does any Tesla owner have an issue with how long it takes to charge a Tesla? And IIUC it has to be charged more often than a similar Toyota with a full tank.
According to Tesla's website, it takes 30 min to charge with a supercharger. That seems much less convenient than the 2 or so minutes it takes to fill a tank.
45 minutes is only if you are trying to charge over 80% which you don’t actually want to do. Unlike gas tanks that have a consistent fill rate, batteries are like a sponge where near empty the charge/fill rate is much much faster than when it’s nearly full. 20% to 80% is about 10 /15 minutes depending on how new the super charger station is. This gives you about another 3 hours of normal highway driving or so depending on conditions like temperature, 70mph+ and how hilly/windy the drive is. However, if you time the stop around meal times then you can take 45 minutes to charge to fill while you are eating at a restaurant.
Sadly, it is true most non Tesla chargers are terrible and require you make an account/give up personal information first and are not maintained well. Tesla does as well but the stations are maintained and the account signup happens when you buy the car so you just plug it in and charge.
There needs to be a just a pay and fill chargers like gas pumps but that doesn’t fly with todays VC vultures.
Electrify America was built by Volkswagen as punishment for the diesel scandal. They have zero interest in maintaining them.
This is a normal misunderstanding from someone who doesnt have an electric car. Attaching an electric charging cable to a Tesla takes approx 8 seconds. It takes way longer driving to a gas station to fill up and drive home.
Takes around 30min to 80% charge a Tesla. Have you ever been to a rental car lot? It's almost always full of cars. And when not full, it's because of the same event everyone is renting for, which doesn't indicate fast turnarounds. There's plenty of extra inventory to charge all the Teslas between customers.
IMO, charging time is a non issue for people with personal garages. I have owned a Model S for a year, and the only time charging time is a factor is when I am doing long road trips. For everyday use, my car gets charged overnight in my garage. I am actually very happy that I have to never make that weekly drive to the gas station.
This is becoming less true every year. Tesla now has 250kW superchargers, and there are even 350kW CCS chargers starting to be installed. In practice, for a Model 3, this means that you can charge the battery up to about half in 15 minutes.
For a long day of driving, say, 700 miles, assuming charging available at both ends, this means two charging stops of 15 minutes each instead of one gas stop of 5 minutes.
IMO while this can always be improved, this is now at the "good enough" point for long distance driving. Obviously to make this a true reality, there needs to be widespread charging available in parking lots, and more 250kW Superchargers, but progress towards this is rapid.
> And then the EV has to stop and charge for a couple hours.
Also, it isn't a couple of hours at all. 10% to 90% charge in model 3 takes about 50 minutes using a V2 supercharger (the most ubiquitous one) and about 40 mins using a V3 supercharger.
And both take much faster to get to lower percentages, due to the charge rate curve looking more like a log(1/x) graph, with rapid charge rate at the beginning that slows down the more your car is charged.
This isn’t discussed very often, but if you have an old model, like we do, the Charging a Tesla takes forever. Out 225 mile range battery takes 1.5-2 hours to get to full charge.
Some would say that’s not necessary, but there are certain stretches of the road where we came down to Zero miles, after having full 100% charge.
It doesn’t feel great to almost run out of power at midnight with two young kids, in the middle of nowhere.
Sounds like you might not know how to charge properly. I’ve discovered that a lot of Tesla owners don’t. Five hours, for how many miles of a trip?
Edit: Or maybe you did not buy the long range model, in which case you are forced to charge up into the top of the range, where charging is slowest. Yeah that’s bad.
According to Tesla it takes 1h15m for a full charge. If you don't happen to be around a supercharger and have to use a 240v outlet you're looking at 9.5h for a full charge.
It only takes ~20mins to charge a Tesla from 10% to 85% at a SuperCharger station. For 3 stops, he likely only added ~45 mins. If you round up and add time getting on/off the highway, plugging in and unplugging, he maybe added an hour to the overall trip. Newer Superchargers (v3) are higher power and reduce the charge time further.
Tesla fast charging at Superchargers is closer to 15-30 minutes, depending on several factors (temperature, battery pack size, state of charge, etc). I have had some 45-60 minute outliers on rare occasions, but it isn’t the norm (over my ~30k miles of road tripping).
The latest generation of cars and chargers don't need an hour to charge. A Tesla Model 3 can already charge at 250 kW, which is over 1000 miles per hour. Practically speaking, that means a decent charge in less than 20 minutes. On a long trip, most stops for gas take around that long anyway by the time you use the restroom, buy supplies, eat, etc.
The newest chargers being installed today go up to 350 kW, so the charging infrastructure is being future-proofed for even faster charging as the cars improve.
The charging rate is very low when there are many Teslas charging at a station so sometimes it could take 3-4x longer than usual when at a busy location. I'd expect to be charged the same amount in those cases.
People draw a lot of scary conclusions based on what they know about bad EV choices.
It all depends on what car you choose.
With Teslas at least, you don’t sit for an hour, since they have fast chargers all over the place. In other cars, yes.
Some of our charges are 5-10 minutes. On a road trip most are 20-30 minutes. The longest charge is if you need to get to a place that is near the edge of your range, which is
exceedingly rare, even on long road trips. In those highly unusual cases you might have to charge for 45-50 minutes for that one leg of the trip, if you didn’t arrive with half a charge already. Again this is with a supercharger. Other cars… yes, scary charge times. (You will hear about how some cars… Porsche… can charge at a faster rate, but the chargers to support this are rare, so their fast rate is often not possible and they are stuck at a slow charger for hours.)
Also with other cars you are sitting there alone often at a single plug station. With Tesla chargers you are generally not alone, you are with other Tesla owners who have your back if anything suspicious starts happening around the area.
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