Comment by Toutouxc
3 hours ago
What do you spend the additional hour on? Charging for the ENTIRE 2hr trip, starting with an empty car, would take less than 30 minutes in my very average EV. A quick boost good enough for 100km (60mi) at 130 km/h (80mph) takes about 9 minutes. 1 hour of cumulative charging (well spaced) gets me about 750km (466mi) of range. Starting with a charged car gets me well into "fuck it I'm not driving that far in one day" numbers, still on one hour of charging.
One hour of cumulative charging, well spaced, means at least 1.5 hours of actual lost time (exit highway, drive to charger - remember that most US highways do not have service areas as such, so you are interacting with regular local traffic for fuel stops, start/end charging, get back to and on highway) and probably more like two. Same drive with ICE-speed fueling has more like 30 minutes down time (if it’s just me).
If you have children or pets along, you will stop more, but then the question is whether the charging areas have the amenities that fuel stations do - available snacks, restrooms, pet relief areas, and at least the Tesla superchargers I have seen generally do not have the same level of availability for those.
Also, 750 km is well within single-day driving. I did 950 km each way in June, with pets and wife, and it took a touch over 11 hours each way (Google Maps estimates 9.5 hours of actual driving time without stops), and I don’t know any other American who would turn that into a two-day drive unless they couldn’t leave early in the morning. Though I’m sure they exist. There really wasn’t a good place to stop after just doing most of the drive. Either halfway, or all the way, or sleep in some awful hotel and eat up the better part of two extra days of your time off. (I get more time off than most, but I have to take a full week at a time - a break is a full week, or two full weeks, or three, but not extendable by an extra couple of days.)
> "fuck it I'm not driving that far in one day" numbers
Yeah this is what gets lost in most conversations. The fraction of the population doing marathon road trips is actually pretty small. The average is more like 400-500 miles a day. That's a single stop at lunch time, rinse and repeat each day.