Anyone who’s ever driven between Seattle and Portland and seen the e16b charging lots of people sleeping in their cars knows there is a whole different side to your rosey picture.
EV owners are still internalizing their range anxiety into a benefit.
I get it; I like EVs for their around town purpose, but man it’s almost fantasy to sell it as “5-10 minutes every two hours”.
There is virtually no EV sold on the market today that takes two hours to charge to 80% at a HVDC charger.
"I get it; I like EVs for their around town purpose, but man it’s almost fantasy to sell it as “5-10 minutes every two hours”."
The Hyundai Ioniq 5 takes about 20 minutes to go from 10% SOC to 80% SOC in about 18 min with an 800v charger. That equates to about 3 hours of driving on the highway.
So when you say it’s got a 350 mile range, but then make the point you only need to charge to 40% that you would be fine with a single vehicle that had a 140mile range?
I swear buying an EV in 2026 breaks brains. The push back has been so bad because the mfgs pushed the single car lie… but the people that jumped in now need to defend their $60,000 purchases.
I get it, but please don’t think you guys are sneaky about it. We all know what it is.
“5-10 minutes every two hours” … lol, that’s good when you’re going from LA to San Diego. If I had to stop every two hours on a road trip I’d get a train ticket, it would feel a lot faster.
First, you're not assuming good faith.
Second, I got a used Model 3 for $16k. I also have an F150. I _choose_ to drive the 3 on road trips. I am not suffering from whatever mental illness you think EV drivers are.
Ev's are not 60,000 purchases anymore. They should be significantly cheaper than ICE cars since they are fundamentally simpler
"“5-10 minutes every two hours” … lol, that’s good when you’re going from LA to San Diego. If I had to stop every two hours on a road trip I’d get a train ticket, it would feel a lot faster."
I would be interested to know where you are located in the USA that a train is faster than driving on the highway, its very rare.
Sorry, now you're spewing nonsense. LA to SD does not require charging at all.
I did more than 120000 miles of road trips in my EVs across the US and Canada, even before they were fully covered with charging networks. So I know a thing or two about that.
A good way to think about charging is not in kilowatts but in miles per hour. Tesla Model 3 peak charging rate is 1000 miles per hour, and the average on 10-80% is around 600 mph. The state-of-the-art Chinese cars can charge at 3000 miles per hour and more than 1200 mph on average.
So if you want to do a 500-mile road trip (~8 hours of driving), that's about 45 minutes of charging time for a Tesla and less than 30 minutes for modern Chinese cars.
But wait, there's more! For a 500-mile road trip, you will have at least 200 initial miles covered by your home charging or if you stay overnight in a hotel with a charging station. So that's even less time spent charging.
And yeah, people usually prefer to do more frequent charges rather than drawing the battery down to 10% to alleviate the range anxiety and just as a safety buffer.
I mean, you can, because you are clearly emotionally tied into your purchase. But I can’t as an engineer.
I think you should not get an EV. But I like mine.
And even if you totally forget about charging and you really need to go, that's just an additional ~20 minutes or so. You don't even need to plan the route anymore, with so many charging stations available: https://supercharge.info/
> as an engineer.
I have doubts about that.
But I can't assume every time I go leave in my gas-fired Honda that the tank is going to be completely full.
I might decide to fill up before I leave town on a long trip, or I might decide to just head out and start it with whatever's already in the tank.
And either way: Refilling will need to happen at some point, just like with an EV.
And that's fine. I'll probably be stopping every couple of hours or so anyway, if I'm doing it right.
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There was a time when I'd cannonball every trip as hard as I could, but it was exhausting to do that. I'd work so hard to minimize travel time ("I must not waste time!") that I was basically useless once I finally arrived at my destination. It was terrible. When I'd finally finish the trip, I would often be in such a bad way that my brain would be fried, my abdominal muscles would hurt, and I was very drained of energy; I was always a dysfunctional asshole who needed a proper nap.
But nowadays, I grant myself the time to take things a little easier and take breaks. This method's on-road time takes longer than a cannonball, but that's OK: It allows me to still be a functional and sane human once I arrive where I'm going.
I mean: I'm not delivering paid-by-the-mile packages here. Rather, I'm going somewhere because I want to enjoy myself when I get there, or because I have work to do (or sometimes a combination of both). Therefore, I do not have to race.
And now that I'm not trying to race from A to B anymore and I choose to take it easy periodically as I go, the trip itself isn't such an exertion.
I can get some fun and/or constructive stuff done once I finally arrive, or if it's appropriate I can lay down for some properly-restorative sleep like a sane person who isn't feeling like they just pulled an all-nighter working on some deeply-involved project that they stubbornly refused to pull myself away from.
The overall time investment of a road trip (including eventual wind-down and recovery) is about the same, but I find that the results are better for the entire duration.
And that's me, with my gas-powered van that can go an astounding 500 miles between refuelling stops.
I don't need that much range to take a long trip; it doesn't help much there at all. And in my normal daily life, the big fuel tank mostly just stretches out the time between visits to my favorite gas station between home and work.
With the long-trip prerogatives I've described, an EV would normally do fine.
And the rest of the time, at least for those whose living situation can allow it: Plugging in at home can often completely eliminate refueling stops during any series of normal weeks. (When EV owners laugh about not being able to remember when the last time they needed to stop at a gas station was, they aren't joking. It works.)
What? I said no such thing. I would hate to wait two hours at a refueling station.
> it’s almost fantasy to sell it as “5-10 minutes every two hours”.
I guess I live in fantasy land then.
Maybe the non-Tesla charging story is crap, but I made conscious choices not to participate in that circus.
I have no range anxiety. I point the car where I want to go, it tells me where to charge and for how long, and it’s earned my trust over many road trips. It hasn’t been wrong yet.