The exponential characteristic (EC) method is one of a family of nonlinear spatial quadratures for discrete ordinates radiation transport that are positive and at least second-order accurate and provide accurate results for deep-penetration problems using coarse meshes. We use a split-cell methodology to adapt the method to unstructured grids of arbitrarily shaped and oriented triangular cells that provide efficient representation of curved surfaces. Exponential representations of the flux entering through a cell edge and of the scattering source within a cell are constructed to match average values and first moments passed from the adjacent cell (or from the boundary conditions) or obtained from the angular quadrature of the directional flux spatial moments in the previous iteration (or from an initial guess). The resulting one- and two-dimensional nonlinear rootsolving problems are efficiently solved using Newton’s method with an accurate starting approximation. Improved algorithms, presented here, have increased the efficiency of the method by a factor of 10 as compared to an initial report. The EC method now costs only twice as much per cell as does the linear characteristic method but can be accurate with many fewer cells. Numerical testing shows the EC method to be robust and effective.