I spend a ton more time waiting to "recharge" my ICE than I do my EV, its not even close. If you're going to go by time waiting, my EV wins out by hours a year. Compounding that a several years and its essentially a day or two of my life saved by not having to pump gas every week and a half.

When trips are drive-to-work-each-day, and you can tolerate charging at your house overnight, the wait times for an EV charge are not an issue.

When your trips are drive-across-the-country, so you need to recharge multiple times en route, that's when it starts becoming substantially harder to find something else to overlap with your need to recharge. Even just doing Midwest-to-Mid-Atlantic drives, I'd complete my lunch pitstop (including eating, filling gas tank, and emptying bladder) before an EV charge could fill up again, even discounting the fact that the lesser range of an EV means I'd need to squeeze in another charging pitstop uncomfortably early to overlap with dinner.

I think you cover it, but from elapsed time, the average consumer use is mostly commute or errand based with the occasional (or weekend trip).

What this means is that if you fill gas 1-2x a week to handle the average 20 mile commute, you've saved 10 minutes because the refill of the electric is at home, with little effort.

Now you bank that 10 minutes every time you take any one way <~200 mile trip with electricity at the ends.

If you're doing regular multi region drives you are not average, you're likely in the top 1% of consumer long range trips.

To add, the longer and "more often" stops are healthier for you and your passengers; very few cars have a less than 200 mile range now, and if you're sitting for that period of time, moving (or at least not sitting) is a good idea to prevent deep vein thrombosis, the longer the better.

> When your trips are drive-across-the-country

Good thing I do well less than 1 of those on average every year, along with practically every other passenger car in America.

Is driving from San Diego to New York City really a common thing people do here? Is that what the average driver does on a weekly basis? Is that really what we should be targeting our cars to do?

Coast to coast is very uncommon. San Diego to Seattle, or New York to Miami would be much more typical of a once per year road trip.

If I were to add a NY-Miami-NY trip once a year to my life, and try and do that in a single shot, that would add ~4 hours of charging time round trip. In reality you wouldn't do that in a single shot (20 hours of driving each way!), you'd probably break it up into two days each way and thus have at least two low charge->100% in there "for free" time-wise. This would cut out an hour or so of charging wait time, so really probably closer to 2ish hours of charge time. On a 40+ hour round-trip drive.

EDIT: This is with a Hyundai Ioniq 5, not my current Mach E. The Mach E doesn't charge as fast as this most recent generation of EVs, so it would be a bit over 4 hours each way in the Mach E. However, if my plans for a car was "go on a yearly road trip", I would have probably bought an Ioniq 5 exactly for this reason. Personally though I'd probably just fly for either of those distances instead of spending 20+ hours in a car each way. Which is why the standard range version of the Mach E is perfectly fine for me.

> In reality you wouldn't do that in a single shot (20 hours of driving each way!)

That depends, one person probably isn't doing that in a single shot, but a three people driving in shifts might.

Your mistake is thinking that an EV needs to fill up during road trips. That is very rarely the case unless you get one with a low range. California to Houston, we filled up once during the entire trip. Once.

Los Angeles to Houston is a 1500 mile drive. There are currently no EVs capable of making that drive with a single recharge.

and?

They (somewhat reasonably) took "filled up" as "times charged". I did originally, but then when that distance was pointed out I got you meant you did a few smaller charging sessions and only one big to 100% charging session to make the trip.

If that's not what you're suggesting then that was not done in any commercially available EV in the US today. Even starting closer to the California border like El Centro and only making it to fringes of Houston like Katy is ~1330 miles, so ~665mi a leg. No generally available EV in the US has that range. So I take it you did a number of like 10-60% or whatever charge jaunts.

Even then though, if you were to sum up all of those shorter charging sessions you probably had to recharge your car a total of at least four charges energy-wise. If you get 300mi of range on a full.charge, 1,330 / 300 = 4.4333...

Yes, you got it right, the “natch must be claiming to have a special car” is a bad take.

It’s more just that it really, really matters time-wise that the car is not charging up to full on any given stop, because that means the charging stops are significantly faster.

People who latch on to the idea of judging EVs on their time to get “fully”‘charged are going to get such a distorted idea that they will never believe current EVs could be a good option. But, they would be mistaken.

Yeah, there's a bit of complexity around it and in the market today you could have two cars which both have the same "max range" but have vastly different times to complete a 1,200mi trip depending on a large number of factors. If you had two cars which state 300mi of range, one charged at 50kW and the other at 350kW, the 350kW car would win that marathon by a large margin. There's more to think about with EVs than just range, that's for sure.

That's just not true. That's just something EV owners say to themselves to justify purchase. I've seen a bunch of these longer drives on Youtube. They try to say, hey you can stop here and get lunch or wait 30 minutes and the kids can play a game. I watched a trip one person did and every time they stopped they went shopping in the Walmart (this was non Tesla chargers) or ate. That adds up. Plus you might not always be in the best part of town late at night. At the end of the day according to the Tesla trip planner it adds quite a bit of time on to basic trips. The other thing is these chargers might not be covered so you're out in the rain, or snow and the lots haven't been cleared. That just doesn't seem fun with 2 kids.

You also have to think about the AC / heat, how you're driving, battery degrading after first year or so. It's an anxiety I don't need.

Plus in my case I would have to get my Tesla towed 3 hours away with major issues. I now minor ones the traveling repair can deal with. A neighbor had a collision and didn't have his Tesla for 4 months. The facilities are so backed up. No one knows how to work on them except Tesla.

Electric is the future, but it's like 4 to 5 years out. Hybrid is good enough right now.

With ICE you literally pull of an exit, take 5 minutes to fill up and you're back.

> That's just not true.

Its objectively the reality I live with. I definitely spend more time pumping gas in my Santa Fe than I do my Mach E. A bit over 5 minutes every week and a half versus 0 minutes so far in my Mach E. 34.666 * 5 = 173.33 minutes of waiting, as a lower bound, in the ICE means just shy of 3 hours a year I spend waiting on my gas car. Meanwhile, the amount of time I spent waiting on my Mach E to charge last year was 0 minutes. This is objective and factual.

> You also have to think about the AC / heat, how you're driving, battery degrading after first year or so.

If you want to, you can stress about these things. I don't, I practically always have way more range than I need every time I leave my garage. Meanwhile I do regularly get frustrated about getting a low tank of gas and think "ugh, gotta stop by the gas station sometime on this trip, even though I'm in a hurry and would really rather just get to where I'm going".

You could also stress about things like AC or how you're driving in your ICE, these things impact your gas mileage and will impact what you spend. Which your per-mile energy cost is waaaaaaaaay higher in an ICE than an EV, so you'd think you want to conserve even more. Having a lead foot in an EV is a lot cheaper than in an ICE.

> No one knows how to work on them except Tesla

No one knows how to work on my Mach E than Tesla? Only Tesla can repair a Ioniq 5? That sure seeems strange to me!

If you regularly drive hundreds of miles at a time, then your position is fair enough. Very few people do that.

I and many people I know own an EV, and it is literally zero stress. In fact it's less stress than with my old ICE car, because I effectively always have a full tank in the morning. I don't even have level 2 home charging, but it's still a complete non issue.

I've done longer drives too, and I would describe those as "slightly inconvenient." In all honesty I sort of appreciate the breaks, but I know it annoys my girlfriend who likes to keep rolling. It definitely adds time, that's a fact!

But realistically owning an EV today is incredibly straightforward and stress free. I an everyone I know who has one would agree.

> I've seen a bunch of these longer drives on Youtube.

Cool, now consider that lots of people make very few longer drives.

They're not deluding themselves just because they use a car differently than you do!

Alternate solution: If you don't feel that that EVs are suitable yet for you to make road trips, you can still buy an EV for your daily needs and rent a gas-powered car for the occasional times you need to take longer trips.

That's YOUR experience, but that certainly doesn't translate over to an appt dweller who doesn't have their own garage to charge their BEV with. You better believe they WILL sit for a dang good bit of time waiting for their vehicle to charge.

That's a fair critique. It's certainly easiest for homeowners with a grange to do EVs. Eventually, market forces will make apartment owners who offer parking to also offer EV charging, but I think it would be reasonable for government regulations to require them to install chargers for renters who request it. Policy solutions are harder for neighborhoods where residents rely on on-street parking, as the municipality would probably have to install and maintain a lot of level 2 chargers, but this would still be worth doing.

In the mean time, if you're in this situation, I personally wouldn't fault you for getting a gas-powered car. EVs are still more constrained by supply than demand.

That was me up until recently! Infrastructure is good enough where I live that I can charge the car most times I go out for errands. I was able to make enough of my trips ones where I came home with more charge than I left with. Consequence was basically no waiting around, except on road trips. It was great! I charge at home now, which I'll happily admit is more convenient.

The majority of Americans live in single family homes. The majority of Americans can charge an EV at home.

Americans with single family homes aren't the only market in USA.

USA is not the only country in the world.

Other countries can have wildly different situation and setup, and in fact building home charging stations might be problematic for significant portion of future buyers that Toyota might want to grab.

P.S. A bit under 30% of worldwide Toyota production goes into USA - that still leaves a huge chunk of sales that might have wildly different needs to cater to.

A slight majority of Europeans live in single family homes as well. It's not like single family homes are something that only exist in America and the entire rest of the car buying world is "wildly different".

I realize not every car buyer can have their own charger at home, that's obvious. But let's not act like it's a rare thing for people to have the ability to charge at home. Over half of all households in Europe and US can probably add home charging for little cost. That's a ton of EVs to sell, an absolutely massive market able to be addressed now.

Seconded. I live in NJ, too, so any trip to a gas station usually involves waiting quite a bit for a human attendant to pump my gas. At least I don't need an attendant to charge my EV! I don't need to swipe a credit card, I don't need to wait for a pump spot to open, and I don't need to listen to ads playing on a tiny speaker. The EV charging routine is so much better in every way than ICE. Another consideration is that I always have a full 'tank' in my EV, almost every single time I drive. There is no consideration I'll run out of juice during my commute or errands.

Proponents of electric cars love to talk about daily commutes and charging at home over night and how they never have to "fill up", while either never leaving a 200 mile bubble around their home, or pretending they're okay with paying an extra $1k+ to rent an ICE car for road trips.

As someone who does not have a commute and mainly owns a car for the 600-2000 mile road trips I take _at least_ every ~6 weeks. I'd much prefer a PHEV, which incidentally can drastically increase range while also handling the ~30 mile average daily commute electric-only quite easily.

The absolutism is tiring.

This is quickly becoming outdated. Fast-charging times of about 15 minutes are possible in the US with currently existing infrastructure and vehicles, and this speed is likely to keep improving as the tech gets better. And for the typical daily driving needs of most people, plugging in to charge overnight is sufficient, so you only need to worry about charging times in rare occurrences, such as when taking a road trip.

Not only that but for those five minute gas fill ups you can’t really leave the pump.

Maybe a 20 minute fill up where you can do other things at the same time isn’t that much worse.

> Not only that but for those five minute gas fill ups you can’t really leave the pump.

The part where you can't leave the pump shouldn't be longer than 1-1.5 minutes.

You should try timing it sometime. It usually takes me about 2-3 minutes to pump the almost 18 gallons of capacity into my fuel tank. Pumps in the US aren't allowed to go faster than 10gal/minute, lots around me seem to go much slower than that max speed.

Seems highly contextual. If I can charge at the grocery store - great. If I forgot to plug in last night and can't quite make the trip into work, 15-30 min is going to be a problem.

> If I forgot to plug in last night and can't quite make the trip into work

Assuming a 30 mile round-trip commute, I'd have to forget to plug it in 6 times before I would run into this issue my car with ~200mi of range.

I've had more times where I needed to be sure to stop and get gas before I head to the office than I've had times where I had to wait for my EV to charge before I head in.

Most commutes are 30 miles round trip at the high end. Given a capacity of 400 miles as was quoted above you would need to forget to plug in for over a week to have any issues.

Not having enough electricity to make it to work is akin to not having enough gasoline for most local trips.

Which car can be fully charged in 15 minutes? I've looked and cannot find one except some supercars that are way out of reach.

"Fully" is a bad metric for this, because charging on EVs tends to be extremely non-linear.

For example, let me approximate the numbers I had at a recent supercharger stop. It took me about 15 mins to charge from 3% to 60%. Then another 10-15 mins from 60% to 80%. Then another 15 mins from 80% to 90%. In general, for better battery life and to not waste your time, it is recommended to charge to 90% or below.

And that wasn't the most recent gen supercharger. At some, I had personally seen peak charging speed of 580+ mi/hr.

Here is how I reacted to this: “Damn…it took this person 40+ minutes to almost fill up their car”

I only do a full charge for a long trip. Normally, i just charge in my apt garage overnight or at work, and the car is already full every single day i wake up, zero time spent.

And if i am in a rush, i just charge at a supercharger for that quick 15 min charge to 60% and go along.

I guess I am just not bothered much by taking a short break after multiple hours of driving. And the costs being much cheaper than gas (about $17-18 for full tank at a supercharger, virtually free at my apt building or work) kinda helps.

It’s just a mental shift us non-EV owners need to make. Starting every day with a full charge has value for sure.

You cannot charge fast past a high state of charge, mostly because you don’t want to overload the battery cells by having a too high voltage.

Cars that charge that fast to 100% either do not care about not destroying the battery, which makes sense in a racing context without sustainability concerns, or the 100% reported by the battery management system is a lot lower than the maximum state of charge possible.

That’s why you cannot find common electric cars that charge to 100% in 15 minutes. But you will find some that can charge fast for 15 minutes and that’s what matters.

This and the sibling comments seem to prove the (grand)parent's point though; you can "charge fast" (apparently to 60-80%) in 15-30 min, which leaves you with a less-than-full-distance capacity in a longer time compared with an ICE which is "5 min and full capacity." That doesn't mean that electric cars aren't good, but it means they are slower (less distance, more down time) - this is good enough for most local traffic situations, though.

With "local traffic distances", my ICE has been slower overall. I spent ~3 hours on "charging" time driving around town last year, while I've waited 0 minutes waiting on my EV.

That's 3 hours of downtime with my ICE, 0 minutes of downtime with my EV. Which one resulted in more downtime again?

You have commented this on a handful of subthreads, but I feel like you're missing the goal of the argument. If you want "instant recharge," gas wins. I understand that charging overnight will work in most cases, I understand you have a window of perhaps as much as two weeks to find a single night to do it, etc. Similarly, for the sake of argument, I could keep a gas pump in my garage to fill up at night, which would mean I had "0 minutes of downtime" as well.

In most cases having a battery will get you from A to B without issue - same on a tank of gas. When it won't, you will spend more time waiting on the battery to charge, which is a tradeoff that is probably still worthwhile for the vast majority of people.

I was specifically talking to their statement of "local traffic distances". Is >200mi "local traffic distances" to you? That's a long drive to me. "Local traffic distances" to me means maybe 60 miles round-trip, max. Most EV's can handle "local traffic distances" without having to stop and recharge.

> Similarly, for the sake of argument, I could keep a gas pump in my garage to fill up at night, which would mean I had "0 minutes of downtime" as well.

You literally couldn't unless you were massively wealthy or lived on a farm or something along those lines. You probably wouldn't be able to secure the permitting to have that much gas on site at small residential lot. It would also be a pretty big headache managing the gas delivery contracts for such a small amount. It would be a huge hassle getting it delivered to your home. Realistically, you couldn't get as much convenience at your home assuming you lived in a statistically average suburban/urban single family home.

Meanwhile all it took for my EV was to install an outlet, <$200. No crazy permitting, no massive storage tanks storing hazardous liquids, no managing additional delivery contracts needing to get big fuel trucks to pull up near the house to deliver gas, no EPA inspections for that storage tank, etc.

“fully” charged is a red herring, and foolish in practice.

Ok, which car can charge to 300+ miles in 15 minutes? I can fill my car in 15 minutes and get another 300+ miles.

Obviously you can't do that, and no one is arguing that a "full tank" type EV fillup is as fast as it is with an ICE vehicle.

But as an EV owner, long (like multi hundred mile) trips are the only time I would ever do that. Otherwise it's just frequent top ups while I'm at home or doing errands or whatever. So from my perspective the time to charge to full is kind of a red herring unless you are someone who regularly does like 300+ mile trips.

Well, I am someone who regularly does 300+ mile trips and I currently have a hybrid but they are not great on highways (for obvious reasons). Time of charge is a big component of my next buying decision.

Time of charge is fastest if you have some headroom in your range. In other words it’s a lot faster to charge to 80%, as charging slows as you get higher. Keep that in mind when buying so you don’t make the mistake of buying lower range.

Fair enough! I think in general this topic gets brought up too much since most people do drives like that rarely if ever, but if you do then an ICE vehicle or hybrid might still be your best option.

Try 9 minutes, one stop, to get from the bay area to LA. It’s not as fast to fill as a smelly ICE car, but it’s not too shabby at all and a lot more fun and safe to drive. The numbers are contrived.