this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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If I want to go anywhere out of my state, I now need to budget nearly an hour every 200 ish miles for charging. That turns what used to be a 6 hour trip into closer to 8 or 9.
It would take most of the charge range just for me to get to anything interesting, and now not only do I have hours of driving to do, but also hours of sitting around doing nothing.
A gas car can be fully refilled in 5 minutes and be ready for another 300 miles of driving. Electrics just don’t have the appeal to someone like me who makes somewhat regular trips over distances. I’d love to take trains, but that’s not viable in my area, so I’m sticking with gas cars for now.
Not an hour, I regularly go from STL to Chicago in my electric car and it adds 25 min if im driving right back. If I'm staying overnight and plug-in it only adds 15. That's also when I go to the bathroom and get a snack.
Just like… you know… filling a normal car up with gas. Take a piss, grab some jerkey, have a smoke if that’s your thing, go on reddit for a minute, then keep driving.
It’s not hard. The paradigm is barely changing. I genuinely don’t get how people fail to understand that.
I get the hesitation though. You see gas stations everywhere, if you don't know what you're looking for you don't see charger stations. My car was the last gas thing I had, mower, trimmer, I already had solar panels from a Illinois solar program. I love taking friends on trips with it and then seeing that it's not scary. I have run into broken chargers twice. Once from vandalism but thankfully it still worked for me as I registered my car so it automatically uses my account to charge when plugged in. The other was a software issue that they had to send someone out to hard reset. Reminds me I told them it would be a cool idea to have registered/trained people that get free charging credits for fixing ones they come across.
As nifty as repair bounties would be, I think there’s approximately zero chance of that happening, simply because of the liability implications. Tesla’s staff counsel would categorically refuse to sign off on that. High-voltage electrics are a far cry from delivering someone’s takeout orders.
Wow, that sucks. I guess Canada is further ahead in that. Electric car charging is 20 minutes per 3 hours here. I can see why it would make a big difference if it's an hour for your chargers.
It could also be the software for your car isn't well optimized, they should ideally be having you stop around 25% battery and charging up to around 75% if you are trying to make the best time. The software should inject the stops as close as possible to that ideal if you tell it to prioritize speed.
But if the only chargers you have on your route are that slow, then I guess there isn't much you can do but hope companies don't stop funding the R and D and contsruction of more up to date ones.
I don’t think it’s the chargers, but the vehicles. Someone correct me if I’m wrong since I’m only familiar with Tesla, but enroute chargers do tend to be super/fast chargers already, and destination chargers really don’t need to be.
A fast charger is theoretically fast enough but vehicles only use its full power for a short time. each vehicle has a curve of the power it can use, where it’s usually not using the full capacity of the charger. I really think we mostly just need improved vehicles, and they have been improving over time
I was mostly being facetious, I don't think it's any different in Canada. The guy was just wrong about it taking an hour every 2 hours of driving.