About Charge & Explore
Charge & Explore exists because the charging stop is now part of every long electric-vehicle drive, and most tools treat it as dead time.
The idea
Route planners are good at getting you to a plug. They are less helpful with what happens next: twenty to forty minutes in a car park, hoping there is somewhere decent to eat or stretch your legs. Charge & Explore ranks reachable stops by the quality of that break, so you can choose the charger next to a good café or a park rather than the one next to nothing.
How we approach it
- Transparent scoring. The live list ranks reachable chargers on two published factors, charging power and closeness, and the demo ranking uses the fuller seven-part Stop Score, whose weights are published on the How it works page. Nothing is a black box. See the method.
- Honest estimates. Charging time is shown as a range, and chargers outside a conservative range estimate are never offered as the best stop.
- No crime-based "safety scores". We show observable signals and say how confident we are instead.
- Clear sources. Charger data comes from the U.S. Department of Energy's public station data; place data comes from OpenStreetMap and, where enabled, Google Places.
- Optional car connection, read-only. You can use the app without connecting a vehicle, and connections only request read access.
Independence
Charge & Explore is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Tesla, Inc. or any charging network. "Tesla" and related marks are the property of their respective owners.