I only use like 10% of the gas in my tank 95% of the time. That doesnt mean I dont want to be able to drive well over 400 miles without stopping for 30+ minutes the 5% of the time that I need to
My average stop time for gas or anything else on a road trip is less than 10 minutes every time. EVs cant do that, yet at least, plain and simple… If youre driving 10-15 hours then stop time makes a difference. Not to mention there is hardly gas available, let alone fast charging, in huge swaths of the country
Newer EVs Go further and charge much faster. Stopping for 15-20 minutes on a road trip to grab a drink and use the bathroom really is no big deal (and probably good for you after driving three hours).
My only complaint on road trips is finding a fast charger, and one without a line. We really do need more chargers. And it’s stupid for roadside restaurants like Starbucks and McDonald’s not to put some in at every location since it would bring in more business.
I don’t like stopping for five minutes to pump gas. I just want to go to the place and not stop.
I really enjoy not having to stop to pump gas the other 99% if the time.
Last summer I did a 1,200+ mile road trip, and found recharging time no big deal. The more important factor is availability of fast chargers. Maybe it’s the trip software, but it had me stopping about when I would have anyway, and scheduled stops 5-20 minutes. Actually, I screwed it up a couple times from eating lunch where even fast food takes more time than it recommended charging.
This was in the northeast US, where fast chargers are plentiful. However I did notice a difference. The way down following the big cities had fast chargers everywhere. However the way back, following a more rural route, was definitely a bit more worrisome. There ended up being plenty and admittedly I didn’t even look for level 2 chargers, but if you weren’t paying attention, it could go badly wrong. I don’t want to have to tow my car 40miles. And yes I do realize that’s still better than large sections of our country
I really wish that Plug Share or ABRP had options to stop every 2 hours. That would make it so much easier.
Completely ignoring vehicles for a moment, it’s quite the statement that being inconvenienced 5% of the time isn’t worth having convenience 95% of the time.
Back to vehicles now, I feel like the time saved with an EV by not refueling in the regular day to day activity outweighs the time spent stretching legs for half an hour while recharging from 10-80%.
I’ve linked this before but it’s relevant here too. Less than 5% of all trips are over 50 miles. Extrapolating from that, a vanishingly small percentage of trips are several hundred miles long.
I feel more people would benefit from watching technology connections “but sometimes” video. YouTube vid
How often do you actually do that, though? Also, see BYD and megawatt charging for 5 minutes. Or the 15 minutes for the Hyundai Ioniq.
This sounds like the standard anti-EV talking points. I’ve taken a long trip in my older, very slow-charging EV. It’s fine for the once per year need, or I can rent a (gas) car for the trip and still come out ahead.
So you’ll pay a few thousand dollars a year for the privilege of occasionally saving 20 minutes? You do you.
If EV chargers were as prolific as gas stations you would have a point!
You have a point that we need a lot more trip chargers. But if you can charge at home, all those local gas station can go away. It is an underrated pleasure to just not have to go to them anymore.
Unless I’m going farther than a couple hundred miles, there’s no point to gas stations anymore.
In a lot of the places even in the US the charging infrastructure is fine. If you often have to drive to remote places, it’s probably not ideal. Here in Germany I’ve never had any problem in five years of driving an EV.
In Germany you also have public transportation to fall back on and your stuff is far closer together.
As a kid, I drove from around Topeka Kansas to Denver Colorado at least every year or two to get to the mountains and to visit a friend’s family. That is not an uncommon drive!
That is a further driving distance than driving the furthest east and west points of Germany. Distances are simply a lot further in the rural US. Sure, sticking with cities is pretty easy for EVs, and that is great, but ignoring more than half of the continental US land mass that we have to drive through to get between major cities, much less visit rural towns, is glossing over a whole lot of context.
Yes, I wish we had better public transportation and more EV chargers, but the situation in the US is very different than Europe because of how people are clustered and the vast distances in rural areas.
While I appreciate that’s a great example of a regular long distance road trip through rural areas, have you actually looked? Looking at the Tesla Supercharger map, there seem to be plenty on the highway between the two cities, and of course there are other brand fast chargers that may be there and possible destination chargers at each end.
While I couldn’t claim such a trip is as convenient as gas, it doesn’t look at all bad for an EV. You might be surprised
I was making a point about relative scale pf travel using a personal example, not necessarily exact route. Europeans tend to forget we have rural areas with sparse populations (double or single digits per sq km) that are the size of even the largest European nations.
As EV ranges increase and chargers become more common this becomes less and less of an issue, but it is still in the “visiting rural relatives requires more planning with EV” phase just because of distances.
I pay $0k per year by just driving an ICE car that has no range issues? Its not like charging is any more free than gasoline
You’d be surprised at how many public chargers are genuinely free, although they are typically level 2 (8 hour) chargers.
My state has about the highest electric rates in the contiguous states, and the best estimates I can figure out, I pay just over half to charge in the convenience of home, compared to gas stations.
In two years, my only service cost is from blowing a tire in a construction zone. No oil changes or other services
No. Just way fucking cheaper.
So you stole the car? And it doesn’t need any maintenance?
The implication was that I would pay for more range in buying an electric vehicle, when the reality is Im not buying one. Ergo, $0
Ugh. I’m so tired of this non-sense. No one needs a bunch of range for their “daily commute”. They need it when they leave town. That’s the only time range matters.
A really short range EV would make a great commuter for most people. Enough range to do the daily route 2 times with the heating/cooling at full blast and every accessory turned on.
Range anxiety is for when you don’t have a charger at home, you insist on taking your EV on road trips while towing, and for extremely long commutes.
Yeah, I was actually considering looking for an old Leaf for exactly this. This was the first summer I had two teen drivers in contention for one car and the sharing did not go as smoothly i has I hoped. While it seems silly to spend money on an additional car just for summer use, it was mighty tempting. Either of them could get to work for a round trip endurance of like 20-30 miles
A Leaf as a first car might be ideal. Cheap to buy, cheap to run, barely fast enough to get in trouble. If I was not an apartment dweller, I’d like to have one for myself
And they keep asking for gas money, it would be satisfying to reply “plug it in”
We drive my EV for 99% of our trips because its cheaper, more pleasant to drive, more comfortable, and results in less maintenance. Also we never have to pump gas at a gas station. Just plug her in at home. Simple.
We drive my wife’s hybrid on the rare occasion we need ro go somewhere far away. Maybe twice a year max.
I will never go back to an ICE car and give up all the benefits of an EV just for a handful of trips.
