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Comment by swalling | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn’t needing to stop, it’s charge time and availability.

When I stop with an ICE car during a road trip it’s for 15 minutes max and I know I can do it basically whenever I want. With an EV, you have to carefully plan your road trip around fueling.

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Roadtripping is much nicer in an EV, IMO. You just set your destination, it tells you where and when to stop, you almost always go to the bathroom and eat at those stops anyway. You never deal with gas station bathrooms, you just pop into a Starbucks or whatever. The car is almost always ready to go by the time you are, or maybe you wait 5-10 minutes.

There's an intuition that the minor additional flexibility gas cars give you on a road trip makes the experience better, but in practice I think it's worse.

Is this with a Tesla on their fast charging network? Most companies are standardizing on their plug type and so on, but I don’t want to buy a Tesla for a variety of reasons.

Yes, but the point is it’s not inherent to EVs, regardless of your preferences.

It's only relevant insofar as fast charging stations have a huge impact on how long you have to wait. The fact that basically only the Tesla network offers this is a pretty big limiting factor.

Yes, but it's not really a limiting factor or fair complaint about EVs in general. It is perhaps a limiting factor for people who only consider non-Tesla EVs and don't want to wait for the Tesla Supercharger network to become available to other brands.

I think there are more buyers than you think that don't want a Tesla.

I shouldn't have to say it again but this is not the point.

Outside of few crazy people no normal people drive 5-6h at a time. If you can get out on the highway, plug in and spend 20min doing basic necessities you are find.

The United States is a huge country and lots of people take road trips with 5-6hr drives. If you live in California you can easily do 5+ hours and not even leave the state.

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.

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