The fact that so many people don’t think about this or are unaware shows how well the propaganda worked.

Here is a car that is by far the easiest car you’ll ever own, the power to run it is the cheapest you’ll ever see, and 99% of your trips will be within one charge/tank meaning you’ll never need to worry about range ever - but the propaganda convinced them all that that’s a deal breaker.

As an EV owner the road trips we take are the vast minority of driving anymore. When we do there are options.

• plan out your route and stops. Requires maybe 15 minutes of planning before your trip. You pick a place with food nearby, get out for 30 minutes, stretch, eat your meal, and you are good until the next meal.
• if you are one of the 80% of households with 2 cars, take the other car for that roadtrip.
• get a rental car for your trip. (Remembering that a couple hundred for a rental car is vastly cheaper than paying for gas for 10+ years)

the vast majority of their charging at home or at their destination.

Absolutely true, which is also why I found it extremely annoying when reviewers began claiming that range wasn’t as important as fast charging speeds in daily use. Luckily most have stopped that shit, probably realizing there’s a reason most people want good range, and this is one of them. Also charging at home/destination cost way less than using a fast charger, and it’s better for battery life too.

Speed doesn’t matter as much if you’re going to be parked for half the day or overnight.

The apartment complex and workplace chargers I’ve seen all limit how long you’re allowed to leave your car parked at them. I suppose speed doesn’t matter in the sense that having to move your car 20 minutes later isn’t much less annoying than having to move it 4 hours later. Still, I wouldn’t want an EV without my own garage even if I never went on road trips. It seems like a pain.

Yeah EVs seem almost non-viable if you live in an apartment complex right now, which is a shame. At least where I am

This, and the cheapest charging option will always be at home.

If you can’t charge at home, an EV is not worth the additional cost vs a combustion or hybrid.

That is an idealistic way to look at it. In practice, charging anytime a car is parked is expensive:

1. Utility companies will often charge a premium on electricity spent during business hours. This alone makes it uneconomical to charge the car by day (eg while you’re at work).

2. Charging on public infrastructure will often include a “convenience premium” - electricity will be more expensive than charging at home.

3. A lot of the time charging will be limited by time, thus requiring you to go out of the office and move your car in the middle of work. Not possible for everyone.

4. My experience is that “energy providers” discovered subscriptions. And charging “out of network” is mor expensive - especially important when traveling.

Reality is that with an EV the only economical approach *today * is:

• to charge it at home, at night
• hopefully produce your own electricity, if you can (photovoltaic + battery)
• use quick charge stations for longer drives

If you can’t charge it at home (eg you live in a flat or an apartment complex), you’re basically effed.

We bought an EV and it took a few trips for it to click that you don’t need to charge to 100% or even 90%. Hook it up, hit the restroom, buy a latte, then get back on the road with 50% charge.

You only need enough to get to wherever your longer parking+charge is going to be.

We also figure out the range anxiety. Getting down to 10% isn’t a big deal, especially if that last stop is going to get you back to full charge. Our EV doesn’t even have that great of range to start with.

Don’t forget the unmutable unskippable multimedia advertisements on the fuel pump!

(Yes, I know some of them are allegedly mutable, but I have yet to find one.)

Just sounds like a CEO who doesn’t want to invest anything in upgrading anything.

Of course I want to be out of there quicker. I’m driving to somewhere and it sure as shit is not to a charging point.

When I had an ICE car, it was exactly the same. With our BEV however, I don’t generally need to charge “on the way” as I can start each morning fully charged, and have more than enough battery for a full day.
It’s only on longer trips we need to charge, and on those we can easily combine charge and a short break.

100%. The time I spend at a fucking gas station is the time the gas is flowing + the overhead of tapping the card. Plus, if there are ads and the mute button doesn’t instantly work, leaving a 1 star review.

I think it means specifically in the context of long road trips, the kind where everyone gets out to stretch their legs and take a piss while stopping for gas. On the other hand, I was under the impression that EVs simply didn’t have the range for such activities, so IDK.

I agree with you. I always hurry to get out of there ASAP.

I’ve done some very long road journeys, 900+ km in a day, and having an EV would likely have added at least an hour to that day, even more if I was towing.

You do realize that 99.999% of people don’t drive anything like that on a regular basis right?

As someone who’s had an EV exclusively since 2018, several makes and models, and not near a massive metro area like NYC, LA, etc. where infrastructure has been extremely built out for a long time. I’ve made long trips, and the total time difference across an entire day of driving, accounting for stops for meals, bathrooms, etc. that would have happened anyway with an ICE vehicle, the trips were maybe total an hour and a half longer spread across that day.

Does it take more time on long distance trips? Yes. Does it actually matter when those long trips are usually going to be entire day or even multi-day trips anyway? Not really.

I’ve found non-EV owners usually still think of charging the car like filling it with gas, full every time with all the time it takes to fully charge. But you almost never fully charge the vehicle while on a trip, only at the beginning and maybe end. The batteries charge significantly faster when at a lower state of charge, so most travel happens in the middle between 20-70%. It’s faster to charge twice for 15 minutes at a fast rate, than taking an hour or more to fully charge each time. And the built-in navigation and charging systems take that into account along your route to optimize those stops to take advantage of those higher charging speeds. I also have noticed that non-EV owners significantly underestimate the amount of time they take when stopping to get gas, use the restroom, etc. The real world time difference between those quick charges where you can let the car sit unattended while you use the restroom, grab snacks, etc. versus having to stand at the pump and then do those things, is much closer than most people tend to think.

Good to know you’re the overtired and in a rush driver that the defensive driving courses warn me about. Worse if you’re towing something.

I’ve found many (most honestly) non-EV ownershave some pretty big and fundamental misconceptions about EVs. They’re not usually working from a point of reality when thinking about these things.

From my experience talking to people about my vehicles since 2018, most think that the car needs to be fully charged every time, and think that it takes multiple hours. They don’t seem to realize that charging speeds vary based on the charge level (even though they literally see this exact thing with their phone charging every day. That you can use that to your advantage on longer trips, and that the built-in navigation systems automatically do this planning for you.

And they also tend to underestimate how much time they actually take when stopping for gas on trips. They usually just think about the time they’re standing there at the pump getting gas, but ignore the time they take to use the restroom, get snacks/drinks, heck even the minute or two to walk into the gas station and back to the car… all of which would be unattended charging time in an EV. And those all add up quickly.

And then you realise that chargers are literally at homes, workplaces, parking lots and ALSO at gas stations.

Perhaps if you were in an apartment complex without access to a home charger, but many complexes have added EV charging as amenities. Most people don’t drive very far on a daily basis, well within the range of most EVs. Heck, I make a 50 mile round trip commute to the other end of the city and I only charge once a week at home usually, unless I’m doing a bunch of other stuff outside work.

Charging at home means you almost never need to charge anywhere else unless you’re on a trip, that most people do only once or twice a year. And for trips, charging stations along highways were some of the first to be installed.

I think for my commute I would prefer a battery chemistry that needed slower charging, if it was cheaper or lasted longer or was safer, or lighter, or whatever. But I think there will always be use cases where it’s worth maximizing uptime, like long-haul driving.

I wonder if trucking will evolve to do tractor swaps, where rigs coming into charge up will hand off trailers to fresh tractors. That way the cargo doesn’t have to take up space in the charging lot or whatever. Or they might do battery swaps. I imagine for above some threshold of cost/minute downtime, the hardware for doing swaps will be worth the extra cost.

Everything is a tradeoff. At this point there are more valuable things to be spending money on than making chargers that are as fast as possible. Not all cars can charge at 500+kWhs many cannot even do 100kWhs. IMO better to spend money upgrading all the slow 7-50kWh chargers. As well as putting in more slow charging near residents. Kerb charging for people that dont have a driveway in cities or chargers for those living in flats. That would serve people better then spending more money on something very few can actually benefit from.

Gas stations can also raise the price of gas. You are realizing that both are the same. The differentiator is the possibility of charging at home without ever going to a dedicated station.