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Comment by NuDinNou | Hacker News Reader

It has 215 miles(346 km) range. For a long distance trip I would plan a 30 min break after every ~ 300 km of driving.

Why? That's just a hour and a half to two hours of highway driving.

Bladder. Sore/stiff muscles. Eye fatigue. People certainly love their 6+ hour non-stop drives enough to keep doing them, but my human body likes to stand up, stretch, maybe relieve itself every couple of hours.

Yeah, I didn't mean to drive for 6 hours straight, but at least 3 is the norm.

My experience is that the normal reality is that your first stop is after about 2.5 hours, because you leave with a 100% charge from home, then you stop about every 1.5-2 hours, depending on supercharger placement and destination. That worked out pretty well for the 6.5 hour drive that I did most recently, with two stops one way (up into the mountains), and one returning (downhill helped with range). I think it would be more impactful on 10+ hour drives, but still within the realm of reasonable. If you are someone who does 10 hour drives regularly, then EVs aren't for you.

We should be talking about range, not hours of driving. I'm regularly driving 600km/day, but on a highway, in 160-250 km/h range (my car says that average speed of my last trip to Berlin was 218 km/h). I can't go 3 hours at this speed because I would run the battery dry, and stopping for charging prolongs the trip by at least 2 to 3 hours. Time is money, and I'd rather spend this time with my family or working, not waiting to charge.

I know that EVs aren't for me, that's actually what I'm trying to show. Some people have the feeling that charging is just a little inconvenience and everyone should buy one. For someone like me, charging doubles the trip.

You are certainly an outlier in the discussion.

There are range extended EV options (the Volt/Ampera, for instance) to at least use battery for part of the trip.

It certainly doesn't have to be all or nothing right now. You are enough of an outlier you might never be satisfied, but that shouldn't stop you from trying for a middle ground.

There are people that wish to tax conventional vehicles relentlessly. I feel the need to mention my case in the discussion because while I'm most certainly an outlier there (and in the general population), I know there's still a lot of us, and that the tax has the potential to ruin life of these people.

Me personally, I have an EV Smart that I use in my home city. I love electric vehicles, but there are use cases when they just can't be used.

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