this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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I don't drive 11h often, once/twice a year maybe, but the 30% is more or less constant for me because:
On routes that I drive very often this is not an issue. I plug-in, charge for 20 min and drive on. But those are usually 1-2h trips. On long routes, far away from home something almost always will happen to add extra time to the trip.
As for reliability I always check the apps but I often plan the route 1-2 days ahead and you can't be 100% sure something will not break before you get there. In the 2+ years I was driving I saw chargers that were reporting as active that refused to charge, chargers that died right as I was charging and even the entire infra of a charging network collapse as I was about to charge (even their website went down. I called and they told me it's an outage and it will be fixed "soon").
I'm very happy with my EV. I'm just saying there are still issues with longer trips. If you don't do long trips that's awesome. If you do range anxiety is still a thing. I can deal with it but I understand people who don't want to.
That can go both ways. You can go to 10%. You should be able to pretty easily find a charger somewhere between 5-20%.
You can't do this AND complain about how long you're stopping. Presumably you're doing this because you want to, which can be fine, sure. Your phone tells you when the charge is done. If you want to spend less time charging, just choose not to do this.
All of this is 100% legit. Sometimes tapping the credit card doesn't work, or you have to use their fucking app to get the discount.
I also wonder about privacy. Which ones are recording my VIN when I connect? I'd really like the option to pay cash for a charger to be normalized without the charger recording my VIN. My car should be asking me before it shares any information. I don't know if it does, and would love to hear more on this.
Is this a relic? In the middle of the US, I've found charging networks to be reliable enough to not need this. I picked what should be a terrible route on google maps, Clinton, Oklahoma to Ogallala, Nebraska, an 8 hour drive. I might plan that one a little more, but you probably don't need to.
Not all of what I mentioned happens always but sometimes you have an issue with the charger, sometimes you stop for a bit longer and it all adds up. I mean, I'm not making this up. I did the same routes multiple times with my ICE and electric car and charging easily adds 20-30% to the time. With bigger autonomy it would be less of a problem (you stop for longer by less often so all the little things are a smaller problem) but I think the article is trying to prove that we don't actually need bigger batteries (and I agree that 90% of the time we don't).
As for the route planning it's definitely not easy in Spain. I think right now it kind of getting to the point were you should be able to find a charger every 50 km but only on some highways. Very often the shortest and fastest route will take me through secondary roads but there's only one charger along the route and if it's not working when I get there I'm fucked. Last time I did a longer route I got to one charger and it simply wouldn't initiate charging (the app claimed it's working). I got to the next one (again, app claimed it's active) but all the fast chargers were disabled, only the slow one was active. The third one worked. Looking at your map I can see some places were broken charger could leave me stranded so I would definitely spend some time trying to figure out alternatives. If some day the chargers will work 100% of the time it will be a different story.
It's getting even easier in the US with Biden's initiative to "Electrify America".
Oh wait, that's cancelled.
It's an interesting discussion, and I think all of it is valuable reading for people who might be on the fence or skeptical. And of course I'm not as familiar with Europe, but I expected you'd be farther along than Kansas when it comes to this green anything. On the other hand, our car culture in general is much larger, and highway culture in Kansas surely plays a bigger role than Spain.
It's a complicated topic in general. In my apartment building there are many families with two cars (because both parents work). They are in a perfect situation to get an EV because then can simply keep the other car for longer trips and in the last year I saw many new chargers appear in the garage. In other places people don't have a private parking spot to install a charger, have just one car and drive more. For them EV will still be a big inconvenience. The infrastructure is improving quite fast and you can definitely drive anywhere you want but it still not as convenient as gas stations.
What are you using for route planning? It should have had you charge 10% less at the previous stop so you'd arrive at the current stop with 20% instead of 30%.
A 20% buffer is my high end. I generally prefer at least 10% buffer but that depends on conditions, speed, etc.
I just use electromaps to find the chargers. And figure out the route myself. I don't know any reliable app to plan the whole route. Can you recommend anything?
A Better Route Planner (ABRP) is generally considered the gold standard.
But that said 99% of the time I was using Tesla's chargers so there is little thinking involved. But I've white knuckled a couple of charging stops in ND, SD, MT.
Last summer i unfortunately got in an accident about 900 miles from home. When I went to pick up my car a few months later, I found out at my first charging stop that stupid Tesla disabled supercharging. Fortunately I had done the DIY upgrade to enable CCS charging and was relieved that they only disabled supercharging and not all DCFS.
I managed to get home but it was painful. 5 or 6 different charging networks all with their unique issues. I often spent more time getting a charge started than I would have spent charging on a Tesla charger.
When I got home, my local service center reenabled supercharging without having to do some HV voltage battery test at a cost of about $1600. That was not disclosed on the estimate they provided.