The Bolt, Leaf, and i3 are all fairly ugly. Most of the people I know waiting for Model 3s are doing so in part because it's actually a decent to good looking sedan, and not a weird jelly bean hatchback.
When Chevy Bolt came out, virtually every north american automotive magazine slammed its looks; and virtually every European immigrant friend of mine absolutely loved them.
Similarly, the Sedan nature of Tesla3 appeals to a lot of my 4th-generation-Canadian or -American colleagues, but screams impracticality and poor visibility to others.
Like the UI (the all-touchscreen paradigm is a HUGE deal breaker for me - I want buttons and levers I can operate without looking), the design is not universal :)
(edit: note that I'm carefully not saying anything about the i3... I have yet to meet a person even anecdotally who loves it for its looks - maybe it's just too ahead of its time ;-)
You're the first person I've heard say they don't like the look of the 2018 Leaf.
https://cnet1.cbsistatic.com/img/dSKLWFx0d35FPHtPvpJJg0dRBcs...
(Disclaimer: I own one.)
Search PlugShare for CHAdeMO chargers. There are a lot.
They’re often unmaintained and left broken for long periods of time.
They’re often installed in single units, leaving you vulnerable to being screwed by another user or someone blocking the spot.
They’re usually installed in cities rather than along highways. Many important corridors don’t have enough CHAdeMO coverage for a long trip.
The networks all have realtime status via their apps/websites, there's no guessing about whether a charger is working or in-use. The distribution is fking fantastic: most of them are right at the rest stops on the PA turnpike or I95 and other highways, so you don't even get off the highway to charge. Tesla puts theirs in strip malls, so you have to go through a toll, exit the highway, drive through a town, charge, drive back to the highway, go through the toll again to resume your trip.
I work from home with no commute, but I put over 1000 miles a month on my Leaf because it's a great road trip car: a smoother, quieter ride than most luxury cars, that drives itself most of the time with ProPilot, with a nearly 10x larger charging network than Tesla's. Nissan throws in two years of free charging with new Leafs, so for the most part these road trips cost nothing too.
50kW is still slow. I consider Supercharger speeds to be the bare minimum.
Not that there's any reason you can't continue on from any of those destinations to another further one; the entire eastern and western coasts are covered by several CHAdeMO chargers for every Supercharger.
As for Supercharger speeds, most of the time spent plugged in to one is spent at less than 50 kW, it's really not that different. Especially if we talk about the Model 3, where the standard range battery is going to be similar to the old Model S 60, which would spend less than 5 minutes above 50 kW starting from low SoC on a Supercharger before the charging rate would be no better than any CHAdeMO station.
I doubt my 15-20 minute charging stops are much different from yours with your Model S 85 most of the time, except that I have a lot more options for where to charge without an adapter around here, and they're a lot more conveniently located. Most of the population lives around cities along the coasts, and those cities and coasts have excellent CHAdeMO/CCS coverage. Bolts and Leafs are viable for single-car households for a heck of a lot of people, not just Teslas.
If your charging stops are 15-20 minutes then they’re similar to mine... except mine take me twice as far and thus happen half as often.
If you don’t want to consider trips over 3 hours then the whole issue of fast charging disappears for long range EVs. You can do those trips without charging in the middle at all. This discussion is completely pointless unless we look at longer trips.
Out here on the west coast, cities are much more spread out.
Getting between major cities is at minimum 2 hours.
99.9% of my trips aren't that long, but a couple times a year I go well over 3 hours.
Heck I'm planning a 10 hour trip soon. I'll be meeting in the middle with some friends in LA who are driving up 8 hours.
The network is large, yes. But so many of the locations you see are single or dual units. You can’t count on such a facility when traveling, because it might be in use. I’d hesitate to count on any station with 4 or fewer stalls. I guess if the density is good enough you could hunt around for a free one, but that sounds awful.
In most urban Supercharger stations, the stalls are almost always taken up by taxi companies. On heavily trafficked highways/freeways like the Interstate 5, most of the stalls are taken up by drivers for hours-long intervals. Same problem, but far worse--because Supercharger stations are more spread out than their non-network/non-Tesla counterparts.
I’m in the US, and the charging networks outside of Tesla’s are fragmented and unreliable.
https://fastned.nl/en/blog/post/fastned-onthult-nieuwe-gener...