My long drives are mostly to rural areas; there’s nothing right off the highway except maybe trees. I hate it when the sign on the highway shows food or fuel at this exit but when you get to the bottom of the ramp it’s 4 or 5 miles away. Nope, stop at the stop sign & then go straight, right back up the on ramp & continue on to something less out of the way.
I can fill my ICE in 4 mins, almost always under a covered area & half of that time is squeegeeing away the remains of the suicidal bugs that didn’t get out of my way at mumblety mumble MPH. It’s no big deal to wait a few seconds for the fill to finish & then move it to a regular parking space because I’m already outside. That’s different than being comfortably sitting in a restaurant & need to get up & go move my car just as my food arrives.
“Rain” is the reason we don’t have out of control wildfires around here.
I guess it depends on how many road trips you take. For us, that would be an issue less than once per year. On our recent week long trip, none of the charging stations were busy and we never had to leave our meal to move our car
That’s a major difference. In California along the coast, you’re always close to a charger. Ruralia, not so much. A lot of infrastructure needed still.
I also dislike driving out of sight of the highway for services. It always feels like I’m being bamboozled by an out of date sign. Having an app tell me where the charging was wouldn’t feel too much better at this stage in the game because while I would trust that their location info was accurate, I wouldn’t trust that they wouldn’t be out of service or busy.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t mind so much having to move my car out of the way during a recharge. I also can fill up my HEV in 5 minutes, and would dislike waiting close to 30 minutes more than once a day. But interrupting whatever I was doing to move wouldn’t be that huge of an issue as long as the place wasn’t physically crowded and there weren’t people screaming at me to move my car already.
The Polestar 2 is assembled in China, though (Volvo being part of China’s Geely Motors now). If the proposed tariff on Chinese EVs comes to fruition, that could be a problem. Although I suspect they would open a second production line outside of China if that happens – according to Wikipedia the Polestar 3 is built in both China and the US, so they could possibly build some 2s in their US plant.
Tesla shows you the location and the usage of the Supercharger location so you know what you are looking for, and what is open. Traveling I-90 and I-5 in WA and ID, I have found they are mostly vacant. The only that was maybe half full was a charging station in Burlington, WA. Have never seen one out of service. Of course, my limited experience is with 5 trips that required charging since we bought it in February
Volvo is another one with EV options. My mom got an XC40, or maybe it was the EX40. She got tired of waiting for the EX30.
Anyway, it’s a standard 5-passenger, 4-door SUV/wagon/hatchback type car. It’s pretty good as a car, but I don’t care for the Android based screen. It’s not nearly as well thought out and designed as the Tesla screen based interface. The Volvo isn’t nearly as dependent on the screen as the Tesla, but when you do need to use the screen it can be frustrating. It is functional, just a very poorly thought out user interface.
It even does one better these days: it shows you if any other cars are en route to the charger. Of course it can only do that if the drivers are using the nav system to get there, but it’s accurate in my limited experience.
Already have five 500+ miler weekends in the books this year, with three more planned. That’s a typical year for me.
Last (long) weekend was 800 miles. The event hotel (so I didn’t get to choose it) did have a 2-vehicle charger; one Tesla was parked there all weekend & an ICE was parked in the other spot most of the time; to be fair, the lot was full & there wasn’t anywhere else for them to park. They even had a guard not letting anyone except hotel guests, with passes into the lot because the event was across the street & tons of people were trying to park there as there was limited on site parking.
There’s a trip I make with moderate frequency that’s almost exactly 500 miles round trip. No charger at the destination, but several along the way.
Last time I went was several weeks ago. Stopped twice: once for 15 minutes and the second 10 minutes. The first stop was exactly enough time to walk to the nearby McDonalds, use the bathroom, and grab a drink/snack. The second stop was late and had no nearby fast food, but they did have a clean bathroom accessible by code (which the car provided). So I spent the remaining ~5 min messing around on my phone. I actually could have avoided that if I was willing to arrive with <5% to spare, but I didn’t mind a tiny wait to give myself a little margin.
So almost no delta vs. an ICE trip. Possibly even a negative delta since I can’t just leave the car while the gas is pumping.
At 800 miles it starts to tip a little in favor of an ICE, but it’s still a small amount in the grant scheme of things. And still a net loss unless those long road trips are the only thing you do.
We’ve now done a very standard 700 mile trip (350 miles each way) and it is less time charging than fueling in our ICE vehicle. With the Subaru I had to fill up before we left, once along the way, once before we left on the return, once along the way back, and again when we got back (or soon after). With the EV, we start with it full, charge once on the way, destination charge while there, charge once on the way home, and plug into the garage when home. We’ve done this trip three times since February and the EV is the winner for this particular trip.
I’m assuming that at some point, I’ll leave the freeway. The average can’t be zero. Can it? CAN IT?
Again, here in California, I was spoiled for choice when it came to charging locations. I really could have gotten some empirical data around whether slower driving with fewer charges was better than faster driving with more charges. But I didn’t, not really. I always picked “drive as fast as I think I can get away with.”
