- A small crowdsourced database wants to make life easier for EV drivers who camp.
- The Camp and Charge team individually reviewed over 500 campsites in North America to see their policies on EV charging.
- Nearly 40% of the campsites included in the dataset outright forbid EV charging, with fines of up to $500.
With Memorial Day weekend just around the corner, plenty of Americans will hit the road for weekend getaways. Many will head to visit family or to typical hotel vacations, but Memorial Day is often the kick-off of camping season. For those that want to camp in an EV, though, the options may be a bit more limited.
Most developed campsites in the United States have power hookups where RVs can plug in to keep their lights on and their refrigerators cool. They could also be used to charge an EV, but that’s not always the case, which can lead to confusion and even hefty fines.
Photo by: Camp and Charge
A small new crowdsourced website aims to bring some clarity to EV owners who visit campsites in North America. Camp and Charge has been slowly reviewing sites in the U.S. and some Canadian provinces, adding over 500 locations in the past three years.
The idea is simple: find and expose each campsite’s policy on EV charging. The founders of the project and a fair number of contributors have scoured the internet for up-to-date information, and when those sources were obsolete, they picked up the phone to keep the project going. It’s a passion project, and there’s still a lot of work to be done, but it’s a great starting point for EV campers.
Nick, the person who runs the site, told me in an email that the main problem of going to a campsite is that most RV parks don’t advertise their EV charging policies on their websites. He found that it was a pain to plan camping trips with his Rivian R1S and Airstream trailer, so he decided to take matters into his own hands and launch a platform that makes life easier for EV drivers.
“Nobody else seems to be tracking this systematically, which is why we started doing it,” Nick said. “Camp and Charge is a small project, built because we kept running into the problem ourselves with our R1S and Airstream setup, where we’d try to plan a road trip, not knowing whether a park would allow us to plug in or not.”
The data gathered so far paints a relatively balanced picture. Out of the 504 RV parks surveyed so far, 76 (15%) openly allow EV charging through pedestals, while 230 (46%) don’t allow using the pedestals for charging, but have separate EV chargers on site. The third category includes 198 (39%) campsites that forbid EV charging and also don’t have dedicated EV chargers.
What’s more, 13 parks listed in the directory publish specific fines for plugging in an EV when you’re not allowed to, ranging from $30 to a whopping $500. According to Camp and Charge, the main reason for some RV parks’ refusal to allow EV charging is related to the power hook-ups, which—the campsites claim—were not designed for continuous loads. That’s a fair answer, seeing how a traditional RV can draw up to 32 amps when it’s plugged into shore power, but then the load drops significantly after the A/C or fridge cycles off. Meanwhile, EVs pull 32 amps for several hours.
In one particular case, a camping location describes pedestal charging as “stealing power” and applies the fine “per occurrence,” which theoretically means that an EV driver could pay multiple fines for a single charging session.
But even if a campsite refuses EV charging, the good news is that there’s probably a DC fast charger nearby. The data gathered by Camp and Charge reveals that the average distance from an RV park that forbids charging to a public DC fast charger is eight miles. Meanwhile, campsites that allow EV charging are usually farther away from public charging infrastructure, with the closest DC fast charger located 16 miles away, on average.
It’s a great starting point for EV owners who prefer camping over hotels, but it’s not yet complete. Camp and Charge acknowledges that it only includes campsites that have a published EV policy in its dataset. Additionally, it’s possible that not all entries were visited in person, with most of the 504 listings coming from cross-referencing campground websites, reading reservation pages, and calling offices when the available information was out of date.