How about "Someone who has to rush to a loved one on a very short notice" ?
Sure, it's a worst case scenario.
How about "someone who's traveling on the exact same bank holiday as the rest of the country, and will not for the love of any deity wait for an hour on a packed highway station while every one is recharging ?"
My point is not that "it's what people actually need 99% of the time", but that "the worst case" is the bar to clear.
Ironically, it's kinda the same issue as electricity grids, except you can't buy range from your neighbors.
Oh, and it has to be cheap, too, by the way.
I honestly though it would be done by the 20s. It's getting harder and harder to argue for EVs every year that goes by without such a model - which also happens to be "every year that goes by without me being able to afford an EV".
Mechanically, over 300 miles, you take an airplane rather then drive 5 hours to your destination if it’s a life of death situation. Making bigger batteries is a giant waste of resources there.
Good luck getting a flight that fast. Sometimes driving overnight can still be faster. Especially if you need to get somewhere after you get to the airport as well.
Unless you're flying directly into your final destination, I would argue driving is probably faster for everything assuming you need to leave in 12 hours or less. Not to mention exponentially cheaper (ignoring depreciation).
In Europe, I would agree that flying could often be easier and/or cheaper. In the US, I can drive 500 miles (800~km) in 8 hours or less, passing through a few major cities with light/moderate traffic.
When you take into account airport travel, security time, the actual flight time, and leaving the airport, that is often 4+ hours for a 1 hour flight. Short haul flights also only tend to run once or twice a day unless you're traveling between busy cities, so you need to factor that waiting time in as well.
For a middle-age (+) person with friends and family that are starting to die of old age, being able to drop everything and drive overnight to say goodbye could be really important to them. This is something I had not really considered before when thinking about EV charging speeds. Until now, I had really only thought about vacations or business travel, which is not that time sensitive.
Good thing that we read the front page of HN every day, so we can just hop in the closest Hyperloop for the bulk of the trip, then travel the last mile in an autonomous electric flying robotaxi to visit our loved ones - who are not dying anyway because their desease has been crispr-ed away in the metaverse by an AGI.
Not sure how you're going to travel the ~100km from the closest airport to the place you need to go, if you happen to have the audacity to dare having to reach people living in "the middle of nowhere".
I completely agree this is a giant waste of resource to do that with the current battery tech, and that it results in completely unaffordable, suboptimal cars that most people can neither afford nor agree to buy.
Which is also why we need better tech yesterdecade.
The situation really has to improve a lot before the end of the 20s arrive, otherwise we'll see civil unrest unlike anything you can imagine. Our next election cycles in Europe will be 50/50 immigration ("they're coming from your job") and transportation ("they're coming for you car !"). Guess who wins this game ?
This is a huge problem. While Tesla has portable superchargers that they bring out on bank holidays to handle extra demand, everyone else is super bad at handling peak capacity (I only charge at home, except on holidays, when everyone else is vying for the same chargers!).
I'm dreaming of being able to drive an EV from Seattle to Anchorage, so that kind of range would reduce the amount of time spent at RV parks (until BC hydro completes their EV charging network in northern BC, then it won't matter as much anymore).
