About EV Travel Planner

Who Runs This Site

I'm Branden Flasch — an Application Engineer at Alpitronic in the EV charging industry, and an EV road tripper. I run a YouTube channel called Branden Flash (https://www.youtube.com/@brandenflash) where EV road trips are core content. EV Travel Planner is the written counterpart to those trips: routes, hotels with charging, packing lists, and the kind of practical road-trip knowledge you only get from actually doing it.

Based in Charlotte, NC, with two EVs in the household and a regular habit of taking them on multi-day trips up and down the East Coast, I built this site to share the practical knowledge that makes the difference between a smooth EV road trip and a stressful one.

Why I Built This

When Bethany got her Model Y and we started planning trips that mixed her car (NACS-native, Supercharger access) and my Ford F-150 Lightning (CCS-native, NACS-adapter capable), I realized:

• Most EV road trip content is single-network — Tesla-only or "ABRP says go here" without charger-level reality checks
• Almost no content covers hotel charging in any depth (Level 2 destination charging, plug types, availability, real-world reliability vs what the hotel says they have)
• Packing for an EV road trip is different from an ICE trip in non-obvious ways (adapters, charge cables, redundancy, weather considerations)
• Charging strategy on long trips depends on terrain, weather, payload, and adapter setup — generic advice misses all of this and gets you stuck on a 90/10 climb in a heatwave with 12% SOC and a closed charger

I built EV Travel Planner to share what I've learned doing real multi-day EV road trips across the eastern US. The kind of trips where Supercharger uptime, hotel L2 reliability, NACS adapter performance, and actual driving conditions all matter — not just the theoretical "ABRP-says-this-works" version.

My EV Setup

• 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning Lariat ER (mine) — 131 kWh battery, primary road trip vehicle, CCS-native with NACS adapter for Tesla Supercharger access. A great test platform because if a charging stop works for a 7,000+ lb truck pulling at high power, it'll work for almost anything else.
• 2025 Tesla Model Y (Bethany's) — NACS-native, used for trips where range and Supercharger speed are critical.

Two-EV household, two very different charging architectures, lots of road trips. That's the experience that backs every guide and route on this site. We've stopped at functional Superchargers, broken Superchargers, EA stations with one working stall out of six, hotel destination chargers that turned out to be 120V-only, and DCFC stations that derated for reasons that took a CCS-protocol nerd to explain.

Why Trust Our Recommendations

• Real road trip miles, not theoretical routes. Every route, hotel, and tip on this site comes from actual trips we've taken or plan to take. We don't recycle ABRP screenshots.
• EV industry context. Working at Alpitronic means I understand fast charging hardware deeply. When a Supercharger or DCFC behaves weirdly on a trip, I usually know why — and that informs the content. "The charger is broken" is rarely the full story; we explain what's actually happening.
• Cross-EV perspective. We cover both Tesla and non-Tesla road trips. Most EV travel content assumes you're driving a Tesla. That's not most EV owners anymore, and our adapter and Supercharger-access coverage reflects that.
• YouTube documentation. A lot of these trips are filmed and published on the Branden Flash YouTube channel. You can see the receipts: real charging sessions, real efficiency numbers, real hotel L2 setups.
• No tourism-board sponsorships. We don't get paid by hotels, charging networks, or destinations to feature them. See our Editorial Policy for the full breakdown.

YouTube Channel

Branden Flash (https://www.youtube.com/@brandenflash) on YouTube is the visual side of this site. EV road trips, charging session breakdowns, route reviews, and FSD on long highway drives. If you like the practical, data-driven tone of this site, the videos run deeper on the same trips — real-time charging curves, real elevation/efficiency data, and the unscripted reality of what works and what doesn't.

Get In Touch

Got a route you want us to cover, a hotel that nailed (or botched) EV charging, or a question about adapter performance on a specific trip — email branden@bflasch.com. Our Editorial Policy covers how we work.