With fast charging you typically only stop for 15-25 minutes, the infotainment or app does the planning for you, and the frequency you'll have to stop at matches the natural frequency people typically need to stop anyways by design.
I can see how EV cars are good options for people who live in the city and only go grocery shopping, but for people who have family scattered around the country / continent with young children or babies, it sounds extremely inconvenient.
And what if, unlike you, I can manage to sit down for more than 2-3 hours?
The mental gymnastics are so weird to read. It's like .. for a horrible analogy, you're trying to defend a power drill which no longer drills, by saying "well hey, it works just fine, as long as you want to use it as a hammer and not as a drill, and hey, having to rotate it manually to actually screw something in is actually a good thing because it's good exercise".
Sure, if you need to charge exactly when your family gets hungry or tired and you happen to be exactly at a Supercharger, and the restaurant is exactly the kind of restaurant you like, it's not worse (but not better either) than traditional cars. If any of those conditions are not met, it's now an inconvenience charging your car.
In my experience (Europe), you can't really drive longer than 10 minutes without passing by a petrol station, and you can put gas in your car, pay, and leave easily under five minutes. Then, if everyone in the car feels like it, you can drive again for hours. If someone wants to eat, you can look up which restaurant you want to go to, and stop there. Eat your sandwiches at the top of the mountain while the sun is shining! Or pick anything else you want, Thai, local, Burger King, or get some snacks at a supermarket. ! I can decide which restaurant I go to or where I take my 30 min break, and it is not decided for me by the charger network.
I don’t have an EV, but do drive long distances a lot. I regularly drive for six hours without stopping. I have been scoping out the feasibility of getting an EV and it seems that the Long Range style vehicles would just almost fit into my traveling without any disruption.
To each their own.
This isn’t really an EV topic but a philosophy of life topic: do you plan to have a relaxed time or do you push thru to minimize your metrics. Funny these people seem to end up in couples.
Tho, on the EV topic, my son now borrows the Tesla for roads trips and has discovered that long trips are faster going 65 than 75 or 80 or whatever he was doing because the increased efficiency cuts down on total charge time. He has been showing up to places early. It’s weird.
And you bring this up as an advantage of EVs, it's mind blowing.
Sure, if EVs work out for you, that's awesome, but let's not pretend that the 20 minutes wait time cannot be a disadvantage for some people.
Personally I want 3 days for a trip like that.
There's a local DCFC that's really fast to 80%, and a fair amount of 5-7kw chargers that are SUPER cheap at places I go near.
I've learned to just live more slowly because of it and I'm ok with that. I drive slower and safer, I know when I need to charge might be a good time to take a walk or grocery shop or something, and I just kind of plan around that.
Heck, sometimes I sit there and read a book in peace and quiet. I can't speak for people who have kids; I might not want to deal with that, but as a married adult without kids I'm totally fine.
It never made sense before because I didn't have anywhere to plug an EV in nor did I want the hassle of street parking two vehicles. I have a 4x4 for offroading, mountain biking, and other weekend trips but getting around town on bike/foot/transit was faster day to day.
Now that I have a house and land getting an EV as a daily driver for the 20 to 100 mile round trips I take into town/the city actually makes sense since I have plenty of space to keep multiple cars, can install the necessary charging (and solar) equipment, and don't want to die riding my bicycle on unlit country roads.
i'm sure happy path traveling is great, but it becomes stressful as hell very quickly
"I did a long trip no problem", you say.
Would that have been as pleasant if 10x the number of electric cars were on the road? If you had to wait 45 minutes for a charger to become available due to demand? I doubt it. I have an EV (not a Tesla, one on the CHAdeMO standard) and I love, love, love it for driving around the city, but I don't dare take it on longer trips. Even doing a lot of driving in a single day is dicey in the winter.
Until the charging network is as ubiquitous and reliable as gasoline pumps, EV's will remain a niche.
https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=5335.0
(I once paid close to $10 USD / gallon (after converting from cpl) diving from Banff to Jasper at a station that had 4 pumps and on that day, a 10 minute wait to get to one of the pumps)
> the road, at the beginning, should be signed with "speed limit enforced by unmarked frost heaves".