> I like Teslas a lot, but gave you ever been on a road trip in one?
Not a Tesla but a different EV. I've taken it on about a dozen road trips over the years. It's been fine. I pull off the highway, plug in, go grab a quick snack, get back in the car and go on my way. On a several hour drive it adds an extra 20 minutes assuming I'm not stopping at all in the ICE, not that big of a deal. And honestly I should be doing that stretch break, and I'm often stopping for a meal anyways.
It takes however long I need to charge it to reach my next destination, whether that be the final destination or the next charging stop. Maybe I'm charging for 10 minutes, maybe I'm charging for 20. When I'm on a road trip, there's rarely a reason to charge for more than 20 minutes at any given stop.
The rate of charging is a curve, where at a low state of charge you can dump a lot of energy into very rapidly. When its nearly full, you can't charge it as fast without risking damaging the battery.
This is a massive simplification and not quite what's really going on, but think of the battery having a lot of holes to stick electrons in. If the electrons you're pumping in don't smoothly find a hole, it might damage the battery. When the battery is low, there's lots of holes, electrons can just fly in and they'll probably hit an empty spot. When its nearly full, you have to carefully put the electrons into the holes or else you'll damage it. This is kind of what's going on with charging speeds.
So you probably see these charging times of over an hour or whatever to go 0-100%, but the more important stat to look at is the 0-80% charge time which is often like 20 minutes. That 0-80% time will often be like 20min but the 80-100% can often be another hour or more on top of that.
When I stop to charge the car on a road trip the time I take is usually like 10-20 minutes. There's no reason to spend more time than that, because the charging speed drops dramatically that its not usually worth it unless I really need that last 20% of range. Which I usually don't, because there's usually other spots to charge. And then I get where I'm going and the car will be sitting for a few hours and can charge at whatever speed it wants, I'm not needing it.
FWIW though, I spend way more time in my life pumping gas in my ICE than I do waiting on my EV to charge, even including the time I've spent on road trips on the EV. This is even with my EV having significantly more miles on it over the past few years. Its a question of if I spend an extra 15 minutes a few times a year or more than five minutes every other week.
Not a Tesla but a different EV. I've taken it on about a dozen road trips over the years. It's been fine. I pull off the highway, plug in, go grab a quick snack, get back in the car and go on my way. On a several hour drive it adds an extra 20 minutes assuming I'm not stopping at all in the ICE, not that big of a deal. And honestly I should be doing that stretch break, and I'm often stopping for a meal anyways.