It seems like many routes (not all though) along interstates have enough Electrify America fast chargers that the mere existence is adequate. However, the charging experience is very buggy and unreliable. Cars randomly refuse to charge, charge much slower than they should, etc. And it's not rare, it's likely that this will happen multiple times on a trip, from what I've seen. The videos posted were with the Mach-E and ID.4, so very recent cars.
However, I think as long as these cars sell (and the F-150 lightning does too), this will all get better very quickly. Most of it looks like it should be fixable with software updates, and these companies are all doing OTA updates now.
Indeed that seems to be very common around here hence my mentioning fallback chargers: you can’t currently rely on a specific charger working, so you must plan for an alternative or two at every charging stop.
What I think a lot of people are starting to realize is that the road trip angle is small. It needs to work, but it doesn't make or break the experience. In both cases I found that I did 99% of my charging at home, and so the experience has been the same.
The third-party networks are also collectively growing at a rate much faster than Tesla is growing the supercharger network. At some point in the foreseeable future it will be a disadvantage that you can only DC fast charge a Tesla at a proprietary supercharger.
Tesla is still 100% proprietary in the US.
You’re overestimating how many people make road trips > 200 miles.
Most Americans never leave their hometown, with an even higher percentage who never left their state.
For the middle class family who drives to visit grandma once a year in a different state, they’ll just use their ICE car.
This can't possibly be right. Maybe they never move away, but never leave a radius of 200 miles from their home town? Do you have a cite for that?
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/lealane/2019/05/02/percentage-o...
Not to mention there are many states you might not get out of in 200 miles. 200 miles from the Californian coast is still Cali unless you’re at the northern or southern edges.
The worst part is they’re nowhere near: the effective strength of Tesla is that they built a large and reliable network of fast chargers. I don’t know how non-Tesla charging is in the US, but in Europe it’s still a complete mess of half-assed crap, meaning if you don’t have a Tesla you either simply can’t make trips beyond a single-charge round-trips, or you have to plan the trip for days in advance poring over maps and fallback chargers like it’s the 60s and you have to account for 50% odds of needing to rebuild the engine on the roadside.
Not “green book” bad, but absolutely “get close to hurling from the stress and triple travel time because you had to hypermile to reach the charger then it was worse than a home socket”.