Reply to Electric cars

Forum Index » Cars and Transportation

Reply to "Electric cars"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Does anyone have an electric vehicle? Not hybrid. How do you use them for long road trips? We take occasional long trips (eg Maine) and I’m trying to understand how feasible this is with a car with a range of less than 200 miles. Is it easy to find places to recharge? What is your experience?[/quote]

The strength and reliability of your charging network is going to determine your answer. We chose our ev as much for the charging network as for the range - Tesla supercharging network plus 360 mile range means we can go anywhere. We have done 6-7 road trips in the past 2 years, half were under 500 mi and half were over 700 miles. It will take you longer in an ev depending on how long you have to charge. It added about an hour to the 700 mi trips, but since I was the only driver, that’s how long it would have taken me in a gas car because I don’t like driving for longer than 3h stretches. We didn’t plan our stops ahead of time - just got in and then roughly lined up our charging stops with when we needed a bathroom break or a meal. Unless I need to drive 6 hours straight in some sort of emergency situation, I’m always going to opt for the ev. We waited 10 min for a charger once, otherwise have never had to wait. We stopped at one supercharger that was adjacent to an electrify america station. There were several out of order signs and people were trying different chargers to find a fast one. We saw an etron that couldn’t disconnect from the charger. That might be atypical, but we have several friends with beautiful luxurious etrons and they won’t take them on road trips because of range/charging issues.

You should also know that range is deceptive. We have a range of 360 mile, but a lot of things can affect that - at higher speeds, blasting ac or heat, being fully loaded with passengers and cargo will diminish that range. Plus you are supposed to charge to 80% for battery longevity, so now the range is 275. And since I want to have a cushion in case I get stuck behind an accident, I don’t want to go below 70/75. So now the range is really 200. So you can see how your range gets eaten into. If you start with a range of 200 and charge to 80%, now you are at 160. And if you don’t want to go below 50, now you are at 110. Which isn’t great. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics