You know you can stop in a gasoline powered car and take breaks if you want or feel tired. But I cant imagine being forced to take an extra 1-1.5 hours whether I want to or not.
This feels like a post-hoc rationalization to me. I drive a Tesla and I do often find the breaks annoying. I would prefer to drive straight through rather than stand in some random parking lot for 30 minutes. Even if I want a break, I’d prefer to find a park or something. You can take a break whenever you want with any car, the car doesn’t need to force you.
Given that I don't know of a single driver actually obeying the rules about mandatory breaks for long-distance travel, yes, I'd definitely want a similar situation with respect to sleep.
There is something weird about driving that makes most people feel they're smarter and better than everyone else, so they can ignore traffic laws at their discretion. That attitude costs quite a lot of lives every year.
The reason people will say that sounds unreasonable is the fact that the vast majority of people will probably be discomforted more by having to drive almost 1000 km with only one stop compared to having to stop two or three times to take bathroom breaks or eat. Not to even mention the fact that it is not safe for you or others to drive that long just one break.
Bloody hell, how much non-stop driving are you doing? If you're driving a solid 12 hours a day, that is only three 18-minute breaks, one of which is your lunch break.
Speaking as a child subjected to routine 2 hour road trips each way (often coming back the next day, once in a while the same day) and occasionally much longer road trips:
Stop the damned car and let your family out for fuck's sake.
Just because you can drive >4 hours nonstop doesn't mean you should drive 4 hours nonstop (I did on a solo road trip earlier this year. I forgot a piece of equipment and didn't realize until I was 5 miles out of town, so I had to 'make up time'. It was still a mistake.) Complaining that you can't drive 6 hours nonstop is some form of insanity that I am not qualified to diagnose.
Personally I'd love to be able to just relax on longer road trips rather than driving. Taking the 2 hour trip back to my parent's neck of the woods is much less annoying if I don't have to drive it too.
I don't think you'd ever want to take a road trip with me. One of the big reasons I bought a VW TDI is that I can go for 8+ hours without stopping at all.
I want the freedom to take a short trip to the store or a long trip to visit friends and family, without waiting to leave. I'm not a big fan of the actual driving part, but there's no way to avoid it without depending on another human being and their car.
On most people almost never make such drives. This has been pretty well researched. And those that do most of the time stop and make 15min breaks at least.
So the whole issue is that on very, very long drive you might lost 15min. That not the end of the world.
The recommended safety advice is to stop every two hours or so and rest for fifteen minutes each time. Otherwise you increase your chances of having an accident due to fatigue.
The EU rules for driving HGV allow you to drive 2 hours, have a 15 minute break, drive a further 2.5 hours and have a 30 minute break. Those are enforced by law and tachographs
If you're driving long distance, you should be stopping for a break every hour or two just to stretch your body and keep mentally alert. These stops are not quite the right rhythm, but they are not a bad idea either.
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