I hear people talk all the time about how they can't imagine sitting for an hour in the middle of a road trip while waiting for the EV to charge. Well what they don't understand is that you almost never will charge for an hour.

It's true that it will take a Tesla nearly an hour to fully charge even at a supercharger but that is because once the battery hits 80% capacity it charges very slowly. That is why when you see charge times listed for EVs they will commonly tell you how quickly it charges from 0-80% because that is the most important. They charge pretty quickly 0-80% and then very slowly 80-100% so when you are road tripping it will not have you charge all the way full because it's not worth the time.

For example, I will be driving my Model S 700 miles to the game next week. My range is about 250 miles so one would think that you would drive 200-250 miles, stop for an hour and fully charge, and then drive again and do that over and over. That's not the case. At least with Tesla. Their supercharging network has chargers everywhere and it will plot a route for you and calculate charge times to make it as fast as possible.

So rather than driving until I'm fully depleted and charging for 40-60 mins, I will stop more often and charge for an average of 20 mins. I just looked and my longest charge time is 40 mins. The rest are 15, 20, or 25 mins.

So you are stopping more often which can be annoying to some, but you aren't sitting there motionless for an hour. You stop, get out of the car, stretch your legs, use the bathroom, grab a drink (or lunch if a longer stop) and then you are back on the road. Not nearly as bad as you'd think.

EVs still aren't great for people trying to get from A to B as quickly as possible but they aren't nearly as bad as most would think. If you have young kids like me you are used to bathroom breaks every couple hours anyways so it's really not that much different. Combine that with the savings over gas and the ease of driving with autopilot and I love my Tesla for road trips.