5 up to 21 L/100 km.
Converting that to “EV” metrics, that is about 25,000 kWh of energy (if you were to include charging losses), overall consumption of ~1.7 kWh/km, and towing-only of 1.8 – 2.1 kWh/km! Or stated in efficiency terms, 0.55 to 0.48 km/kWh.
Compared to regular highway driving without towing at all (typically 12.5 – 13.5 L/100km, or ~1.3 kWh/km), the consumption increased by 55-65%, limiting our range to roughly 60-65% of normal. Because of the small tank on the Ridgeline, this worked out to about 300 km in practice.
We have slept in the trailer 89 nights so far, 7 of those used the propane furnace, 58 used the propane fridge (meaning we had no electricity hook-ups), and every day we boiled water on the propane stove for tea/coffee and dishes. (We only used the hot water on propane once to try it out; otherwise we only use it when we have electricity.)
We have used about 3 tanks of propane so far. They are “30 lb” tanks, which are filled 80%, or to 24 lbs, which works out to ~120kg of CO2.
This shows why a person should focus on what they are towing with (or driving in general) before trying to electrify/solarize your trailer – orders of magnitude more energy are consumed for towing than for operating daily life in the trailer – your choice of tow vehicle (and trailer to tow) will, by far, make the biggest difference in how much energy your camping lifestyle consumes.
Where our travels took us
Our travels took us both regional (nearby Provincial Parks, towns, hikes), to the Canadian Rocky Mountains National Parks, and around the Pacific Northwest this summer.
2022 spring – the Okanagan valley – a week of mountain biking, seeing the wildflowers, and a bit of gym climbing:
View from 3 Blind Mice
The trip plan
Lakeshore sites at Banbury Green RV Park!
Fantastic trails at the “3 Blind Mice” network in Penticton
Shooting stars
“Okanagan sunflowers” were in their prime
Watching this scared me as a parent!
3 Blind Mice
Roller Coaster trail
Pink dogwoods at Linden Gardens
Linden Gardens
“Rose valley” network in Westbank
Rose Valley – I think this area burned in late summer 2023 🙁
Lupines near Kalamalka Provincial Park
View from “Kalamalka” network
Room to cook!
Rock Garden climbing gym in Vernon
Trucks make transporting bikes so much easier
Start of “the Mantle” at the Predator Ridge trails – awesome slab lines!
Working our way down The Mantle to Granite
We did have one EV with us – 1:24 rock crawler by some shrubby penstemons at Ellison Provincial Park – great trails right from the campground 🙂
2022 summer – circling the BC/AB Rockies – 3 weeks of hiking, wildflowers, family, biking and canoeing:
Loaded to the gills!
Trip plan
Free ferry that crosses Kootenay Lake
Shuttled up Mt Swansea near Invermere
Sunset ride on the Kloosifier (Invermere)
Fantastic flowy single track on the Kloosifier
Hiking Stanley Glacier in Kootenay National Park
Valley of the 10 peaks at Moraine Lake in Banff National Park
Hiking up Larch Valley
View back to the 10 peaks in fields of heather
Parked along the Icefields Parkway at the bottom of the Helen Lake hike
Weasel mid-chase for Columbia ground squirrels near Helen Lake
Hoary marmot in the alpine above Helen Lake
Icefields visitor centre near the glacier buses
Paddling for the day on Maligne Lake, Jasper National Park
Looking down the lake wistfully, wishing we had been able to get a reservation on the popular canoeing circuit!
Family portrait – this is the meadow where we were married near Jasper – we signed our vows on that very stump 15 years earlier!
Riding through flower meadows near Wabasso Lake
I hiked this many times as a tween, teen, then young adult – once they’ve fixed up the big washout we will take our teens there too!
Enjoying trailer life so much he drew a picture of it 🙂
Designing a logo for his future bike company
Looking up at “Treebeard” in the Chun T’oh Whudujut (Ancient Forest) Provincial Park
Inky gentian flowers amongst the heather in the alpine at Raven Lake (Sugarbowl-Grizzly Den Provincial Park)
After a good visit with family in Prince George, we headed to the Valemount Bike Park. We did one climb, then shuttled the network a few times
Though not as many times as we wanted to! I crashed on a big double and broke my wrist! (scaphoid – I finished the last week of the trip in a splint popping Tylenol)
Next stop was Sun Peaks to do some biking – unfortunately on the way in a cattle guard caught us off-guard and blew our trailer tire. M and the kids were rockstars, working under my guidance to put the spare tire on!
Last stop of the trip was in Revelstoke for more canoeing and biking (hiking for me) – this is the waterfall at Blanket Creek Provincial Park
High above Revelstoke, at the start of Frisby Ridge
2022 spring & summer – northern Kootenay Lake – we camped at Davis Creek in Kootenay Lake Provincial Park 3 times through the spring, summer and into early fall, matching activities to the seasons. Lowland hiking and canoeing in the spring, hiking high in the alpine meadows and swimming/paddling the lake in the summer and early fall.
Davis Cr and Monica Meadows
Canoeing on Duncan Lake
Eagle
Hiking above Davis Creek to the cedar forest
The old growth cedars
Later in summer, a 1.5hr drive on gravel roads, some rough – then hiking up to Monica Meadows
These larches are spectacular in the fall
Meadows!
A variety of flowers
Back at camp enjoying being ferried around (still in a splint, about to get surgery)
Miles of beaches at the end of Kootenay Lake
2022 late summer – Slocan Lake & Valhalla Provincial Park – late in the summer we spent a weekend+ in the village of Slocan and enjoyed some rock climbing at Slocan Bluffs, and a great hike to Gimli with several friends! Another hike where our Tesla Model 3 just wouldn’t have cut it.
Waterfall at the Slocan Village campground
First wide-open view of Gimli after seeing peek-a-book views as we hiked up the nose of a ridge towards it
Anemone gone to seed
90 degrees around the corner of Gimli – impressive from all angles! We look tiny!
Pink monkey flowers grace this babbling brook near the trail head
Climbing and hanging out with friends
Excellent swimming location right beside the climbing!
2023 spring – Kimberley – in mid May we spent a long-weekend+ in the Kimberley area – largely biking and enjoying the wildflowers.
Camping at Kimberley Riverside Campground
We took the ferry crossing each time to avoid the Kootenay Pass – we weren’t sure how the truck would handle the 1100m (3,600 ft) of climbing/descending!
Riding from the campground into the Kimberley Nature Park
Excellent flower display
Enjoying Thunderturkey
Monk’s hood
Later we shuttled up the Bootleg trail network
After an evening shower, we went out for a walk and were happy to see this mountain bluebird
The Rockies in the distance on the other side of Cranbrook
Sunset on the recent raindrops
Riding at the Kimberley Nordic centre on the Magic Line
Last day, we rode in the Cranbrook Community Forest on what we call the “Coffee Loop”
Enjoying a Double Shot
2023 summer – Pacific Northwest – from mid-June to the end of July, we travelled a fairly large loop through the Pacific Northwest, avoiding the major cities and instead spending time down the eastern side of the volcanic mountain chain inland in WA and OR states, then over to the coast to see the giant Redwood trees, then slowly travelled north up the coastal highway and back into Canada onto Vancouver Island. Our second dream trip in the trailer, and all of the US portion was new to us. It was filled with learning about new ecosystems, histories of people (indigenous and settler alike), and finding adventures wherever we went. The truck and trailer were comically full on this trip (many large relatively light objects!), and it was at this point that I really felt we needed a slightly larger & stronger truck.
Trip plan on a page – looks so simple right? This was the culmination of many many evenings of planning and booking campsites to ensure we would have places to stay all along the way and could instead focus on exploring each day rather than looking for a place to stay. It largely paid off!
First stop – an amazing place called Frenchman Coulee, an ancient outwash canyon from one of the many glacier ice-dam breaks on the Columbia River. Behind us is “The Feathers”, a rock climbing area.
Can’t get much better than this – climbing less than a 5 minute walk from your campsite!
First new moon of the trip, so I tried my hand at astro-photography
Cool little lizard we found while hiking in Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park – an incredible collection of petrified wood!
This interesting charging arrangement was at the hike in Gingko SP – my recollection is that it would charge your vehicle directly off the solar-array
Wild Horse wind farm – Frenchman Coulee is in the background
We stayed in Bend for 5 days (not long enough) and saw several Rivians driving around. We found one to park near at Newberry Volcanic National Monument! 1st one we were able to really look at in detail in person.
The various walks we did around the NM were fascinating
The obsidian throne up in Newberry Crater
We upgraded EV crawlers to this 1:10 scale since our trip the previous year – I prefer my rock crawling with this little beast – it is much cheaper if you need to repair it! (Also far less impact on the natural environment than full-size off-roading!)
We spent a few days at Smith Rock State Park climbing and exploring. Even if you aren’t a climber, you should go and hike around here – it is absolutely spectacular.
On a climb called “5 gallon buckets” because of the large huecos
Next spot was near Toketee Lake – this is a hot springs called Umpqua
Toketee Falls
At Crater Lake National Park, the Rim Road was still closed, but essentially snow-free, so we used our bikes to access a hike part-way around the rim called the Watchman Lookout, right above Wizard Island
Real live whitebark pines! We were very excited, as most (all?) of the large ones like this are dead in BC from a blister rust
Up at the Lookout, with Wizard Island below us. The colour of this lake can’t really be described… the blue is just that surreal.
One of many Big Trees in the Redwood State and National Park complex
Children for scale purposes – biggest root-wad I’ve ever seen, by far!
Photos cannot possibly capture the immensity of these trees! Now we want to see the sequoias in the Sierras as well.
The coast was often cool & misty while we visited, but if you went just inland, sometimes you found a little bit of paradise. This is paddling up the south arm of the Smith River near Crescent City, CA
New flowers! (We saw many new-to-us flowers/plants on this trip)
A bit of bouldering near Harris Beach State Park; majority of rocks are off-limits due to nesting birds (though we witnessed some nimrods ignoring signs and wandering all over tufted puffin habitat sadly)
A bit further up the coast near Cape Arago, we came across quite a few raptors
A little waterfall coming onto the beach near Secret Beach along one of many “Scenic Corridors” on the OR coast
Tow skim-boarding in a pretty scenic spot!
Tidepooling near Cape Arago
Inland from Coos Bay at Gold Falls
We rented boards/suits one day while on the coast, and unfortunately picked a relatively bad day at Bastendorf Beach – a bit later in the trip near Otter Rock we saw beautiful little peelers on a sunny day! Renting stuff is so expensive though, especially the closer you go to Cannon Beach.
The sand dunes – this is on a little patch that doesn’t allow off-road vehicles (though they did let us bring our crawler lol)
South Beach State Park near Newport, OR
M became quite fascinated with this type of carnivorous plant that only grows on serpentine rock formations in CA and OR in select locations – it was a pretty cool ecosystem
Rivian had recently finished installing a number of fast chargers up the OR coast – too bad we couldn’t get a truck in time to use them! This one was set-up perfectly for someone towing.
Looking out over Nehalem Bay State Park near Manzanita, OR
Enjoying the patterns in the sand at sunset at Nehalem SP
We stopped at Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park for a few nights. It was actually bone-dry and almost dusty, but the mosses were still pretty interesting to see on the trees.
Back in Canada, we stopped in the Cowichan & Shawnigan Lakes areas to visit family and friends. Finally it felt like summer, and the water was so nice to swim in – perfect temperature!
After almost 3 weeks of essentially zero biking since we left Bend, the boys were stoked to ride!
Here we are at Mt. Tzouhalem near Duncan
And here we are at the bike park in Nanaimo, named after a local-legend (who died too young). We moved up to Cumberland for 5 days next, and did a bunch of riding there as well.
We also went to Mount Washington to specifically look for Vancouver Island Marmots, a unique sub-species of marmot – we found her!
Climbing right behind the campground at Cumberland, on Comox Lake
One of the last adventures before heading for home – this is on Quadra Island.
About a week before our trip ended, I received an email noting that the Vancouver Rivian demo space was opening up! We managed to get there on opening day and checked out many many different colour combinations. And that was it for the trip! Unbeknownst to us at the time, it sure provided a good segue way to only 1 month later…
The universal thread in the above trips was quality family time, generally outdoors on some adventure, learning about where we were, and visiting friends/family afar. While I wish we had been able to do this in an EV instead, I don’t regret it either.
Coming Soon!
If you’ve read this far into the post – you get a preview of coming posts!
This is the truck we bought at the beginning of September 2023. Last weekend we essentially repeated the trip to Kimberley that we did back in May with the gas truck – so a detailed trip comparison will be posted s0–0n! I’ve also already run consumption/efficiency tests for various truck configurations (e.g. roof box, bikes on rack, bikes in box, suspension height), so as time allows, I will create posts for those tests as well. Stick around!
(P.S. – I did complete a rough trip-planning exercise for all of these trips over the last 2 years and towing with an EV truck; all of them were viable, but there were a few key legs that would have required charging at a Level 2 for a few hours [or just driving a bit slower] – these are trade-offs I can live with in order to drastically reduce my family’s energy consumption for our vacations.)
Andrew is an environmental engineer by day, "youth activity volunteer" by evening, and EV advocate / blogger in his remaining spare time.
He is very passionate about the future of energy generation & usage. He prefers bikes & buses to cars, but acknowledges that Canadian cities have been developed primarily with cars in mind, so if we're going to drive, let's make them all EVs!
Great update! Trips sound great. Our family did much the same. A favourite place was also Winthrop. Went every year. We also loved the Oregon sand dunes – really neat to see and hike around. We towed several years of towing a similarly sized trailer with a Honda Pilot. Then switched to F150 which was pretty convenient for bikes, but we certainly missed the smooth ride of the Honda.
Thanks Colin. Winthrop has been on my list for years! We decided to bypass it this trip, since it is so much closer to home, we thought we’d catch it on a week-long trip, maybe in 2024! The Ridgeline was quite a pleasure to tow with when we weren’t at the GVWR of both it and the trailer – I had a friend drive it (during the broken wrist timeframe, one of the trips to Davis Cr) – he used to tow a bit bigger Airstream with a 3/4 ton, and he was quite surprised at how well the Ridgy handled it. Hopefully Honda makes an electric version – I’ve always liked Hondas (we had a Fit for years in the 2000’s, great car!)
Hi Bernard – I guess I didn’t state it explicitly in the post, but the very bottom photo is the new truck, a Rivian R1T. We took delivery on September 2nd in Richmond. Our wait was just over 2 years… I wanted to put a deposit on it in 2019 as soon as I saw it, but we had only bought the Model 3 several months earlier… after a few more years of missing the backcountry, we made the deposit anyways. The earliest deliveries in Canada were in March, so we didn’t have to wait that much longer in the end.
Great update! Trips sound great. Our family did much the same. A favourite place was also Winthrop. Went every year. We also loved the Oregon sand dunes – really neat to see and hike around. We towed several years of towing a similarly sized trailer with a Honda Pilot. Then switched to F150 which was pretty convenient for bikes, but we certainly missed the smooth ride of the Honda.
Thanks Colin. Winthrop has been on my list for years! We decided to bypass it this trip, since it is so much closer to home, we thought we’d catch it on a week-long trip, maybe in 2024! The Ridgeline was quite a pleasure to tow with when we weren’t at the GVWR of both it and the trailer – I had a friend drive it (during the broken wrist timeframe, one of the trips to Davis Cr) – he used to tow a bit bigger Airstream with a 3/4 ton, and he was quite surprised at how well the Ridgy handled it. Hopefully Honda makes an electric version – I’ve always liked Hondas (we had a Fit for years in the 2000’s, great car!)
Great post and geeky data, thanks for the update! Which EV truck do you have ordered? Any idea when you might get it?
Hi Bernard – I guess I didn’t state it explicitly in the post, but the very bottom photo is the new truck, a Rivian R1T. We took delivery on September 2nd in Richmond. Our wait was just over 2 years… I wanted to put a deposit on it in 2019 as soon as I saw it, but we had only bought the Model 3 several months earlier… after a few more years of missing the backcountry, we made the deposit anyways. The earliest deliveries in Canada were in March, so we didn’t have to wait that much longer in the end.