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1.5 to 3 min gasoline fill is trivial. 15 minute EV charge is not. It's also a long time to wait in terms of the logistics of queuing people.

EV is kinda limited to out and back trips. Which is a lot of the need (commuting), to be fair. Recharging on the go will always be worse compared to ICE.



Road trip stop time with gasoline car: 3 minutes to fill + 15 minutes to go to the bathroom and buy a coffee.

With an EV car: 15 minutes to go to the bathroom and buy a coffee, done in parallel with the charge.

Time spent filling a gasoline car in your home city: 5 minutes 3x a month = 3 hours / year.

Time spent filling an EV at home: 5 seconds 3x a week = 3 minutes / year.


I really need to see videos of people doing these mythical 90 second gasoline fills on long road trips.

Do you practice it like you're at NASCAR or F1? How do you manage bathroom breaks? Bottles or catheters for everyone?


The point is more that if you want to drive like that, you can. My partner and I will typically stop for five to ten minutes to fill up, take a quick toilet break, and then get back on the road. We'll eat in the car, because we're trying to get somewhere. And that time adds up. In this video [1], Engineering Explained spends 8 hours charging, a bit over 20% of his total trip time. That's staggering; it's effectively a whole day, and could mean the difference between staying in a hotel overnight, and sleeping in your own bed.

BEVs are fine for many people, but I don't think Toyota is wrong in their assessment. Requirements typically aren't set at the mean, they're set at the extreme. I know people who had to make emergency trips during COVID that wouldn't have been possible in a BEV. Hell, I went on a work trip with some colleagues the other day and we had to use my car, because my coworker's BEV wouldn't have made the distance back.

The reality is that a BEV isn't a one-to-one replacement for an ICEV, and ICEVs are still superior for the "non-average" use case. I'll think about getting a BEV if they're ever able to compete at Le Mans.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UskzfQJt2Bc


And there are dozens of youtubers doing 1000km+ trips with maybe a hour extra compared to ICE - while saving hundreds compared to gas/diesel.

The US charging infrastructure is really bad outside of few major thoroughfares.


Please share them, then. For example, here's another video of Engineering with Rosie [1]; 4 hours spent charging on an ordinarily 8 hour trip after a mishap. I've driven those roads, and her trips are consistently 1-2 hours longer than an equivalent ICEV. So no, I don't buy that the performance is anywhere close to ICEVs for longer trips, and reliable charging is absolutely an issue.

Secondly, You aren't saving hundreds when using fast charging; in many places you're doing roughly the same cost wise, for a worse experience [2]. Here's a reddit comparison from a year ago versus a hybrid, which came out to be more expensive [3]. It's fair to say that if you're just charging it at home and using it as a commuter, then yeah, you're coming out ahead on fuel costs, but as I mentioned above, you just can't do some things as well as a normal car, and sometimes that really matters.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0cK582iqnY [2] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Tesla-charging-costs-equal-fue... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/jrwet6/road_tr...


Here's TeslaBjörn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_04rk3lIFcM&list=PLqKx2qnB8X...

He's done a 1000km trip on almost a hundred different EVs in Norway. Very few have any major issues.




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