If you need to go further than a single charge, well, hydrogen may provide faster charging times than electric will.
You also have to think about the AC / heat, how you're driving, battery degrading after first year or so. It's an anxiety I don't need.
Plus in my case I would have to get my Tesla towed 3 hours away with major issues. I now minor ones the traveling repair can deal with. A neighbor had a collision and didn't have his Tesla for 4 months. The facilities are so backed up. No one knows how to work on them except Tesla.
Electric is the future, but it's like 4 to 5 years out. Hybrid is good enough right now.
With ICE you literally pull of an exit, take 5 minutes to fill up and you're back.
Its objectively the reality I live with. I definitely spend more time pumping gas in my Santa Fe than I do my Mach E. A bit over 5 minutes every week and a half versus 0 minutes so far in my Mach E. 34.666 * 5 = 173.33 minutes of waiting, as a lower bound, in the ICE means just shy of 3 hours a year I spend waiting on my gas car. Meanwhile, the amount of time I spent waiting on my Mach E to charge last year was 0 minutes. This is objective and factual.
> You also have to think about the AC / heat, how you're driving, battery degrading after first year or so.
If you want to, you can stress about these things. I don't, I practically always have way more range than I need every time I leave my garage. Meanwhile I do regularly get frustrated about getting a low tank of gas and think "ugh, gotta stop by the gas station sometime on this trip, even though I'm in a hurry and would really rather just get to where I'm going".
You could also stress about things like AC or how you're driving in your ICE, these things impact your gas mileage and will impact what you spend. Which your per-mile energy cost is waaaaaaaaay higher in an ICE than an EV, so you'd think you want to conserve even more. Having a lead foot in an EV is a lot cheaper than in an ICE.
> No one knows how to work on them except Tesla
No one knows how to work on my Mach E than Tesla? Only Tesla can repair a Ioniq 5? That sure seeems strange to me!
Cool, now consider that lots of people make very few longer drives.
They're not deluding themselves just because they use a car differently than you do!
I and many people I know own an EV, and it is literally zero stress. In fact it's less stress than with my old ICE car, because I effectively always have a full tank in the morning. I don't even have level 2 home charging, but it's still a complete non issue.
I've done longer drives too, and I would describe those as "slightly inconvenient." In all honesty I sort of appreciate the breaks, but I know it annoys my girlfriend who likes to keep rolling. It definitely adds time, that's a fact!
But realistically owning an EV today is incredibly straightforward and stress free. I an everyone I know who has one would agree.
In the mean time, if you're in this situation, I personally wouldn't fault you for getting a gas-powered car. EVs are still more constrained by supply than demand.
USA is not the only country in the world.
Other countries can have wildly different situation and setup, and in fact building home charging stations might be problematic for significant portion of future buyers that Toyota might want to grab.
P.S. A bit under 30% of worldwide Toyota production goes into USA - that still leaves a huge chunk of sales that might have wildly different needs to cater to.
I realize not every car buyer can have their own charger at home, that's obvious. But let's not act like it's a rare thing for people to have the ability to charge at home. Over half of all households in Europe and US can probably add home charging for little cost. That's a ton of EVs to sell, an absolutely massive market able to be addressed now.
When your trips are drive-across-the-country, so you need to recharge multiple times en route, that's when it starts becoming substantially harder to find something else to overlap with your need to recharge. Even just doing Midwest-to-Mid-Atlantic drives, I'd complete my lunch pitstop (including eating, filling gas tank, and emptying bladder) before an EV charge could fill up again, even discounting the fact that the lesser range of an EV means I'd need to squeeze in another charging pitstop uncomfortably early to overlap with dinner.
What this means is that if you fill gas 1-2x a week to handle the average 20 mile commute, you've saved 10 minutes because the refill of the electric is at home, with little effort.
Now you bank that 10 minutes every time you take any one way <~200 mile trip with electricity at the ends.
If you're doing regular multi region drives you are not average, you're likely in the top 1% of consumer long range trips.
To add, the longer and "more often" stops are healthier for you and your passengers; very few cars have a less than 200 mile range now, and if you're sitting for that period of time, moving (or at least not sitting) is a good idea to prevent deep vein thrombosis, the longer the better.
Good thing I do well less than 1 of those on average every year, along with practically every other passenger car in America.
Is driving from San Diego to New York City really a common thing people do here? Is that what the average driver does on a weekly basis? Is that really what we should be targeting our cars to do?
EDIT: This is with a Hyundai Ioniq 5, not my current Mach E. The Mach E doesn't charge as fast as this most recent generation of EVs, so it would be a bit over 4 hours each way in the Mach E. However, if my plans for a car was "go on a yearly road trip", I would have probably bought an Ioniq 5 exactly for this reason. Personally though I'd probably just fly for either of those distances instead of spending 20+ hours in a car each way. Which is why the standard range version of the Mach E is perfectly fine for me.
That depends, one person probably isn't doing that in a single shot, but a three people driving in shifts might.
If that's not what you're suggesting then that was not done in any commercially available EV in the US today. Even starting closer to the California border like El Centro and only making it to fringes of Houston like Katy is ~1330 miles, so ~665mi a leg. No generally available EV in the US has that range. So I take it you did a number of like 10-60% or whatever charge jaunts.
Even then though, if you were to sum up all of those shorter charging sessions you probably had to recharge your car a total of at least four charges energy-wise. If you get 300mi of range on a full.charge, 1,330 / 300 = 4.4333...
It’s more just that it really, really matters time-wise that the car is not charging up to full on any given stop, because that means the charging stops are significantly faster.
People who latch on to the idea of judging EVs on their time to get “fully”‘charged are going to get such a distorted idea that they will never believe current EVs could be a good option. But, they would be mistaken.
As someone who does not have a commute and mainly owns a car for the 600-2000 mile road trips I take _at least_ every ~6 weeks. I'd much prefer a PHEV, which incidentally can drastically increase range while also handling the ~30 mile average daily commute electric-only quite easily.
The absolutism is tiring.
But as an EV owner, long (like multi hundred mile) trips are the only time I would ever do that. Otherwise it's just frequent top ups while I'm at home or doing errands or whatever. So from my perspective the time to charge to full is kind of a red herring unless you are someone who regularly does like 300+ mile trips.
For example, let me approximate the numbers I had at a recent supercharger stop. It took me about 15 mins to charge from 3% to 60%. Then another 10-15 mins from 60% to 80%. Then another 15 mins from 80% to 90%. In general, for better battery life and to not waste your time, it is recommended to charge to 90% or below.
And that wasn't the most recent gen supercharger. At some, I had personally seen peak charging speed of 580+ mi/hr.
And if i am in a rush, i just charge at a supercharger for that quick 15 min charge to 60% and go along.
I guess I am just not bothered much by taking a short break after multiple hours of driving. And the costs being much cheaper than gas (about $17-18 for full tank at a supercharger, virtually free at my apt building or work) kinda helps.
Cars that charge that fast to 100% either do not care about not destroying the battery, which makes sense in a racing context without sustainability concerns, or the 100% reported by the battery management system is a lot lower than the maximum state of charge possible.
That’s why you cannot find common electric cars that charge to 100% in 15 minutes. But you will find some that can charge fast for 15 minutes and that’s what matters.
That's 3 hours of downtime with my ICE, 0 minutes of downtime with my EV. Which one resulted in more downtime again?
In most cases having a battery will get you from A to B without issue - same on a tank of gas. When it won't, you will spend more time waiting on the battery to charge, which is a tradeoff that is probably still worthwhile for the vast majority of people.
> Similarly, for the sake of argument, I could keep a gas pump in my garage to fill up at night, which would mean I had "0 minutes of downtime" as well.
You literally couldn't unless you were massively wealthy or lived on a farm or something along those lines. You probably wouldn't be able to secure the permitting to have that much gas on site at small residential lot. It would also be a pretty big headache managing the gas delivery contracts for such a small amount. It would be a huge hassle getting it delivered to your home. Realistically, you couldn't get as much convenience at your home assuming you lived in a statistically average suburban/urban single family home.
Meanwhile all it took for my EV was to install an outlet, <$200. No crazy permitting, no massive storage tanks storing hazardous liquids, no managing additional delivery contracts needing to get big fuel trucks to pull up near the house to deliver gas, no EPA inspections for that storage tank, etc.
Maybe a 20 minute fill up where you can do other things at the same time isn’t that much worse.
Not having enough electricity to make it to work is akin to not having enough gasoline for most local trips.
Assuming a 30 mile round-trip commute, I'd have to forget to plug it in 6 times before I would run into this issue my car with ~200mi of range.
I've had more times where I needed to be sure to stop and get gas before I head to the office than I've had times where I had to wait for my EV to charge before I head in.
The part where you can't leave the pump shouldn't be longer than 1-1.5 minutes.