You can play with tools at https://abetterrouteplanner.com/ to get some guidance as to how this would work.
Broadly: EVs are absolutely going to be slower going on long road trips, but it's not that bad. A routine gas car trying to make good time will have an average driving pattern like "drive for four hours, stop for 15 minutes for gas/food/potty". So you're getting 16/17ths of your highway speed on average. A typical long range EV is more like "drive for two hours[1], stop at a supercharger for half an hour", which is more like 4/5ths efficiency. That's a net difference in average speed of 18%, or roughly the difference between someone on that interstate going 75mph vs. 65mph.
Is that a killer problem? Up to you to decide. It wasn't for me.
[1] The cars charge much faster with emptier batteries (just like your phone), so topping up isn't something you typically do on the road, you just put enough in to get to your next stop plus a safety margin.
In Utah and Wyoming you can be on the interstate and still be far from a gas station[1]. I don't think most people who don't live out west are aware of how remote parts of this country truly are.
[1]: https://www.deseret.com/2013/9/23/20526064/about-utah-no-bul...
In general anywhere in the USA that is "on" an Interstate is solved problem for EVs. If you want to drive on I-whatever you're covered. The question above was about getting to remote areas far from infrastructure. And even there you need to work really hard to be far from a wall outlet.
Again, incremental costs to build out (non-supercharger) vehicle charging is much cheaper than installing a gas station, because it's ultimately just freeloading on the long-established electrical infrastructure.
Edit:
Do the downvoters really think the above scenario is acceptable? Being limited on where you can go, what chargers you can use and the increased time to go places?
If you're demanding to know that there is no where that your hypothetical gas vehicle is going to be an exclusive choice vs. an EV, then clearly the answer is no. Different vehicles have different capabilities.
And that includes your car! Do you normally get nagged by helicopter owners about all the places they need to be that your ridiculous wheeled thing can't reach? The whole thing seems a bit specious.
Generally you end up spending less time filling up in an EV than gas powered cars due to this kind of convenience. Filling up once or twice a week gets replaced with 2 or 3 fast charger stops on long trips and simply plugging in at home.
Are you writing a novel adaptation? This is how Heart of Darkness works. It... ends badly.
But sure: expeditions into the untamed metaphorical wilderness of the depths of the human condition probably do want to stick with ICE vehicles for now. But Tesla will probably get the savage wastes a supercharger soon enough.
Stuff is different. Different stuff works better in different situations. The point everyone is making is that long road trips and access to very remote locations are definitely not the sweet spot for an EV, but they're tasks it's capable of doing well enough.
Seriously if you desperately want to do your crazy day trip where you drive for 9 hours, and you own an EV... just rent a Jeep or an Outback.
If that’s not enough for a day trip I have questions. IMO, even traveling that range for a weekend is questionable.
However, the long range Model 3 only does 353 miles without charging. But you’re adding ~175 miles in 15 minuets, which is where I was getting the 530 mile figure. Basically 400+ miles is where charging wait times become noticeable.
Of course numbers depend on driving habits etc, but that’s the rough ballpark.
My dad & I have done driving around Bears Ears, Grand canyon, various national parks & forests in Colorado & Utah, and have basically had to roll downhill into Loa (if I remember the town right) when we were at the bottom of a tank.
Blanding, UT surprisingly shows a tesla supercharger, but Monticello doesn't. So I imagine the overall situation will get better over time too.
Sorta another side question - I assume any sort of car-hauled solar is too weak to meaningfully charge a car? Totally back of the napkin math (80kwh battery @ 200w portable solar = 16 days to charge). Obviously a partial charge could be had quicker, or a larger solar setup, but not really feasible, even if you figure out all the connections.
Even with a Model 3 (which is among the fastest charging EVs off AC power, due to its efficiency) you're closer to around ~3-4mi of range per hour (so, 16-24mi in 6 hours). It gets much much worse in cold climates, where 120V may not even charge the car at all (although, it will prevent charge loss).
120V, 20A outlets are much better (~7mi of range per hour), but still that's only 42mi/6 hrs.
Assuming you have a full 240V 50A outlet (i.e., a NEMA 14-50), you're getting maybe 30 miles of range an hour. That's max 60mi/2 hours. Also, unless you have that outlet available for EV charging or an RV, it's most likely your home will only readily have a dryer outlet available for hookup (so, 22mi range per hour max) which is less current.
Numbers get significantly worse (up to say, half the rates quoted above) depending on the vehicle used for charging.
All that to say, it's still pretty livable in my experience. As long as you aren't exceeding ~100mi/day consistently you can just constantly charge over 120V/20A and get by just fine locally.
For road trips, I'd consider 120V as a last resort until you can limp to a DC fast charger.
I wonder if this will drive business owners to secure their outlets better or perhaps fast chargers will be cheap and ubiquitous such that few people feel the need to "steal" electricity ("steal" is in quotes because I don't mean to imply judgment).
For anything other than an Aptera, this is going to be really optimistic. For a Tesla Model Y LR or 3 LR, 7 hours on a 15A 120V will get you 10%. This is closer to 30 miles than 100 and a bit less at interstate speeds.
With a 20A outlet, you can bump that up to 14% and closer to 40 miles.
The Model S and X will do worse than this.
Plugging in at home takes 10 seconds. That does add up to a fair amount of time saved over the year.
Not to mention the case where you're pressed for time and realize your car is on empty.
It reminds me of when they phased out incandescent bulbs almost a decade ago (2012?). I always hated CFL lights so I bought a case of 75W incandescent bulbs before they were banned. Within a year or two the price for LED lights plummeted at the same time as the quality increased dramatically. I still have most of that case of incandescent bulbs in my basement, and I'll probably end up just tossing it.
I recommend playing with your start and destination addresses in https://abetterrouteplanner.com/ to see what they would look like with charging included.
Its definitely a little slower than gas. Right now, the best speeds that you can average on a long trip are ~60mph inclusive of charging stops. That is pushing REALLY hard, though. I suspect most folks end up closer to 50mph.
This is like asking how to tow the Space Shuttle with your pickup truck. It can be done (Toyota did it with a Tundra pickup for marketing), but no one is selling into a market to do so. You’re better off outfitting a used 4x4 for overlanding (as @grecy did [1]).
Sorry but that's a ridiculous comparison, I just want to be able to drive to places my current gasoline vehicle can travel to, but in an electric car. Also there are large numbers of people out west camping, climbing, skiing, etc on all sorts of remote backcountry roads far from services. Its the reason many of us live out here.
I admit you adventurous folks exist (and commend your wild spirit), just not in sufficient quantity to sell vehicles at volume, considering the average American light vehicle use case (a few road trips a year, ~40 mile daily round trip commutes).
I’m looking at it from the perspective of what options are left, based on the legislation I mention.
[1]: https://www.mountainproject.com/area/112409907/west-desert
Obviously, I don't know of any current EVs that would be suitable for those kinds of 4x4 roads, but it seems like it isn't impossible from an infrastructure standpoint.
TBH, part of me thinks that in the long run getting electricity near places like this will actually be easier than getting gasoline there.
I think the reality is that people will need to accept that their use of the vehicle will just be a bit different than ICE vehicles for some cases. In some cases people will just need to have or rent or share specialty-purpose vehicles for things like camping or off-road experiences, at least until things like fast-charging stations are as common as gas stations are.
Buying vehicles that are optimized for the 5% use case seems really wasteful, but we do it now because the real (environmental) cost of that inefficiency is not paid for directly by the consumer.
Charging is getting a lot faster as companies move to dedicated EV designs.
Not out yet in North America, but the Hyundai Ioniq 5 will be able to go from 10 - 80% in 18 minutes. And that's only if you need to fill up on a longer trip, if you're just topping off you might only spend 5 minutes at a charging station.
https://insideevs.com/news/501936/hyundai-ioniq5-fast-chargi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEMA_connector#NEMA_TT-30
Only the really, really big ones are 240V split-phase with a NEMA 14-50R receptacle. It's a 4-pin connector, with an additional neutral blade, but it's not a twist-lock:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEMA_connector#NEMA_14
It's not likely to break anything or hurt anyone if you know what you're doing, but with the ridiculous number of variations and non-standard wiring you'll find out there, be sure you do know what you're doing!
They have a 14-50 but there isn't a TT-30R however they have a 5-20 which can be mated to 5-30 with a passive adapter. Not ideal but better than nothing.
We did a road trip in an EV from Ottawa, ON to Saskatoon, SK and back. (3000km each way). The Tesla trip planner said we'd need to stop 9 times to charge, but we ended up stopping 18 times to charge because we needed to stop 17 times for the bathroom, eating or sleeping. Only once was the stop only for charging (15 minutes). One charger was broken on the trip out -- we had enough charge to make it to the next one, but only barely.
I do think when the cyber truck comes out with 500+ range that will change things... you should be able to only need to charge overnight even on road trips.
But long term camping trips might still be an issue.. possibly solar panels on it will help a bit?!
I don't think solar panels will help though. You need too large of a solar array to make a difference. Would be nice though!
In my experience, the biggest issue is location. If I had superchargers at every lunch/dinner stop, the difference would almost be unnoticeable.
In addition to the other responses, I'll note that you can charge (for example) a Tesla at about 4 miles per hour with direct sunlight using a fairly portable solar setup. I've seen some demos of just that on youtube.
I think most families thinking of getting an EV will end up owning 2 vehicles (one gas, one EV) for a while, to cover those edge cases.
They tend to be located near places to eat which helps.
If you're in a Tesla, check out the map: https://www.tesla.com/supercharger
So it's not perfect. The only time I've run into trouble was in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We had to go charge at a slow rate in Marquette, Michigan (one of my favorite towns now) because there were no Super Chargers or overnight chargers available where we stayed "someone might trip over the cord".
So if you get, say, a Tesla Model Y you're looking at probably around 300 miles of range in the summer time (less in winter or cold conditions). So you just need to be able to charge somewhere. It takes more planning for now.
If you're with another car, I think it's not quite as good. Typically people will find a destination charger (i.e. stay at a hotel with an outlet to charge at).
So you're likely to be in the smaller minority where they don't quite yet fit all of your use cases. Often times I tell people to plan for most of your use cases most of the time. For example, we are in our house or around town 95% of our lives. So I'm not going to stress out or over-optimize for that 5% when an electric car might be inconvenient. That's us though. It's an individual decision. It's nice that we can charge our standard range Model 3 fully (220 miles~ of charge) for $2.65 total. Much, much cheaper than gas. On the other hand we spent 8 lovely hours in Marquette charging our car. YMMV
Charging times vary. We recently did about a 5 hour trip from Columbus to Michigan with a Tesla and spent 40 minutes charging (each way, a little more on the way up and less on the way back) - a couple of stops. One at a Meijer where we went in, walked around, got some snacks and used the restroom. Another at hotel lot where we just stood and stretched for a bit. That's with Tesla SuperCharging network though. We also were at a house and had a 110 outlet so just plugged in and when we went home we were at 97% so didn't have to charge as much on the way back home. Personally wouldn't do a long road trip with any other EV.
-edit-
It'll be gradual then sudden, but a lot of those convenient gas stations will be going away too as we shift toward electric vehicles. It won't be long before gas itself becomes inconvenient compared to electric as far as availability is concerned. For example, national parks can install electric chargers. They can't put in a gas station.
As someone else mentioned, you probably are saving more time overall with an EV since if you charge at home you don't ever need to go to the gas station. I have to imagine that more than makes up for the time you spend stopping and charging on road trips. Would be interesting to see studies on this.
Very curious, though, just what kind of timeframe we're looking at before gas fills become more inconvenient than electric charging... my hope is that by the time my current ICE vehicle has to be replaced (8 years or more, with luck), we'll have electric vehicles with 600 mile ranges and enough reliable fast-charging infrastructure that I can actually justify an electric vehicle.
The the 2nd GEN Tesla charger has pigtail adapters for a lot of NEMA single and split phase receptacles. While it doesn't cover all (e.g. TT-30R), you can use passive adapters to convert to those specifically.
You can purchase the pigtails individually for under $50 each or $200 for a kit.
Tesla-wise there is already a reliable fast-charging infrastructure. The question is what will happen with the rest of the industry. I would say in 8 years we will definitely have electric vehicles with 600+ mile ranges. I think the Plaid Model S is over 500 already, but I think there will be less emphasis on milage and more emphasis on fast and available charging. It's going to be more feasible to expand infrastructure (as far as I can tell) than to build the batteries. Likely both will happen simultaneously. For Tesla, I think if they thought larger batteries were the answer they'd probably slowly stop expanding the SuperCharger network - but doesn't appear that's happening. Could be wrong here and would welcome a more thoughtful discussion.
TBH I'd say gas on the whole is more inconvenient to me than electric charging. 95% of the time I charge at home, car is always just ready to go. 5% of the time I stop after 2 hours, charge for 15-25 minutes, take a quick break, and move on. But I don't have to go to a gas station once/week or more, stand outside my car in the cold, pump gas, w/e. Personal preference though. My back cramps up sitting in a car for 3+ hours between gas stations and would prefer more stops (and this gives me an excuse).
As to the time, we timed it for breakfast at a coffee shop there. It was about a 1 hour stop.
The power company in Taos (northern NM) has chargers at their office. In that case, they are slow chargers, which is a bummer, but it's walking distance to restaurants and stores and things to do, and free, and it's enough to extend the range a bit and get you on your way to the next faster charger elsewhere.
Almost everywhere there are chargers at hotels. For Teslas hotels often have Tesla connectors which are faster than the other hotel options. They often will allow you to plug in for a charge for a fee, even if you aren't a guest, on an as-needed basis in the daytime. For nighttime, I assume guests get priority.
I haven't scoped out Wyoming. We did traverse Nevada and Utah and no problem with Superchargers but were only on small roads for some of the time. I mean if you are charged up to 300 miles, you can drive for (up to) 300 miles on small roads if you know there's a charger at the other end. Obviously I would build some margin into that.
With Superchargers most stops are between 10 and 20 minutes, for me at least. Some people stay longer because they think you have to charge to full at every stop. This is wrong, and slows down your trip because topping up that last 20% gets slow, since charging slows down as you approach full charge.
I've been from California to New Mexico and back four times, to Oregon and back twice, to San Diego once, to LA and back a bunch of times, and to the far side of Texas and back once. Way more enjoyable than in my old ICE cars. On longer trips if Superchargers are spaced out wider, the stops are slightly longer just because I like to keep a margin of extra range. If there's no Supercharger then there are sometimes fast chargers at Walmart, but usually fewer of them, so if you don't have a Tesla you have way fewer options.
Major routes are very well covered. Minor routes, say going down through Ouray and Silverton, I would incorporate a hotel with a charger into my plans to charge overnight, but you should have a backup option because someone else could have occupied the hotel charger first. I don't know whether some hotels allow you to reserve a charger in advance. Haven't crossed that bridge yet but I imagine some do.
This is all a moving target though as the system is being built out rapidly. I think hotels will start catching on that they need to add more capacity soon.
The high order bit here is, and sorry for making it a company product endorsement, but if you're going to get an EV, get a Tesla. Way more options. Especially if you buy a CHAdeMO adapter (yucky, but useful). Non-Tesla drivers are going to get very familiar with Walmart, which is fine, but pretty limiting, and are probably going to be reluctant to go on road trips, pretty much the opposite of the Tesla experience.
On the other hand.
If something breaks, with a Tesla your car is going to be loaded onto a flatbed and carried far away to a Tesla Service Center somewhere, and you are not going to see it for a while! That's kind of a different topic though. They don't seem to break in such ways very often. Usually only when hit by an ICE car driver, lol. It's probably even worse with other EVs, some of which sell way smaller unit numbers, like the Kona — good luck finding service for that.
On these trips I always go looking for the less-traveled route. Ouray area is beautiful, we pick other mountain passes instead of I70 when we can, and go back ways into national parks and forests.
The charging stops more like a regular gas station I'd just walk slower and make sure to use the bathroom and browse every isle.
It adds about triple the time for a stop. Not sure about non supercharger capable EVs. With a Tesla it's pretty close to same experience.
A lot of Tesla Superchargers are in restaurant or hotel parking lots.
We use to drive Atlanta to Asheville and would stop at a Supercharger in Greenville on the way up, it was in a hotel parking lot and the hotel lounge was setup to accommodate people stopping to charge with an array of snacks and drinks to purchase along with the restaurant and bar.
I use to drive from Atlanta to Jellico regularly and would stop at a Supercharger in a strip mall within walking distance of shopping, a Starbucks, and three restaurants.
We went to Joshua Tree from San Diego recently and stopped to charge along the way at an In-N-Out.
Non Tesla EVs can still be nice EVs, but today they’re city cars.
I had a Fiat 500e before my Model 3, a great little EV (and absurdly cheap lease at ~$87/month) but I can take my Model 3 to Tahoe from the bay area easily and would never take the 500e there. I was hesitant to take the 500e from Palo Alto to SF.
The biggest difference is that there are more DC fast charging locations for non-Tesla EVs but they tend to have fewer chargers per location. Superchargers are less common but there are more chargers at each location.
Both chargers have less than stellar reliability, but I'd give Tesla the overall edge there. But the third-party networks are growing much faster overall, and the quality of their infrastructure is improving dramatically as well. At some point in the next couple years I expect Tesla will need to find a way to allow their cars to take advantage of these other fast-charging options, to stay competitive.
The only comparable network to Tesla is EA and they hope to be about 3/4s the size of Tesla's network by early 2022.
In my opinion, 99% of everyone worries far too much about the road trip use case and completely overlooks that most people will do almost all of their charging at home.
The big exception is Electrify America, which has about 600 sites now. Its good enough for many right now, though it isn't as deep or reliable as the Tesla Supercharger network.
Tesla supercharger coverage is pretty good with just over 1000 sites. EA coverage is actually pretty good too with just 600 sites. The # of sites needed for L3 in the short term isn't really that high. The number of plugs is important. I think EA averages 6 plugs per site, and Tesla is a little over 8 per site, with most new sites being 8 stall setups.
I would like to see Tesla transition to CCS in the US but that's going to be a hard sell without legislation.
*exception being CHAdeMO, but those are becoming so rare now as to be not worth consideration.
How do you do longer trips? I live in Colorado and go on multi day "camping" road trips.
I'd be able to charge, but what's the time spent at a charging station along the way?
How would I find a charger in the middle of nowhere Utah or Wyoming? Often even gas stations are pretty few and far between when you're not on the more main roads.
It's only maybe 5% of my total miles, but it's the fun ones. In-town is a solved problem for sure, but seems less so for long distance, and often back-road travel.