Route Planner Analysis

Which route planners pass the test?

This website started as a way to document my road trips. My last road trip was in February 2025 to Bandhavgarh National Park and I had been itching to go on the road again. Fortunately, two days ago, I drove down from New Delhi to Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. This is second time I was driving on this particular route. You can read about my previous experience here.

Before heading out, I checked what the aggregator apps had to offer for route planning. I’ve written here, here, and in every road trip article, about an ideal road trip planner. Today, let us find out if any of them are really upto the mark.

Route planning is an important feature of any app that would like to act as an assistant to EV drivers. The industry must resolve this right away, to further accelerate the EV adoption. With route planning ability, more people will take longer road trips in their cars and with good route planners, less people will be stranded on the road. A good trip planner can also take away the load and headache of planning a trip, which, except enthusiasts, not everyone would be used to putting in such kind of efforts.

I understand that route planning is not a straightforward process and is always dynamic in nature. People across the world have solved it, Tesla has, in the USA. ABRP has, despite it not being a car OEM before being acquired by Rivian, an EV OEM. So why not India?

The biggest monetary benefit of having a good route planner is, no doubt, the car OEMs. The next is CPOs. Infact, if OEMs take up the onus of having an intelligently integrated route planner, then the driving experience will improve significantly.

Because neither of their route planners are upto the mark, there’s space for independent third party players to step in.

---

Route Planners analysed - A Better Route Planner, ChargeMod, eHUB by MG, EVJoints, Google Maps, Ionage, Jio-bp and Statiq.

If I have missed out any, please let me know in the comments on LinkedIn. I am consciously not reviewing PlugShare because I have used it so many times in the past. Also, their app experience is horrible as compared to their web experience.

Note - I have only considered CPOs who are also aggregators, or just aggregator apps. I’ve skipped players like Zeon who are a pure play single network CPO with route planning options. This route isn’t dominated by their network either.

I have also excluded Tata’s IRA EV, because it is primarily for Tata EV customers. It is a pity that Tata Power, a very big CPO, does not have inbuilt route planning.

Please note, we do not do any promotions. All our opinions are our own and we take full responsibility for the same. Readers of this blog and buyers of our data products help us fund the organisation. Please become a paying subscriber to keep my voice independent. Psst, this is a great time to become one as new benefits(!!) were just announced and the price goes up next week!

---

Summary for those who cannot afford or don’t want to take a premium subscription. None of the apps have a perfect route planning feature yet. Either some of them lack updated list of charging stations, or some of them lack the ability to plan a trip seamlessly, or some lack both.

A snapshot of my review

If I had to rank them, I would rank them as follows - EVJoints, eHUB, Statiq, Ionage, ChargeMOD, ABRP, JioBP and Google Maps, in order of preference.

My route planning options have always been to use PlugShare, EVInfraBI, Windy and Google Maps (for distances only). I’ve highlighted my process multiple times in the past.

Context

New Delhi to Gorakhpur. It was important to use Yamuna Expressway, Agra Lucknow Expressway, Purvanchal Expressway and Gorakhpur Link Expressway. This was the longer, but fastest route to get to Gorakhpur.

There are new Adani chargers near Agra city and on Agra Lucknow Expressway that could further reduce the travel time. You can follow what actually happened on my roadtrip here. Let me know if you’d like me to document on how to remove Vehicle Control Systems Fault error from MG cars!

The ExpWithEVs roadtrip sheet is also updated, incase you’d like to dig deeper into the numbers.