This is tiring. Not everyone lives in the suburbs with a plug at ground level and getting out and stretching your legs is great when you choose where you do it but not when you do it in the queue for charging...

Maybe its tiring for you. What’s tiring for me is that in every single one of these threads, people bring up the most extreme, outlier situations (500 mile trips) as a cudgel against EVs.

EVs (or having a car in general) aren’t for everyone. Or aren’t for everyone yet.

But you’re now talking about the lack of adequate charging infrastructure in an urban setting. That’s a different conversation. It’s a worthy conversation, but not all that related to making 500 mile road trips.

This summer I made two 500 mile trips (round trip each time) to drop off (and pick up) a kid at a summer camp. It was a week long camp, so I drove up and back on two weekends. I drove an electric car up the first time and a hybrid SUV up the second time.

It was fine to do in my electric car. I spent about 5 minutes making sure I had a good charging plan, which turned out to add about 10-15 extra miles to the trip. It wasn’t a problem to stop to charge, and I really wanted to stop to eat and stretch when I needed to charge, so everything worked out well timing wise. The trip in the hybrid was a little faster, but not by much. I still stopped the same number of times regardless of what car I drove.

Note: I would have happily had made the trip in my EV both times, but I had another person with me for the second trip. She hated the seats in my EV, so we took the car with more comfortable interior for the second trip. The trip in the hybrid was “nicer”, but that was because it was a more comfortable car in general, not because of the difference between an EV and hybrid.

I have never been in a queue for charging in my 5 years of ev ownership. This includes 3 long roadtrips (Denmark to southern France so 1800 km to 2200 km each way) during summer vacations.

I've been doing EV road trips for four years now and I've never had to queue for a charger.

A recent road trip I went on about a month ago, I pulled up to the place I was planning to charge (an EA station attached to a Walmart, was going to go to the deli for a snack while it charged). It was completely full and seemed like there were a few people waiting. I just drove to another charging location about 2mi away (a 7/11 station I think?) and charged there and had a snack. No big deal.

That's about the closest I've had to queue in the past few years. Other than that, there have usually been multiple open chargers available. And once again that's only when I've road tripped. I've had to waste far more of my life pumping gas in my non-EV than I've spent waiting on charging despite my ICE getting far fewer miles.

Of course if you don't have a plug at home, and have to do all your charging at a station, buying an EV now is not a great idea.

If you do have a plug for charging, which you could have even if you live in an appartment (personal parking spot with a plug at your residence), then you're trading a small inconvenience for another.

Yes during your occasional long trip you'll have to spend 20 minutes charging instead of 5 minutes filling your tank, but when you're around your home doing short trips (most of the time for most people), you no longer have to do the occasional visits to the gas station. You just plug your car at home and be done with it.