I don't think there's anyone in the world who wouldn't like this, and there are many people already working on it.

But I would say: you don't seem to be justifying the statement I've quoted. You're speaking from experience to say that filling up an EV from 0-100% is slower than an ICE vehicle, but everyone knows that. You're not saying why every EV needs this for everyone's case, aside from your use of capital letters.

The reality is that would be nice (or having a fusion reactor where I never have to fill up again would be nicer), but there are plenty of people and journeys that happen in ways that EVs could easily fulfil, and the zero to three journeys a year most people do that require a long uninterrupted haul across hundreds of miles might have to be planned a little differently, or might require the renting of an ICE car.

I'm afraid you are perfectly demonstrating my point that the pro-EV side contort themselves to extreme levels to try to justify the lack of maturity in EV.

The fact is: I own an ICE car. Whether I drive it 5 miles or 500 miles is irrelevant. I don't have to "plan a little differently" on my 500 mile journey. And I don't have to drive a different car on the 500 mile trip.

As I said at the start of my original post. I am on your side. I want to buy EV. But I suspect, like many others, I look at it objectively and I see that the technology is not quite mature enough. I've no doubt one day it will be, but not today.

I'm just saying there's no point flat out stating that things must improve when a) for a lot of people they're good enough right now, and it's about effort invested vs additional numbers of people to reach, and b) real experts are already constantly working on this.

People will accept some increase in inconvenience on a particular metric if the product is a lot better on other metrics.

Look at mobile phones. Before the iPhone, all of them had a detachable battery. When Apple came out with a device with a glued-in battery, a lot of people were saying they would never ever buy a phone whose battery can’t be swapped out for a fresh spare.

The argument was same as yours: “I can’t possibly wait ten minutes to charge if the phone dies!”

Presumably 99.9% of those people now carry a smartphone with a fixed battery.

Your argument happily co-incides with the point I was making.

Smartphones have matured and are now at the point where you easily get a whole day's battery life, maybe a day and a half if you don't use it much. So who cares if the battery is glued in. (And as an aside, phones also charge a lot faster than they used to).

EV needs to go through the same maturity process.

Similarly EVs don't need to exactly reach the convenience of refueling, it just needs to be good enough in balance.

You don't use the bathroom or buy coffees? With a family, that'll kill your entire 20 minutes. Food or sleep will kill even more time.

And why the heck would you sit in your car while waiting? If you're driving in your car all day, a 10 minute walk every 3 hours will do wonders for your sanity and health. There's a reason commercial drivers are required by law to take a 30 minute break every 4 hours.

1) More frequent but short breaks, e.g. literally a 3-4 minute break every hour. Just enough to fill up the tank, for someone to run into the bathroom etc.

2) If doing a long break (e.g. lunch with the family) do a 2-3 minute stop at a gas station before orafter, but for the stop itself drive 5-10 minutes off the main road to unwind somewhere for an hour on more.

E.g. I was recently driving through the Rheine valley, and had lunch with this view, which is a 10 minute drive from the closest gas station: https://goo.gl/maps/VVXTWQDkc2F48UHe8

If I had an EV I'd have been stuck with the family in some uninviting car park at that gas station instead, and instead of a nice lunch having to pick through overpriced gas station fast food options.

Re #1: I find that those types of stops happen at the beginning of trips. If you're only an hour or two into your trip when you need to grab gasoline, you grab it quick. But with an EV you should be charging at home or at your hotel overnight, so you start out with a full battery and don't need a charge until about 4 hours in. Once you're 4 hours into a driving day, you want to stop for more than 3 minutes.

With that in mind I think we've been optimizing the charging infrastructure in Europe for something that worked well in North America.

Since you are going to need a bit of a longer stop I'd think it would be equally if not more important to ensure that there's fast chargers at every restaurant & attraction that's a short drive from the highway, rather than blindly copying what works for gasoline powered vehicles.

Re #1: I didn't mean to do short pit stops because you need to, but, and particularly with kids of a certain age, getting them out of the car to walk around for 5 minutes every hour might work much better than a similar 15 minute break every 3 hours, etc.

Which is still a big advantage of combustion, since fueling itself takes 1-2 minutes you can more easily pick which stop is the rarer longer stop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheine