Heavy trucks too?
Perhaps the answer is that today’s heavy trucks (and buses?) are in fact underpowered and should eventually be replaced with ones having electric engines.
I do not perceive a right lane merge problem with my car/SUV. But there’s a left lane merge interstate entrance near the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania that I find both harrowing and hard to avoid. I do not really think a more powerful engine would much help me, but I admit it could be a slight plus.
Ours are somewhere in the middle- usually 10-15 minutes at most. Everyone but me piles out, goes to the bathroom, gets anything they want, while I pump gas, and then I trail in and go to the bathroom. If we’re in a hurry I tell my wife or kids what I want and they get it while I’m pumping, and they check out while I’m in the bathroom. If not, then I trail behind them by a few minutes. Either way, it’s never a half-hour, unless we’re unfortunate enough to end up at Bucee’s and have to deal with the massive crowds.
Yes, i often pick up a bunch of people and drive 3.5 hours or so. Often, i realize i need gas at the start of the trip, so i stop for gas, and then we take off. If the drive overlaps lunch time, we stop somewhere for lunch and restrooms. Otherwise, we just drive through.
I don’t do “road trips”. I’ll fly if that will be faster. But i often need to drive 2-4 hours to get somewhere, and rarely, 5-6 hours.
And yes, I’m in the Northeast, where most rest areas sell fast food, or at least have a bunch of vending machines.
Mine too (Kia Niro, BEV). All my charging is regenerative braking. But my C-max PHEV told me how efficiently i was generating power every time i braked, too.
You always use regen to some extent, I think. It’s just a question of whether you need supplemental brake-pad breaking. Well, except when the battery is completely full. Sometimes, if i brake right after leaving the house, i get a little warning about not being able to use regenerative braking because the battery is full.
The c-max was much too chatty for safety, and it took me a month to learn to ignore it. But i did learn what it felt like to brake each way. And i can tell in my Niro. It feels a little different, although i have no clue how to describe it.
That’s what I’m getting at- it’s frustrating to think that I would have to plan trips around where I can charge my EV, especially if that plan involves also going out of the way or having the chargers in weird places like car dealerships without amenities.
I mean, if say… Shell or Exxon decided to start putting EV charging stations at every one of their gas stations, that would be a game changer. You’d have the charging stations right in the same places where gas stations are- no having to exit the freeway and drive to the other side of town to charge at a random charging station or something, then go eat, because there’s no restaurant right there.
That’s the point I’m trying to make- right now, ICE and hybrid vehicles are freeing, but with the current state of EV charging infrastructure, they’re restricting in a relative sense. Better than not having a car at all of course.
Some gas stations are adding EV chargers. For example, the Buc-ee’s chain is adding them to some locations, as are Pilot Truck Stops.
But have you tried mapping out a sample route? Check out google maps. Enter your home and your destination. It will map the route. Then click the EV Charging button on the map.
Between LA and the SF Bay Area, around 400 miles or less, there are at least 20, and they all have a lot of chargers and plenty of food options.
In the car we’re considering, we’d probably need to charge once, maybe twice at best, and we’d certainly need lunch in the middle.
You don’t really want it at the gas station. You want it at a mall, or a restaurant parking lot, it a full-service rest area. It’s way more convenient to charge while you eat lunch or at least have someplace indoors to sit down.
As does mine. If I am low, but decide to make it home, I can put on all the power-saving features, turn off climate control, and drive in such a way the I charge almost as much as I discharge. I can go about 8 miles on the odometer before the power gauge goes down 1 electric mile.
And there is a bar on mine that makes it clear when you are using power above 1 electric mile per mile driven (blasting the AC or accelerating quickly), using electric miles, but fewer than 1 per mile driven, or regenerating through braking, or using 1-pedal driving.
And you know whether you are using the brake or 1-pedal driving.
You can buy Tesla adapters for many models, but be careful you buy not just for your make, but model, year, and body style, or it may not work.
They are pretty expensive, too, though as someone I know put it, “The mean cost is about 3 times getting your car with a dead battery towed, or 10 times the power you waste getting to and from a station you can use.”
I have never let my battery run down to “tow,” and I don’t have to drive around looking for a station, or ever even drive much out of my way, but in any event, I do about 98% of my charging at home.
FWIW, one of my few annoyances with owning an EV has been finding a working fast charger on a trip. I’ve tried I think 5 different apps to find a charger, and they’re all confusing and unreliable. Among my experiences has been:
-Getting to a Tesla charger only to find out that my car requires a special adapter in order to use it (which I didn’t realize).
-Getting to a dealership charger only to see that they keep cars parked in those spots and only allow people to use their chargers if they bought the car from the dealership.
-At least twice, getting to a charger only to find that it’s out of order.
-Getting to a charger only to find that it costs more than double what other chargers cost.
So far, even using apps to track chargers down, if I’m on a new route, it’s more common than not for me to have to stop at more than one charger location before I find one that works. And yeah, that’s really frustrating.
But when I’m on a route that I’ve gone on before, I know where the good chargers are, and I can stop there. And even with all the frustrating time spent tracking down working chargers, over the long term I think I spend less time “refueling” my car than I would with a gas car: the vast majority of the time, refueling takes less than thirty seconds, between plugging in my home charger, and putting it back on the wall mount when I’m done.
Thirty seconds, once a week, averaged with the occasional frustration of a road trip? I’ll take it.
My friend the EV pioneer recommends the plugshare app. I haven’t used it except to poke around, but it includes user reviews, and can do stuff like filter out dealers.
Plugshare is a good app for finding working chargers because it’s crowdsourced and not brand specific. It can filter by your specific car and filter out dealers, Tesla and Rivian exclusive locations (they’re opening up to other brands but not all at once), private businesses, etc. You can check recent reports of every station.
Even with that, though, there is a lot of variance in where chargers are. On our last couple of road trips, we charged at a Pilot full-service truck stop gas station (good), an abandoned restaurant next to some woods (creepy and partially broken), a mall with both Tesla and off-brand chargers (fine), a grocery store (fine but really crowded), a casino (way out in the corner of the big lot, and slow and occupied), a parking lot with no amenities (but at least it charged), another parking lot with nothing (but walking distance to a brewpub, thankfully), a hotel (hard to find and all occupied), a parking garage (whose chargers, we found out too late, were valet only).
None of the experiences were great. Some were tolerable. We didn’t WANT to go to any of those places. Every road trip becomes planned around the needs of the vehicle instead of where and when we would like to stop. Especially as a vegetarian & vegan, there’s nothing for us to eat at most rest stops and restaurants and malls, and the places we like to eat at don’t have chargers. Many of the charging locations don’t even have bathrooms or vending machines. So 99% of the time we have to stop just to charge the car, and pray that there’s some business within walking distance to patronize. There isn’t always. Many of the chargers were in poor condition and broken. Some of the working ones had such massive cables and chargers my partner (who’s a reasonably fit woman in her 30s) couldn’t comfortably lift it and plug it in. It took all my physical strength as a grown ass man to do so, uncomfortably, in freezing weather in the dark. I can’t imagine an old granny trying to do that.
You never have to worry about any of that with an ICE road trip.
This is largely regional, of course. In denser, richer, more liberal areas, it’s almost never an issue. The SF to LA corridor is probably the best case scenario, and it goes downhill from there the more into the boonies you get. In Oregon it’s not terrible and not great, but it’s definitely something you not only have to plan for but plan AROUND. You can’t just go where you want anymore, you have to go the specific routes needed by the car.
This wasn’t a dealbreaker for us, but it certainly might be for someone else. It’s not something anyone should be surprised by, but unfortunately the government and dealers don’t really bother to inform you upfront. Very much a buyer beware situation.
I forgot to mention my underlying point, lol:
The abundance of chargers in California is an abnormality, as Tesla and Rivian both started there, the feds and state were both heavily interested in it at first and provided subsidies, county and city governments near the Silicon Valley bought in as well, the state granted EVs the ability to use carpool lanes even with a solo driver, etc.
It was a perfect storm of public-private partnerships at a time when people still had hope in capitalist means of forestalling climate change, during an economic high period in the middle of the richest and most liberal state.
That helped sidestep a chicken and egg situation and allowed BEVs to get a solid foothold there.
But that strategy does not work in states that are more rural, poorer, or more conservative. Most states are some combination of all three. The economy is different now too, the federal government has stopped helping with infrastructure, people no longer have hope in climate change prevention, and electricity is getting ridiculously more expensive because of AI.
So not only will we never see the perfect storm that California got again, we actually now have a confluence of all the factors working AGAINST more charger buildouts. I fear that could very well lead to not just a chicken and egg situation where no new chargers built mean fewer BEVs sold, but even the few existing ones will continue to degrade over time and face increasing abandonment. Those things are expensive in equipment and labor to maintain, and far less centralized and profitable than AI data centers are (who are going to be competing with them for both investment dollars and grid capacity).
So what are other states supposed to do?
It’s not just CA. My friend the Tesla fanboy uses the Tesla app to plan his route. He’s done road trips from Chicago to Boston to DC and home, and he says that a few years ago you could only comfortably do that with a Tesla, but now you can do it with any EV.
But one of the reasons I’m a good candidate to own an EV is that i don’t do a lot of road trips. If I’m traveling more than a 4-6 hour drive, I’ll fly and rent a car for the last few hours of need be. And i take the train rather than drive if i can. Not to save the planet, but because i prefer taking the train.
For sure. But I think that still fits the general pattern (bigger, richer, bluer cities and their connections = more chargers). Smaller, poorer, redder = not so much.
Kinda similar situation, almost. The Acela Express (and Amtrak in general) is much better in the densely populated, wealthy East Coast. It’s still not bad connecting in and out of Chicago (its hub, I think?) But its service level and availability quickly deteriorates outside of major urban hubs, much more so than air travel. Sad. I love trains too!
I wish Amtrak had cross-country car carriers where you could load up your EV in a train, travel with it in a sleeper cab across the country, and unload on the other side.
Oh, i totally agree. There are parts of the country where you need to be a pioneer to own an EV, and i wouldn’t want to do that. But a fairly large fraction of the US population lives in the areas that do have EV infrastructure.
Yeah, exactly. Unfortunately, like LSLGuy said earlier:
Electorally, in terms of both the Senate and overall culture power, the undense areas still wield a lot lot of influence over national energy and trade policy. A few more blue House seats isn’t enough to meaningfully change that trajectory 
Yeah with Amtrak and VRE and transit, the time I lived in the DC ‘burbs my driving profile would have been quite fine for a BEV.
Excuse hijack/threadshit/whatever, but I gotta say that as a non-car-owning public transit user/pedestrian/cyclist/car renter etc., I am kind of enjoying seeing a lot of other Americans these days confronting the prospect of adjusting to a default transportation model that isn’t automatically prioritizing their own convenience.
I don’t really mean any schadenfreude, I do want a transportation infrastructure that serves everybody well. But it’s still a little bit funny IRL when people who were always completely indifferent/disdainful about my travel constraints of ”I need to plan my trip based on where the bus routes go” are suddenly vitally concerned and dismayed to contemplate ”what if I have to plan my trip based on where the charging stations are?!??” Or ”what if everything goes EV while I still don’t have adequate EV infrastructure where I live?!??”
Yeah, welcome to the parallel universe where you too have to put some thought into adapting your travel plans to a large-scale transportation system that isn’t constantly catering to your every whim, snowflakes. 
(Just kidding. I don’t mean it. I want everybody to be happy and have safe convenient environmentally friendly transport. 
)
A big part of that is that the Northeast Corridor – which runs from DC - Philadelphia - New York - Boston, and on which the Acela runs – is trackage which Amtrak itself largely owns (and AIUI, Amtrak owns the entirety of it from DC to New York), and is largely dedicated to passenger traffic.
In the rest of the U.S., Amtrak trains run on tracks which are owned by (and used by) the freight railroads. While Amtrak’s contracts with the railroads specify that their trains get priority, in practice, that often doesn’t happen, leading to long delays for Amtrak’s trains.