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Comment by apparent | Hacker News Reader

I have never spent this much time refueling my car. I don't think it's ever taken me more than 3 minutes to actually put gas in the tank. While it may be true that sometimes you have to wait 30-45 seconds for a pump, the wait times on chargers can be much longer because people spend 20 to 30 minutes at each charger.

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Yes, I understand that some people will present contrary anecdotes, but AAA says the average is 15 minutes. And I trust them more than I trust anecdotes from random strangers who show every indication of motivated reasoning.

And to share my own anecdote, I've never once waited for a charger.

Have you ever spent 15 minutes at a gas pump? I can't imagine spending more than 4, and I have an SUV.

Total stop time is not just time spent standing at the gas pump but includes things like going to the bathroom and getting snacks or drinks from the convenience store.

The great thing with an EV is you don’t have to stay there while it charges, so you can do those things in parallel.

You may be thinking of a different context. This is about road trips, not around town fill-ups. On a road trip, people stop to fill the car, get snacks, take a leak, stretch, etc, which is why the average tends to be 15 minutes or so.

You can do faster stops for the weekly fill-up, certainly. But in that case the comparable situation in the EV is zero minutes. The vast majority of owners will spend far fewer minutes on refueling for their EV in a given year even if the road trip stops really did take two or three times as long.

15 minutes seems long. That implies a lot of people are doing something other than getting gas. I guess on a roadtrip I will sometimes eat in a gas station which takes longer - but I don't eat in my car - an unusual rule.

There will definitely be a lot of variance to it. Tank sizes. Pump speed. Some people exclusively fill up at Costco where lines at the pump can be longer. Some shop around a few stations to find a slightly better price. Some make a separate trip to a station at night because they lower prices a bit then.

> Some shop around a few stations to find a slightly better price.

And those people are often bad at math or grossly undervalue their time.

Some people drive 10 minutes out of their way (20 min round trip) to save 5 cents/gallon. Even if you have a 20 gallon tank, that's only saving $1.00. I wouldn't take 20 minutes out of my day just to save $1, even 15 years ago when I was living paycheck-to-paycheck on $10/hr.

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