[bryanlarsen]

This. I've done 4 3000km road trips in an EV. I never went more than 200 miles between charging sessions because my family and I need to eat, sleep and toilet. So more range wouldn't have made the trip any quicker. Faster charging would have.

Add a bit of margin and I believe that 300 miles is the point at which charging speed becomes more important than range.

[dangus]

But if you’re at something like 600 miles that’s basically the maximum most anyone is willing to (or should) drive in a day (10 hours at 60mph average), so that means you can use destination AC charging instead of DC fast charging because you now have 8+ hours of sleeping time instead of wanting to keep your break time under 20-30 minutes or so.

This is why I want my first EV to have a range like that. I’ll be able to the next place I’m sleeping without having to worry about whether I am going to encounter a half-broken Electrify America station that’s going to keep me sitting in a Walmart parking lot for 45 minutes of my day.

[bryanlarsen]

Good point. But we didn't always have destination AC charging; sometimes we were charging overnight on 120V instead.

If you're driving this theoretical 600 mile vehicle you can't charge it overnight on AC anyways. A level 2 charger is typically 10kW or 40amps. A 600 mile battery is likely at least 200kWh, a 20 hour charge at 10kW.

[dangus]

Still, a 10 hour AC charge would get you a sizable chunk of that total range and eliminate a stop that where must charge at for at least one day of your trip.

Selfishly, I have family in this range where it would be nice to get all the way to their house without needing to charge. I would probably pay to have a decent AC charger installed in their house. Spend the weekend there and I’d leave with a full battery, and never touch a DC fast charger.

[bryanlarsen]

Assuming that you mean your family is 500-620 miles away, are you saying you'd drive that far without stopping? At the minimum you'd think that'd require 2 10 minute bathroom breaks, and if that was enough to add 300 miles of range to a 300 mile car it wouldn't slow anybody down.

We have a >300 mile range on our car. You can recharge that over a long weekend on 120V; no need to install any extra equipment.

[dangus]

Of course I would stop multiple times, but it would improve the trip if I didn't have to stop in some of the obscure places where many EV chargers are located and instead stop at normal rest stops along the highway. That's supposed to be a short term issue as charging networks expand but truthfully there hasn't been very much movement in that regard.

Try to plan a trip from Atlanta, GA to Miami, FL. You aren't in a Tesla and your charging stops must always include a restroom. I think it might be legitimately impossible.

It's not like a gas car where you can just not plan anything at all and expect to find a place to stop to fuel your vehicle that has a restroom and convenience store all in the same place. You will instead expect to be in places that aren't really designed for short stops like Walmart/Costco/shopping mall parking lots. A 5 minute stop turns into a 20 minute charging stop plus a second stop to use the restroom or get hot foot.

The status quo is that you pay more for an EV and get a worse experience than the people who are paying less.

[saltcured]

This increases the stakes that your destination charger is available too, right? I can see having a large range is good for anxiety, if and only if you keep it in reserve.

I.e. plan to charge with 50% or more remaining, and have a low probability option to skip a charge and drive to the next destination. Then, your plan has to adapt as you may have to stay there longer than intended to wait for this much larger charge deficit to be recovered.

If this large capacity battery didn't have charge speed limitations, perhaps the mitigation could be to take a detour to a fast charging station and then return to your planned route.