Driving to the Arctic Ocean in an EV

Globe and Mail

a day ago

The tripmeter on Patrick Nadeau's car read 19,739 kilometres when he pulled into Hyundai's head office in Markham, Ont. on June 24. It was last reset when he drove away from the same spot on April 24. That's two months of driving as far north-west as the road can take you, and home again, and all without using a drop of gasoline.
Nadeau owns an all-electric Hyundai Ioniq 5 and this spring, the automaker provided him with a 2025 model to drive to Tuktoyaktuk, on the Arctic Ocean just north of Inuvik in the Northwest Territories. Surely, Hyundai proposed, if an electric vehicle can drive from Toronto to Tuk, it can drive anywhere.
In 2022, Nadeau drove his Ioniq 5 to Mexico to join his family there on vacation. That experience proved long-distance travel was quite possible in an EV with a little planning and, perhaps, some patience, though he says his account on Facebook generated hundreds of negative comments. People accused him of faking his story and its photos, because the distance to Puerto Vallarta was seen as too far to travel on electricity alone.
So how would it be to Tuktoyaktuk – to the end of the earth?
Most of the drive was straightforward, he says, and he used online apps to always plan ahead to the next fast-charging point. The Ioniq 5 can travel up to 460 kilometres on a single charge, but he would normally drive about half that distance, not letting the battery drop below 30 per cent and charging just up to 80 per cent – that's when the speed of the charging slows, to not damage the battery. On average, he'd charge at fast chargers for about 35 minutes each time. 'Most of the time,' he said, 'I needed it, for a break after driving maybe 250 kilometres, not because the car needed it.'
In a normal driving day, starting out with a fully charged battery every morning, Nadeau estimated the electric charging added about an hour to his time, compared to fill-ups at gas stations. The new Ioniq 5 can charge at Tesla charging stations and Nadeau says it was never a challenge to find a place to recharge.
Well, except for the Dempster Highway.
The Dempster is 740 kilometres of mostly gravel that runs between Dawson City in the Yukon and Inuvik in the Northwest Territories. There's only one place to recharge on the highway, at Eagle Plains, at roughly the halfway point. And the Level 2 charger there was not working.
'There was another guy there, another French Canadian, in a Tesla, but he had to plug in his Level 1 charger for three days. So he turned back,' said Nadeau. A Level 1 charger is any 110-volt household wall socket, which charges slowly. A Level 2 is a 220-volt outlet, often used for household dryers or garage equipment, which is usually good for about 30 amps and can provide perhaps 35 kilometres of range in an hour. A Level 3 is the fastest and most powerful of all, delivering up to 100 kilometres in perhaps 10 minutes.
At Eagle Plains, Nadeau had an adapter cable and plug that he was able to hook into the garage's 220-volt plug, but the Tesla driver did not have the correct adapter to be able to do so. There was a Tesla charger there, but it needed to be updated and there was no wi-fi available to do this.
As well, north of Eagle Plains, the Peel River ferry was closed because the water was still frozen, and the ice was no longer solid enough to drive on.
'We had rain for two days, we had snow, we had mud this deep,' said Nadeau, holding his thumb and forefinger apart by about five centimetres. He'd already waited two days at Dawson City for news the ferry would be open, but when he arrived, it had closed again. Fortunately, it re-opened soon after, but the deep, slippery mud took its toll on his EV's driving efficiency.
'It was 365 kilometres from charging at Eagle Plains to Inuvik, and when I arrived, there was zero per cent left on the battery,' he said. 'You have to realize that you're in the mountains with that much mud – it gives a big resistance all the time. Other drivers were waiting at Eagle Plains for the road to dry, and some people with gasoline cars had to bring (spare) gas jugs because they knew they couldn't make it. But I made it, and that was the only moment when I was that close.'
Nadeau's overall average consumption for the entire drive was 5.3 kilometres per kilowatt-hour, and in the northland, most of the public chargers were free to use. He'd hoped to reach Tuktoyaktuk on June 7, his 46th birthday, but the closed ferry delayed that arrival by a couple of days. There was nowhere to stay or even to eat in Tuk, where the tourist season had not begun, and he slept that night in the car at a campsite.
Nadeau is a professional photographer who runs his own virtual reality company at home in Disraeli, in Quebec's Eastern Townships. Before heading north in the Ioniq 5, he drove west to Vancouver Island and took the time to film some virtual reality footage in some of Canada's national parks. The 360-degree film will be made available to children fighting cancer, through Hyundai's Hope on Wheels, a non-profit organization that funds paediatric cancer research. The videos, viewed through VR headsets, are intended to help children's imaginations escape their hospital beds to experience some of Canada's beauty.
'If you can afford the time, a trip like this is the kind of thing you have to do once in your life, for sure,' he said. 'Take the time to travel in Canada and you're going to discover beautiful landscapes, but you're going to discover yourself, too.'