> Had they done so, they would have been able to do the 1000 miles with less than 2 hours charge total (ABRP claim 1 h 34 min), very little in comparison of the 17h drive...
My gas car would require one or stops to refuel in order to travel 1,000 miles. That would be a maximum of half an hour total, which is one-third the time it would take to charge. That extra hour to charge is one-eighth of the travel day (I do not drive more than eight hours per day on a road trip if I can avoid it).
Right now, today, an electric vehicle is not suitable for road trips IMHO. That's fine! They are great for daily commuting. But given that I do take road trips, and don't commute daily, my gas-powered car is good enough for me today.
>Hardly anyone needs 600 miles and no one seems concerned that it takes an hour to add 300 km because most people charge overnight.
I could do with a 200km range for my daily commute, but I also have a camping trailer that I'd like to use at least once every year for a 1000km+ trip. This is just not feasible with the current generation of EVs. I could imagine loading up the camping trailer with batteries to give me that 1000+ km range, though that will increase the weight and recharging at the destination is usually impossible.
>> I can bring 100L gasoline with me to add 1000 km range on top of existing 500 range
> This is the big advantage.
No, absolutely not. Who brings 160 lbs of gasoline with them anywhere? That's twice as much as an average cars gas tank. How many people do you know that have ever brought any gas on any trip ever?
The "advantage" of being able to drive 12+ hours without taking a couple hours to charge is absolutely ridiculous. It's not something people do or should do. The only reasonable circumstance is if you're on a camping trip or something, and somehow driving hundreds of miles without passing a source of electricity- in which case yes, use a gas/ethanol car.
In my honest opinion, it's a ridiculous demand that you should be able to drive 800 km without taking more than 5 minutes to stop. It's minimum 6 hours of driving, and like 30-40 minutes of charging. It's petulant to complain about that like it's a real issue.
The real advantage is cost. It costs a lot of money to get a large battery that can charge quickly, when a $20k Civic can do it. Smaller the EV, the slower the charge, and the more inconvenient it is.
> Anticipating your next complaint (“It takes so much longer to recharge!”) - You also save a lot of time by charging at home and never having to stop at a gas station.
This is not really a valid argument. The point isn't how much time you spend refueling over a lifetime, but rather how many miles you can travel in a reasonable day for a long road trip (and how flexible your route can be). If long road trips are important to you and you only have one vehicle, of course you probably don't want it to be an EV.
In my view, EVs are incredible, but they're still a hard sell for most single-car households in America. But people should buy the car that matches their needs! No one is better off when fans of a particular type of car deliberately try to convince people to buy that type of car against their interests.
>I'm going on vacation next week, driving with 2 young children. It'll be about a 11 hour drive which is not crazy for a US vacation. I don't want to plan where I stop and stop for 45 minutes to fuel up with 2 toddlers in the car.
How often do you do this? Once, maybe twice a year? With my current commute i have to go out of my way to get gas every week. It takes at least 15 minutes extra on my way home (but thats only because the gas station on the route is about $1 a gallon more). i'd be prepared to add an hour twice a year in return for getting 15 minutes back 48 times a year. And the annoyance of having to make an unexpected trip when i was planning to get gas the next day (whereas i could keep an EV charged abouve 50% at all times).
> If their new batteries can get 40 miles on a "tank", and be refueled as easily as my car can now, that seems right on the threshold of being a very viable product.
Not really. I go 300 miles between fillups and would like to go more. 10x as many visits to the "energy station" is a huge obstacle.
Not to mention that I often go on trips that are longer than 40 miles. Losing 5 minutes to fillups every 3-40 miles is unworkable. And, I often go places where the gas station density is low, so I'm going to have to fill up more often and there are places that I just can't go on a 3-40 mile tank.
As a commute-only vehicle, 30-40 miles can make sense, but few of us can afford significant money for such an "extra" car.
> his is already solved in technology terms. Battery capacities and charging speeds are already good enough for almost all long-distance travel scenarios.
Really? It seems to me that decent EV ranges are around 150mi right now, with the best ones going to 300mi... meaning they generally might get you halfway from (say) SF to LA, and you can bet that none of them will get you all the way. And that's not even that long of a distance, depending on what your standards are. Now charging times run into multiple hours, right? How is that even remotely close to gasoline?
> If you just want to top up the 30-40 miles that are driven in a day, then 10-12 hours overnight is fine with a regular plug.
Okay, but you probably live in a city in the US, where you don't really drive.
I live in Scotland, and I use my vehicle for work. I don't think I've done less than 100 miles any time I've put the keys in the ignition in years, and quite often I fill the tank a couple of times a day (dual-fuel LPG and petrol) or just burn the dirty stuff.
I don't really "get" what Teslas are for. I don't need something that can accelerate to 60mph faster than if it had been thrown off a cliff - I can't imagine why you'd ever need to accelerate to 60mph flat out - and I don't really have a use for something that'll get me to work and then need charged for three days. Also given that with the cost of electricity and the cost of propane the way it is, it's actually cheaper to drive a V8 Range Rover than a Telsa, I'm just not convinced.
> Also, while we’re on the subject, can we talk for a second about how completely unnecessary a 900-mile EV is? Why not use a battery a third of the size to give us something much more affordable with a still-useful 300-mile range?
I guess the headline they went with is catchier, but this is the real lede. Don't give me a 900-mile battery, give me a 250-mile battery that weighs and costs 1/4 as much. 900 miles is 12 hours of non-stop driving at highway speeds. I can't even conceive why anybody would want a personal car that does that. (Long-haul buses with bathrooms onboard and the ability to seamlessly switch drivers would be great, though trains would be greater still.)
> give consumers worse experience in terms of range, recharge time, and reliability
My expectation was also that switching to electric cars would involve some sacrifice but for my use cases it has been net more convenient.
For daily commuting I plug in at the office garage where they have dozens of L1 and about twenty L2 chargers. This has been more convenient than remembering to stop at a gas pump a couple times a month.
I initially kept a gasolene car for long trips because I assumed it would be inconvenient to schedule a ~30m stop every ~4 hours or so. In practice it turns out I need to stop about that frequently for family members to stretch, use the restroom, and grab a bite, etc. The major difference has been that it constrains where we stop rather than when we stop.
However, if you are regularly doing 5+ hour trips in rural or remote areas, then a gasolene or diesel vehicle is a more convenient choice. As they build out a more comprehensive charging infrastructure the difference may lessen.
I cannot speak to reliability as we've only had them for a year now.
The base model 3 has an epa range of 270 miles. Say you cut that in half, that's 135 miles a day. If you personally drive more than 135 miles in one day and don't want to stop to charge, and have serious range anxiety, then EVs aren't ready for you. But your experience and requirements are far outside the norm.
> There are also barely any charging stations along this route, if at all.
> I assume all Tesla drivers who are frequent road trippers have a gas car too?
IME, a Tesla is great for a road trip.
- Everyone knows when the next stop is.
- Gives a good break for the driver (or to swap off at fairly consistent intervals)
- Allows a nice quick break for the driver during charge.
It probably comes from a misunderstanding of the charging needed. You usually only charge between a low % and what you need for the next stop. 0% to 80% at a v3 SC ends up being ~30 minutes and you usually don't even need that.
By the time everyone goes to the bathroom and stretches their legs we've been ready to head out.
Plus AP for lanekeep (basic, not FSDj) makes it super enjoyable.
> but that same car is used for vacation trips in summer and winter with the whole family.
Right, and the charging network isn't _that_ bad, is it? Like, I've now done 4 cross country trips in the US (PA <-> FL <-> WA) in both summer, and winter. With the pre-heat-pump-for-heating Tesla Model 3. I basically had to charge one to two times a day, for about 20-30 minutes each time. This was genuinely a good way to force me to stop and take a break too.
I don't really consider these cars a limitation for long distance trips either?
> Besides, how is this different than a gasoline-powered vehicle?
My gas car has a 700mi range so its simply not an issue as I tend to not drive that long on a day trip. I have the X% fuel spare for N hours of emergency heating so long as I do say < 600mi/day. I can drive indefinitely in my gas car while keeping the fuel meter over half tank and that doesn't cause any inconvenience in terms of extra stops. Doing that with an EV (never going under say 50% charge) would be inconvenient.
The same would be true for battery cars once the range is enough. And the problem of course would exist for an ICE car with a shorter range.
> Since Americans have been promised a one-to-one substitute for their gas cars, this seems like a failure; an EV should be able to do everything a gas car can. This idea persists even though in 2023 the average US driver traveled only about 40 miles a day, and in 2022 about 93% of US trips were less than 30 miles. Still, in a survey conducted by Ipsos last fall, 73% of respondents indicated they had concerns about EV range.
This right here is the problem. For >99% of your yearly trips you do not need the range. EV's aren't 100% replacements of ICE. They are a replacement for urban, interurban and trips under 500 km range. For my country, for example, there's no two way trip that is longer than 200 km, and the ones that are are so rare and usually overnight so you have charging figured out.
> If you do this, you will have a terrible experience! EVs charge ultra fast when the battery is low. You are supposed to drive them down to say 10%, then charge up to around 50% repeatedly. This takes.. 10 minutes. You drive for 200 miles or so, stop for 10 minutes, repeat.
I'm not sure why you're basing this off the assumption current EV's have 500 miles of range... (10->50% of 500 miles would be those 200 miles you're driving)
With actual EV's being more like 250-300, 10->50% is only 100-120 miles. Which leads me to...
> It's pretty reasonable to take a 10 minute break every 2.5 hours.
That's more like a 10 minute break every 90 minutes, and not very reasonable for trips taking 5-10 hours.
And that's why EVs as currently pitched will NEVER take off. Heck you probably lost the majority of readers of this site, many of which probably have pretty pro-EV leanings when you start blaming the user.
If you are trying to win someone over to your side, telling them they are doing it wrong is NOT a great way to keep them engaged or convince them.
For example - you could point out that sure, EVs don't work exactly the same way as gasoline cars, but for these trade offs you get these other benefits.
Not by hitting them over the head with "your doing it wrong". Good grief.
>I bet, that when you go on a 500 mile drive, you are stopping that often to use the facilities and get some food already. Nothing changes.
Granted I'm probably not most people, but I'm far from in a minority that when I'm doing a long drive I just go. The only time I stop is to get more fuel which I may combine with a meal, maybe not. And I've never had that take more than 30 minutes. I've crossed the US in three days more times than I care to admit and have maybe one more of those trips left to face. And that's leaving me some nice time to have dinner/sleep and a decent breakfast before setting back out. Someone really motivated could probably do it in two but I think it's important to get good sleep when on those kinds of drives. Waiting around 45 minutes every 200-300 miles is ludicrous.
While I don't relish those trips, I relish being at my destination more than I do the drive to get there so an EV would be a huge downgrade and handicap. And at least one, if not two more nights of hotel bills. No thanks!
> The idea of adding hours to such a trip, or turning it into an overnight trip, makes it a non-starter for me.
> If people are using EVs on freeways, wouldn't they be more inclined to exit the freeway into a city and charge at a motel or a shopping centre while they stop overnight or at least a few hours?
Yes you're right on the money.
I bought an EV to drive around my home area in CA. Instead I've just used it for road-tripping back East to see family.
Each road-trip has convinced me how bad these cars are for long-range driving. Aside from "range anxiety" (going only from one supercharger location to another, and not venturing away) - the charging times are brutal for cross-country trips.
You will spend hours per day, hours, sitting in back of Holiday Inn Expresses in the middle of nowhere Kansas, or in back of a shady truck stop in the middle of Texas.
Safety as well: I've thought about if I were a female for example at some of these locations it wouldn't be safe to be alone, with nobody around, sitting in your car. You're unable to start it and drive away if it's plugged in, not without getting out to unplug it which you have to do manually (there's no emergency eject charger cable button). So if there is a Texas Chainsaw Killer outside your window you're screwed.
Having said all that. It is a perfect car for just driving around my neighborhood IF that's what I intended to. In practice, I never do it.
> If you only drive far once in a while, then i think an ev is fine... you can always rent/take a train/miss a flight... might be worth it to save the planet :)
Not a lot of people live that close to a transit station. That's why they have to drive a long distance.
> a model s with supercharging only adds about 1.5 x on a really long trip (less if you stop overnight every 8 hrs as you should anyway)
I have two adults, we trade off. We can easily drive 16+ hours in a day.
Also, even on a short trip it adds a lot of time. I can make it from my house in NorCal to my parents in SoCal in just under five hours without stopping, but there is no Tesla that can make the whole drive on one charge. I'd have to stop for at least 45 minutes extra (that's a 15% increase).
I still want to go all electric, and plan to do so as soon as someone makes a fully electric minivan, but I'm not going to downplay the inconvenience of electric.
> Citing the time to charge an empty car is such a disingenuous argument; if you have ever lived with an EV you'd know that's very rarely what you do.
I've been very annoyed by online discourse that ignores that simple fact, but in this case the primary utility of a portable option would be on that cross-country drive. If you're just making small trips and topping it up, you're no better off than if you just charged overnight at home.
My gas car would require one or stops to refuel in order to travel 1,000 miles. That would be a maximum of half an hour total, which is one-third the time it would take to charge. That extra hour to charge is one-eighth of the travel day (I do not drive more than eight hours per day on a road trip if I can avoid it).
Right now, today, an electric vehicle is not suitable for road trips IMHO. That's fine! They are great for daily commuting. But given that I do take road trips, and don't commute daily, my gas-powered car is good enough for me today.
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