These cars have ranges around 400 miles / 600 km, and EV owners normally charge them at home regularly.

Cold weather or non-economical driving may reduce that a bit, but you are unlikely to need to stop to charge in any given day before driving 200-300 miles (300-450km).

If you plan to go another 200+ miles, a 30 minute break may be welcome at that point. Or if you're caught just 50 miles or so from home, just charging 5-10 mins should let you reach your home charger.

Anyway, for normal commute driving, most people rarely need to charge away from home. These stations are for longer trips, that most people do only a handful of times per month.

Agreed but imho it's not just about how long it is for one person. If a significant amount of people start needing to charge we are going to need more throughput at charging stations.

Long congestion delays could occur trying to charge on long trips during holidays. Daily driving is less of a problem since most people can charge at home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfUJCWRFjig

Could this be a market opportunity for a restaurant chain like Sonic or Fuddruckers?

In Finland McDonalds has been installing 350kW chargers at their locations for a few years now.

It's pretty much the perfect location, the car usually charges faster than you can wolf down your Big Mac and fries.

The big super market chains are the other big player, they're taking customers from (overpriced) gas stations. It's usually a 5-10 minute detour to get to the local mega-mart and they have cafes and restaurants in there anyway - without the gas station markup.

Tesla V3 stations are not "oversubscribed" like v2 stations, but they are hamstrung by a max grid connection of 350kW.

Once the charging station's own battery is depleted - if all four stalls are in use, they will each deliver 87kW.

That is laughably bad.

> but they are hamstrung by a max grid connection of 350kW

And with good reason, there aren't many power grids particularly along long roads where you can simply plug in more than half a megawatt of consistent (!) load and everything continues to work as-is.

The sorry state of many power grids is keeping actually smart load management, EV, solar/wind/other renewable power generation and wildfire safety back so hard it hurts.

I'm not sure that is really a problem of 'sorry state of power grid'. Its more like 'rapidly changing requirements'.

5 years ago, most rural lines were supporting homes and businesses with 200amp panels (and oversubscribed, since not everyone pulls all those amps at the same time). Complaining the grid isn't ready is like putting a gas power plant in the middle of no-where, and complaining that the only nearby gas main between two towns is too small to run the 700MW power plant.

Tesla can work around this by larger battery banks, or solar arrays to help recharge the battery bank faster. (they own companies that produce both). And in spots where they often can't keep up with demand, work with the power companies to get more power delivered.

15 minutes still sounds like a very long time to me, compared to fueling a gasoline vehicle (I rarely use the restroom, check Instagram, or buy a coffee, or do anything else when I do this). I'm typically back on the road in under 5 minutes.

True, but 15 min still feels into the "small break, mild inconvenience" vs 30 min that feels like a real full stop and rest for the car to charge.

Potentially you could also just stop for 5 or 10 mins for a partial charge? 15 mins gets you to 80%, but arguably 5-10 mins might give you enough juice to very comfortably get where you need to go.

I know when I forget to charge my phone before heading out, those 5-10 min charge I squeeze before heading out might mean the difference between having battery at the end of the day, or not.

>Potentially you could also just stop for 5 or 10 mins for a partial charge?

Exactly, that’s the trick!

Although I still meet people who don’t get this and needlessly keep their charge topped up while traveling, which is a lot slower.

When you primarily charge at home, I'd imagine the need to charge somewhere else most likely to happen after a couple hours of driving, in which case a 15 minute break sounds like a good idea anyway.

We did a road trip like this over spring break. Our last day included 700 miles of driving. Drive for 1.5-2 hours, charge for 12-15 minutes, driver swap, and go. It was easily the best road trip experience of my life. Looking back at the stupid exhausted crap I put myself through in my younger days I can only shake my head.

After 4 years of EV ownership this is exactly how it works for me and my friends, in the UK at least.

Same here, also UK. Yes stops at public charging stations are longer than stops at petrol stations, but then I pretty much never "fill up" outside of home. So I have already saved hours and hours that would have been spent on filling up a normal petrol car - if I now have to go and wait 30 minutes at a rapid charger, that's still an overall massive saving compared to an ICE.

Sure, and I'd argue that 15m can seem like more than 3x longer than 5m does for just this reason. I don't think the minutes and perceived convenience scale linearly

15mins of charging every 400-500km for a 80% reduction in travel costs seems fair to me.

10€/100km with diesel/gasoline and 2€/200km for electric is a complete no-brainer.

Think about it this way: with a gas vehicle you wait 5 minutes to refuel maybe once a week, so that's 4+ hours wasted per year. But with an electric vehicle that charges primarily at home you would recharge outside home maybe once every 2 months, so at 15 minutes per charge that's only 1.5 hours wasted per year.

4 hours vs 1.5 hours.

You also are forced to go to the gas station regardless of whether you go on road trips, so it's probably a wash. Can't remember the last time I went to one.

You sound single. And oh so proud of how you have mastered pumping gas.

On a trip from San Jose to LA we stop once to charge for 10 minutes, arriving with plenty of charge to spare. I’m not too worried about the “extra” five minutes, which we can make good use of.