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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How do they do for long trips?  How long do you have to stop to charge?  Have you ever gotten stuck because others are charging at your planned stop?[/quote]

Our EV has a range of 250 miles. We don't make long trips very often, or we use our other (non-EV) vehicle just because it's bigger and we're carrying luggage.

250 miles is about 4 hours of driving, and you can look for charging spots along the way -- they usually have them at convenience stores or the like off major highways. Our EV comes with free charging on the Electrity America network, and they tend to have their charging stations at Walmarts or shopping malls. Charging is about 20 minutes to charge the battery mostly full.[/quote]

NP.  Suppose I wanted to drive to NYC.  That sounds like it would be cutting it close so I wouldn't want to go the whole drive without a charge.  I'm assuming I could charge at a rest stop.  But if all the chargers are in use, then I have to wait 20 or so to begin to start my charging?  So my 15 min rest stop to pee and fill up would know potentially become a 40min stop?[/quote]

When we drive from D.C. to New York in our EV, which also has a 250-mile range and free charging at Electrify America (so I assume we and the PP both have VW ID.4s maybe?), we charge to 100 percent at home the night before, so we leave here with a full battery. We drive to a Wawa in Wilmington, Del., and stop there for about 25 minutes to charge at the EA station there. It's got six or maybe eight charging stations; we've never seen more than two or three in use at the same time. If you're driving with someone else in the car, you can check how many chargers are in use at a given stop before you get there -- if the Wilmington one was full or out of service, we could easily make it to one of several Walmarts in South Jersey that also have EA stations instead.

I guess it's theoretically possible you could wind up having to wait to charge, but if you're on I-95 in the Northeast, odds are you won't come anywhere near close to running out of range before you just go to the next free charger -- and if you're willing to pay for a charge, there's even more options, because the rest stations on 95 in Maryland, Delaware, and most of New Jersey all have non-Tesla rapid charging as well as Tesla superchargers. I just stick to the EA ones because they're free for us for now.

We also usually charge for about 20 or 30 minutes in New York not too long after arriving, so we don't have to worry about calculating exactly when/where to charge on the return trip, and because the part of New York we go to most doesn't have as many publicly available chargers as we might prefer. But that's a pretty minor inconvenience for the other benefits of the EV -- and at any rate, unless you're taking road trips every weekend or whatever, I wouldn't worry about letting the most complicated, but least common, logistics be what holds you back from one.[/quote]

Thanks pp, this is really helpful. I’m planning to make the trip from DC to NYC soon and was wondering about all this.

- 3rd ID.4 owner[/quote]

In that case, I'll add that before I found a ChargePoint station I could use near my in-laws' place, we routinely hit the EA station at the Walmart in East Brunswick, N.J., on our way back from New York -- charging to about 70 percent there got us more than enough to make it back to the Wawa and then charge there for the way home. If you can charge while you're in New York, though, then you should only have to make the one stop on the way back.[/quote]

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