Driving an EV across 430 kilometers and two islands: Lessons and reflections for the EV transition in the Philippines

Electric vehicles (EVs) are becoming an increasingly familiar sight in Philippine cities. Taking one on a 430-kilometer, multi-island trip, however, is a different proposition altogether.  

Grench Mañibo, Project Coordinator for the Global Environment Facility-funded UNIDO-DTI-BOI e-mobility ASAP Project, writes below some lessons and reflections from traveling by EV during a recent field mission to Matnog, Sorsogon, and Calbayog City, Samar Island, from July 20–24, 2026. The mission brought the team together with local stakeholders to discuss EV charging station deployments.

Matnog, a municipality located near the southernmost part of Luzon, is a key gateway to Visayas, with vehicles traveling south passing through its port before crossing the San Bernardino Strait to Samar Island. Calbayog City, meanwhile, is one of the major urban centers along the western side of Samar. For an emerging inter-island EV network, both are places where strategically located charging infrastructure could eventually play an important role. 

The purpose of our trip was to visit these strategic locations and meet with local stakeholders, assess potential charging sites, and understand what it would actually take to deploy useful EV charging infrastructure along this corridor. 

We decided to add another layer to the field mission. Rather than making the five-day trip in a conventional gasoline or diesel vehicle, we would use an EV ourselves. 

Waiting for us at Bicol International Airport was a fully charged VinFast Limo Green, a six-seater EV, that we rented for the entirety of the field mission. It would take us from Albay to Sorsogon, across the San Bernardino Strait to Samar Island, drive south to Calbayog City, and eventually all the way back. 

There were six of us including the driver, with a week's worth of luggage, several meetings and site visits on the schedule, two “roll-on, roll-off” (RORO) ferry crossings, and more than 430 kilometers of major road legs ahead. This was not an efficiency run under ideal conditions. It was a regular work trip, complete with deadlines, detours, ferry queues, heavy luggage and, as we would eventually find out, a very tight race to catch the flight home. 

If we were going to spend five days talking about EV charging, we thought we should find out what it was like to depend on it ourselves.

Charging an EV outside of the metro 

From Bicol International Airport, we drove with a full battery into Legazpi City for a meeting with the Maritime Industry Authority (MARINA) Regional Office before heading south toward Matnog. The drive from Legazpi City to Matnog is roughly 120 kilometers. While the drive itself was mostly uneventful, the first real EV problem – and lesson – only came after we arrived at the homestay: there was no EV charger. There was, however, electricity. 

After some discussion, the homestay agreed to let us charge the vehicle overnight for PHP 400, or approximately USD 6. We plugged in, went to sleep, and left the car to charge. 

For all the discussion around fast charging and public charging networks, our first lesson was decidedly less glamorous: when an EV is going to sit somewhere for eight hours anyway, even relatively simple destination charging can be surprisingly useful. The next morning, we simply unplugged and went to work. 

Range anxiety and reliability on the field 

Day two of our field mission took us around the municipalities of Matnog and Irosin. We met with the municipal government of Matnog, inspected the proposed site for an EV charging station, and then drove roughly 22 kilometers to Sorsogon 1 Electric Cooperative, Inc. (SORECO I) in Irosin to discuss the power-side requirements of a future charging installation. 

Part of the day was spent discussing electrical capacity, charger locations, accessibility and operating arrangements. At the same time, we were thinking about many of those same issues from the perspective of EV users. 

The irony was hard to miss: we were studying where drivers might charge their EVs while simultaneously figuring out where we could charge ours. 

That being said, any range anxiety and related worries we had never came to pass. Even after our local movements and a side trip to Ladladan Hills in Matnog, the car had remained reliable with enough energy for the driving needed to do.

By then, we were beginning to adjust to traveling in an EV. We paid a little more attention to distances, thought about where the car would be parked at the end of the day, and occasionally checked the battery percentage. For the most part, though, we simply carried on with the work. 

That was our first indication that the experience of driving an EV was not necessarily going to be dominated by range anxiety. Our bigger question was waiting for us the following morning. 

Transporting an EV between islands: Expectations vs. experience 

Battery-electric vehicles on ships have received increasing attention internationally, particularly because a lithium-ion battery fire, once established, presents different firefighting challenges from a conventional vehicle fire. Operators may also be understandably cautious due to shipping incidents involving vessels carrying EVs, such as the 2025 fire incident off the coast of Alaska involving a cargo ship carrying  3,000 vehicles, of which 800 were EVs (as reported by Reuters). 

When we arrived at Matnog Port on the third day of our field mission with an EV we needed to bring to Samar Island, we were pleasantly surprised that the process was straightforward and uneventful. We queued, processed the vehicle, and drove aboard. 

At least on our particular crossing from Matnog to Allen in Northern Samar, the fact that the vehicle was electric did not turn the process into an ordeal like we had expected. There was no elaborate EV-specific procedure and no last-minute conversation about leaving the car behind. The EV simply rolled onto the vessel alongside the other vehicles. 

After crossing roughly 24 kilometers of the San Bernardino Strait, we drove off from Allen, Northern Samar and continued approximately 73 kilometers south to the next destination of our field mission, Calbayog City. 

First-hand experience has just shown us that inter-island travel does not necessarily have to be a major barrier to EV use. At least for this particular route and crossing, the vehicle was treated much like any other.

Another charging lesson in Calbayog City 

Our hotel in Calbayog City presented us with a situation similar to the one we encountered in Matnog. There was no dedicated EV charger, so we once again asked whether we could plug in. The hotel owners were hesitant, citing the lack of chargers in the area and whether their outlets could handle the load of charging the EV. 

This time, the arrangement cost PHP 1,000 for the night, or approximately USD 16. It was considerably more expensive than our charging arrangement in Matnog, but it solved the immediate problem. We parked the vehicle, plugged it in, and let the car recover its energy while we recovered ours. 

For a field mission involving one vehicle, this kind of arrangement is perfectly workable, but not how we would want an entire EV ecosystem to function. If every long-distance EV driver has to arrive at a hotel, find the right person, explain what the car needs, negotiate a price, and hope that the electrical connection is suitable, there is still much work to be done. 

But the experience also pointed to another important lesson: we were improvising around the charging infrastructure, not around the capability of the vehicle itself. The EV was doing its job just fine.

Trusting the EV's battery capacity 

Day four involved meetings with Samar I Electric Cooperative, Inc. (SAMELCO I) and Calbayog City Hall, along with the usual movements around the city. At the end of the day, we checked the battery and found it was around 90%. 

Given the battery level, we did something slightly unexpected for a story about EV charging: we did not charge. There was simply no need. 

After several days of thinking about plugs, outlets, charging arrangements and battery percentages, we realized the EV had been reliable and trustworthy so far, and we did not need to fuss over it. We used it for work during the day, parked it in the evening, and carried on with the mission. 

That was perhaps more revealing than another night connected to a charger. You do not necessarily need to charge an EV every time you park it; what matters is having enough energy for the driving you actually plan to do. 

While it may sound obvious, it is easy to lose sight of that when discussions about EV adoption so often become discussions about charging. Our experience suggested that charging infrastructure should not only be thought of in terms of how many chargers are available, but also in terms of whether they are available where and when people actually need them. 

We had one more day in our field mission, and we had reasonable hope it would pass without issues.

Performance under pressure 

After wrapping up our final set of meetings in Calbayog City, we realized we only had roughly seven hours to get from Calbayog City to Bicol International Airport. Under normal circumstances, that would already require some planning. We were on another island, and we needed to retrace our route: roughly 73 kilometers from Calbayog City to the port in Allen, a RORO crossing of the San Bernardino Strait, disembarkation at the port in Matnog, and another roughly 119 kilometers of driving to the Bicol International Airport. 

There was traffic to consider, as well as the ferry schedule and the queue at the port. We were certain the airplane was not going to wait for six people conducting an EV field experiment. 

We reached Matnog Port at around 5:00 PM. The check-in gate for our flight closed at 7:05 PM, leaving us with a little over two hours to cover roughly 119 kilometers. 

The EV's battery was at 65%. At that point, nobody was particularly interested in finding a charger. The six of us packed into the EV and left Matnog to head north through Sorsogon and into Albay towards the airport. The clock was becoming considerably more concerning than the battery indicator. 

This was effectively the last test of the trip: could we cover 119 kilometers quickly enough to catch the flight without stopping to charge? 

We made it, barely. When we reached Bicol International Airport, we checked the battery indicator and found it at 34%. The final stretch had used about 31 percentage points of battery. The car carried us through islands and unfamiliar roads, was instrumental in making sure we would make it to our flights – and our homes – safely, and did all that with plenty of battery to spare. 

Are we asking the right questions on EV charging? 

Looking back, the EV itself was never really the difficult part. What required more thought was everything around it: where we could plug in, whether the accommodation would allow it, how much they would charge us, whether the RORO would accept the vehicle, and whether we could confidently plan the next leg. 

Those are precisely the kinds of questions that should guide charging infrastructure development to make EV ownership and use less complicated. 

The trip also reinforced something useful for our actual work in Matnog and Calbayog -- when people talk about EV infrastructure, the natural question is, "where should we build charging stations?" 

Perhaps there is another question worth asking first: "Where are vehicles already stopping?" 

Our most convenient charging happened while we were asleep. For another driver, it could happen while waiting for a ferry, having lunch, attending a meeting, shopping, or spending several hours at work. 

That makes places such as ports, hotels, government centers, commercial areas and transport facilities particularly interesting. A well-placed charger does not necessarily require drivers to reorganize their journey around charging. Instead, charging can happen in the background while they are already doing something else. This is the difference between simply installing chargers and building a charging network that people can actually use. 

Five days on the road did not prove that EV travel in the Philippines is already completely seamless. It is not. We still had to improvise, ask permission to charge, and work around gaps in the network, particularly outside major urban areas. 

The trip did answer one question quite convincingly: can an EV carrying six people and a week's worth of luggage travel hundreds of kilometers of unfamiliar roads, cross between islands on a ferry, handle several days of work, and make it back? 

In our experience, the answer is yes. Perhaps the best sign of progress will be when a trip like this no longer feels like an "EV road trip" at all, but a normal road trip. 

About the e-mobility ASAP Project 

The e-mobility ASAP Project, or the " Accelerating the Adoption and Scale-up of Electric Mobility for Low-Carbon City Development in the Philippines," is funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and a joint effort of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), the Board of Investments (BOI), and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), in partnership with the Clean Air Asia-led Consortium. This Consortium comprises De La Salle University (DLSU), Urban Electric Mobility Initiative (UEMI), and the Electric Vehicle Association of the Philippines (EVAP).