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Electric

The honest part of an electric camper van.

Three of our five vans are electric. This page is what 71.2 kWh actually means on BC mountain roads: a brochure range, a loaded range we budget from, a list of valleys with no chargers in them, and a V2L wattage we are still making Kia put in writing. The last section is why the other two vans are diesel — because a fleet that is electric on principle and wrong in practice is still wrong.

Cove & Current · North Vancouver, British Columbia · May – October

Kia estimate

360 km

No EPA figure exists for the Canadian van yet. This is the optimistic end.

What we budget

240–270

Loaded: tent, rack, 582 kg, highway speed, heat pump doing something. Pending van #1.

Up a mountain

−35%

Squamish to Duffey Lake is 900 m in 60 km. Plan the trip on elevation, then look at distance.

Silent overnight

~1.5%

Fridge, lights and phone charging across eight hours. No generator. No idle. That is the whole pitch.

The gaps are real. Here they are.

We are not going to sell you a "charge anywhere in BC" story, because the two routes people most want to drive are the two with the holes in them. Every route page lists the stops and where you commit.

  • Squamish → Lillooet (Duffey / Joffre)

    No public DC charging for ~110 km of corridor. Charge in Squamish, treat the descent as your refund.

  • Joffre Lakes day-use lot

    No charging, no services. The walk-in is the point.

  • East of Lund (Desolation Sound)

    No charging. You commit at Powell River or not at all.

  • Most provincial park sites

    No hookups, and we do not sell them as a feature. You arrive charged or you leave earlier.

Four habits that make it easy

  • Handover

    ≈90%. Enough for a Porteau weekend with zero charging.

  • Night driving

    Heat pump off, seats off, windows cracked. It is a tent with wheels at 8 km/h.

  • Mountain corridors

    Charge before the climb, not after. Elevation is the number that matters, not distance.

  • Return

    70% or more. If you bring it back at 20% we will assume something interesting happened and ask.

What electricity actually costs you

Porteau Cove weekend 110 km $0–18
Sea-to-Sky / Duffey, 3 days 320 km $30–48
Sunshine Coast, 4 days 450 km $55–90
Same trip in a diesel van — $70–120 in fuel

Rough, at BC fast-charging rates. Home-charged, the Porteau weekend is a couple of dollars. Campground "power hookups" are not a thing we offer and you will not miss them.

Vehicle-to-load

Cooking on the battery you drove on.

V2L runs the induction element and the kettle from the traction battery — no gas canister, no flame in a 4.7-metre box, nothing to haul to a refill. Two caveats we will not hide: it needs the vehicle in ready mode, so the van stays awake; and Kia publishes 3.68 kVA at 230 V in other markets with no confirmed North American continuous wattage.

So the hob is a single element set to 1,000–1,200 W, and we are not printing a bigger number until we have run it for a week on a real campsite in the rain. If you want fans and lights overnight with the van fully off, take the 1 kWh power station for $15 a night.

The part we did not want to concede

Two of our vans are diesel. Here is the arithmetic that decided it.

We wanted five electric vans. What we wanted more was a van a family of five can legally travel in, and one you can stand up inside. Neither exists in Canada at a price and a payload a rental company can run, so we bought two Sprinters and stopped pretending the fleet was something it is not.

Ford E-Transit

≈ $75,995

Rear-wheel drive only, ~256 km of range, and an interior height that only works in the long body — which then runs 6.4 m into the ferry surcharge.

Right idea, wrong drivetrain

Ram ProMaster EV

≈ $81,755

FWD, 110 kWh, 261 km EPA and a winter figure nearer 183–209 km. Front-wheel drive with a family of five behind the bulkhead, on a gravel forest road in November.

Not in our season

Mercedes eSprinter

≈ $95,080

The best electric answer in Canada, at roughly the price of two PV5s — before the conversion. Two of them is most of a fleet of the small ones.

The right van, the wrong maths

VW ID. Buzz

≈ $80,460

No cargo van in Canada, 505 kg of payload, a 75 kg roof and a 1,330 mm interior. Seven occupants at 75 kg already exceed what it can carry.

Not orderable, not loadable

What the diesel buys that the battery does not

  • Five travel seats with factory belts and factory anchorages — the thing a cargo van cannot be made into without a certified bench, an inspection and a certification file.
  • Standing height inside. About 1,950 mm after the headliner, in a van where you can change a wet shirt without doing it in the doorway in front of your kids.
  • Four real berths instead of two and a child mattress on a table.
  • Heat that does not negotiate: a diesel heater running in November without touching a driving range you were saving for the drive home.
  • ~700–800 km of loaded range and a fuel nozzle on every highway in the province.

What it costs you, and we will not sand that off

  • It is not silent. The heater ticks, the engine ticks, and the 6 am quiet hour belongs to the electric ones.
  • Diesel costs money: roughly $70–120 for a long weekend off the North Shore, and we do not fold it into the rate.
  • About 2.74 m tall and close to 6 m long — over-height for BC Ferries, over most parkades, and tight in some campground pull-throughs.
  • A $3,500 deductible instead of $2,500, because a bigger van makes a bigger dent.
  • It is not our conversion. A certified builder built it; we chose it, weighed it and kit it out.

If an electric van in that size gets real payload, real interior height and a Canadian order book, the next two we buy are electric and this section gets rewritten. That is the deal we would rather make in public than discover in a boardroom.

The electric three — full specification, statuses included

Vehicle
Kia PV5 Cargo Plus · MY2027 E-GMP.S platform, FWD
Battery
71.2 kWh, single pack Heat pump standard on Plus
Kia estimated range
up to 360 km Kia estimate. No EPA figure exists for the Canadian van yet.
confirming
Our loaded, real-world range
240–270 km Budgeted with the tent, 582 kg and highway speed. We republish after van #1’s first season.
confirming
Charging
NACS DC port · 10–80% in ~30 min Port type is factory. The Canadian charging curve is being confirmed.
confirming
Travel seats
2 Front seats only. This is not a typo and it is not negotiable.
Sleeps
2 in the roof tent + 1 child on the table bed
Overall length / width
4,695 mm × 1,895 mm (excl. mirrors)
Cargo box
2,255 × 1,330–1,565 × 1,520 mm Kia L2/H1 figures. Canadian interior dimensions are measured on delivery.
confirming
Rig height with tent closed
≈ 2,240 mm 1,899 body + 60 rack + 280 tent. Measured on the first build. Will not clear a 2.0–2.1 m parkade.
confirming
Gross vehicle weight
2,650 kg Read off the certification label of each van at delivery.
confirming
Payload
740 kg Canadian figure. Fit-out + people + gear budgets to 582 kg — 158 kg of margin.
confirming
Fit-out weight
362 kg including the awning
Roof load limit
100 kg max · 94 kg on Kia’s accessory racks
Static (parked) roof load
Not published for the PV5 Roof sleeping is capped at 170 kg of occupants until Kia Canada answers this in writing.
not published
Fresh water
40 L, pumped, deck-plate fill
Grey water
20 L, removable tank
Fridge
40 L compressor, 12 V, ~45 W average
Vehicle-to-load (V2L)
3.68 kVA at 230 V in other markets No confirmed North American continuous wattage. The hob is therefore sized at 1,000–1,200 W.
not published
Hob
Single induction element on a tailgate slide
Step-in height
419 mm · 399 mm via the side door
Toilet
None. Portable cassette available at $20/night.

confirming Figures we are still putting in writing with Kia Canada or measuring on van #1. We publish estimates as estimates rather than rounding them into facts. Sources: Kia Canada MY2027 PV5 Cargo launch materials, Kia accessory documentation, and our own fit-out engineering. Anything marked confirming or not published is exactly what it says — we would rather print the gap than invent the number. The two large vans are specified separately, in data/fleet.ts.