Technology

Lets say you have a 300mi range EV. that sounds great, until you realize you can't actually use it all.

We like to save the bottom 20% for emergencies and battery longevity, and fast charging is too slow above 80% to be worth it, so effectively, on a road trip. only the 20%-80% range is usable. Your 300mi+ range just turned into 180mi of usable range. And then factor in ~10% battery degradation over time, or range reduction in winter conditions, and you could easily have as little as 150mi of actual usable range between charging stops. And that's assuming the charging stations are perfectly spaced apart.

That's only a little more than 2 hours at highway speeds. And that's not along time to be driving, even for a single person. In gas cars, we will regularly do 3-4 hours without stopping at all. And if we do stop for a break, it's rarely at gas stations or places with charging stations. Those are typically awful places to spend the limited amount of time you have on a trip.

In practice, the charging interval is far, far less than the ideal 300mi and far more frequent.

"Nobody stops to fuel their vehicle taking gasoline, gets out, rushes as fast as possible, puts as much fuel in the car as possible, and gets back in the car and drives away"

WTF? This is exactly how I have refeuled every single time I have ever gotten gas. If I could pay a little extra for a pit stop style refuel I would. Who wants to linger around gas fumes, processed "food" , and energy drink boner pills?

A big draw of EV for me is that 99% I don't need to stop anywhere to recharge. If I do though I want it to be as fast as possible.

We have been wanting an EV (something other than a Swasticar) for our next vehicle and think we could deal with the extended charging times required during a long drive or trip, but we ended up ruling it out.

For us the big problem is the difficulty getting parts and service. Service for the models we looked at is only available at dealers (and only some dealers), and parts are regularly not in dealer stock.

We really don't want to risk taking a cross-county trip and having the car break down 200 miles from the nearest mechanic. With the additional real possibility of having to wait weeks (or months) for a part, an EV is not an appealing choice for us, at least not yet.