I've been looking at this in a little more depth. It seems that the outbound trip was actually New Orleans->Nashville->Chicago, and the return trip was Chicago->Memphis->New Orleans. For those, like me, who aren't intimately familiar with that part of the country, it's easy to miss that this is an elongated oval; Nashville and Memphis are far enough apart, east-west, both from each other and from a direct route between New Orleans and Chicago, that they aren't logical intermediate locations unless the point is to go there to see the sights, visit friends or relatives, etc. That's fine, of course; it's perfectly legit to do that on a road trip. It complicates discussions of what went wrong, though, since each leg needs to be considered separately, with appropriate waypoints added.
On the New Orleans->Nashville->Chicago trip, Wolfe's error was in ignoring ABRP. On that trip, including Nashville as a waypoint, ABRP adds 71 miles compared to a direct route (what Google Maps suggests, for an ICE vehicle), pretty much exclusively by looping out to the east starting from New Orleans. This is done to hit a series of EA stations. Being generous, it's possible that Wolfe looked at that and thought "that's crazy! I'm not going on a 71-mile detour!" Hence the problems outlined in the writeup -- but the writeup didn't mention ABRP or acknowledge that she may have made a mistake in her trip planning by ignoring it. That would have been fairer to her readers.
On the Chicago->Memphis->New Orleans return trip, it's much trickier. It appears that there's a dearth of charging options to the north of Memphis, so ABRP recommends charging to 98% and then driving a maximum-65-mph route that loops out a bit oddly, I suspect to be able to hit an EA station a bit to the northeast of Memphis. Later on, it hits at least two of the slower DC fast chargers that Wolfe used on her way out. I'm guessing there's a quirk of the expected SoC of the car on the inbound vs. outbound trips that explains this discrepancy. In particular, I didn't fiddle with ABRP's defaults too much, which means it assumed a 90% SoC at the start of the journey; but reading between the lines, I suspect that Wolfe left New Orleans on the outbound trip with significantly less than this, hence the need to stop to charge just 40 miles into her journey.
I also noticed one reference to charging to 100%, although it's not clear if Wolfe actually did this or was just reporting what the car was telling her: "our dashboard tells us a full charge, from 18% to 100%, will take 3-plus hours." There was another reference to using a stop to "top off" the charge. Certainly, if she
was charging to 100%, that would be part of why she took so long to charge.
Wolfe's Tweet says she was trying to emulate a "typical" road trip. New Orleans is the 53rd-largest city in the US, and Chicago is the 3rd, according to
Wikipedia. I wasn't willing to map out routes between all the 2,756 possible combinations of cities from #1 to #53 in population, but I did randomly select ten pairs, and I found that the New Orleans->Chicago trip is very atypical. ABRP suggests routes that add no more than 2.8% of trip distance compared to what Google Maps recommends, for the ten randomly-selected pairs I used. (I did discard two pairs because they were too close together. The rest ranged from 632 to 2693 miles apart.) The straight New Orleans->Chicago path adds 15.97% of trip distance. Looking separately at the outbound and inbound trips, with the Nashville and Memphis detours, those add 7.06% and 15.09%, respectively, compared to what Google Maps suggests for trips with those waypoints. It's hard to argue that Wolfe picked this trip specifically because it's an outlier; her Twitter bio says she lives in New Orleans, and the article says she was visiting her alma mater in Chicago, so this is a trip she might legitimately take. These facts do, though, illustrate the fact that DC fast charging infrastructure still needs to be built up in the US; some routes are still challenging for EVs -- especially for non-Teslas. This is a legitimate issue; but the problems Wolfe encountered are not typical, IMHO, and presenting her problems as typical is deceptive.
I told ABRP to use the Kia EV6 SR RWD for its calculations. It's unclear precisely what car Wolfe was using; she said it was listed on Turo as an LR model, but said that a Kia representative thought it might have been an SR version. I won't re-run all the calculations, but ABRP drops 40 miles and fifty minutes off the Chicago->Memphis->New Orleans trip when I switched to an LR RWD EV6. My own 2019 Model 3 LR RWD could do it in almost two hours less time than the LR RWD EV6, thanks to better Supercharger placement. I didn't factor any overnight L2 charges into my calculations, although Wolfe claims to have done so.
