—
Owner of an EV that would take days to charge on 120V
Of course, there are caveats. If it is cold and the vehicle has to be charged at the street, charge times will be much longer. But he's right that people often underestimate the usefulness of L1 charging, even though it would literally take days.
Coincidentally, in this thread we have people talking about a car that ran out at the airport and required a tow. L1 is perfect for airport parking.
Seems like you're then trapped in a corner case that you can't get out of: not enough energy to allow for any kind of charge at all.
Even if the charger is working perfectly, the first 30 minutes might be spent just running the battery heater. It might even be worse with rear drive model 3, which unfortunately might also be a big part of the Uber rental fleet.
It is a really odd situation, so most people would likely be seeing it for the first time.
If it has been in operation, there would have been no problem charging in the cold.
The last couple of days have been different. People have left their cars in the parking lot for hours, which effectively is what OOS did in their test.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/chicago-area-superch...
And then you have a cascade of drivers going from charger to charger looking for an open plug.
Or, you could take care of your car as recommended and if a battery preheat will help, use scheduled departure features and plug it in if needed and possible.
I've never seen this scenario happen in the real world, but I guess we've found one weird edge case where it can happen.
The comment could be someone in Europe (etc) where "an outlet" means 220-240V, with a continuous power of around 2500-3500W, depending on the regulations in that country.
I live in Toronto, own a Kona EV, and am lucky enough to have a garage. I've literally never needed anything more than 120V except when going on >300km car trips. Any daily commute that wouldn't be handled by an overnight charge at 120V probably isn't a commute I'd put up with even with an ICE vehicle.
You seem to be making a common mistake of thinking that one always needs to charge from empty to full in every charge. Not so. A common scenario would be arriving home with 190 miles of range left on the battery, and plugging in. After a few minutes, you have to go out again, no problem. Eventually you come home for the night with 160 miles of charge left, and plug in again. Overnight you get let’s say (super slow case) 40 miles and now you’re at 200 or more. Not the problem you are envisioning.
You may also be forgetting that public fast chargers which can be used in a pinch do exist.
220 is also an option so let’s not restrict ourselves to 110/120.
But if we must talk about 110, I’ll point out that we survived just fine for 2 years with 2 BEVs sharing (alternating cars) ONE 110 outlet in an apartment after laboring, like many mistakenly do, under the false assumption that you still carry that it was not an option, for an entire year, before we realized that it was totally doable. It worked great. We also used fast chargers when needed but they were not needed very often.
Ignorance is definitely a thing, but it works both ways.