I’m a bit skeptical about it really working on large scales during summer holidays. Aren’t EV supposed to charge for at least 30 minutes 1 hour minimum to be able to get some autonomy? How is that realistic with such a high number of vehicles?
I’m on vacation with a rented Tesla Y LR in Tuscany right now. We traveled all the way from northern Germany (about 1500 km) and never had any issues finding a free charging station. Just once every single parking spot was used and the charging automatically stopped at 80% in order to make space for others more quickly (and to be honest, this was due to other cars parking in the Tesla reserved parking spots at an Italian supermarket).
Traveling with kids automatically makes you take a break every 3 hours or so. This time, we just let the car charge during these breaks and had a 100% charged car afterwards. That’s about 55 min of charging time. In about 25 min you can charge from 20% to 80% using a 250 kW supercharger.
You have to keep in mind that long distance travel is not the usual use case and that being able to slowly charge the vehicle during the night is also important. Most camping sites, hotels and vacation resorts offer at least two 11 kW stations at their own rates.
Newer ones can charge an acceptable amount in 10 to 15 minutes. Technology is rapidly improving, and will only get better. Also if there’s lots of chargers along multiple rest stops, shouldn’t be a problem to find one.
Bigger problem is the clusterfuck of roaming agreements, apps, charge cards, and obscure rules between all these charger operators. Also how to find the chargers and their status. Needs to be regulated into an open standard.
It’s not as complicated as I thought at first. Driving a Tesla you have most routes covered with Tesla Superchargers.
Additionally, I have a basic subscription from an electricity provider including their charging card for rare cases where the app doesn’t work. There are just 3 different types with increasing rates:
Don’t even need kids - I tend to get very sleepy after 2-3 hours of driving anyway, so getting to take a little walk for 15-30 minutes is way healthier than loading up on energy drinks / coffee in a five minute stop.
I’m a bit skeptical about it really working on large scales during summer holidays. Aren’t EV supposed to charge for at least 30 minutes 1 hour minimum to be able to get some autonomy? How is that realistic with such a high number of vehicles?
I’m on vacation with a rented Tesla Y LR in Tuscany right now. We traveled all the way from northern Germany (about 1500 km) and never had any issues finding a free charging station. Just once every single parking spot was used and the charging automatically stopped at 80% in order to make space for others more quickly (and to be honest, this was due to other cars parking in the Tesla reserved parking spots at an Italian supermarket).
Traveling with kids automatically makes you take a break every 3 hours or so. This time, we just let the car charge during these breaks and had a 100% charged car afterwards. That’s about 55 min of charging time. In about 25 min you can charge from 20% to 80% using a 250 kW supercharger.
You have to keep in mind that long distance travel is not the usual use case and that being able to slowly charge the vehicle during the night is also important. Most camping sites, hotels and vacation resorts offer at least two 11 kW stations at their own rates.
Newer ones can charge an acceptable amount in 10 to 15 minutes. Technology is rapidly improving, and will only get better. Also if there’s lots of chargers along multiple rest stops, shouldn’t be a problem to find one.
Bigger problem is the clusterfuck of roaming agreements, apps, charge cards, and obscure rules between all these charger operators. Also how to find the chargers and their status. Needs to be regulated into an open standard.
It’s not as complicated as I thought at first. Driving a Tesla you have most routes covered with Tesla Superchargers.
Additionally, I have a basic subscription from an electricity provider including their charging card for rare cases where the app doesn’t work. There are just 3 different types with increasing rates:
Our EV6 should be one of such newer models. We just did our first holiday trip with it from Belgium to Brittany. Some key points to note;
In addition with 2 kids it makes sense anyway to pause for 30mins every 300km or so. For us ot was a pleasant experience all in all.
We have a Tesla Model 3 since 4 years, did 90K km.
Exactly same experience here, we travelled across France several times and never had issues regarding charging or battery anxiety.
As we also have kids, we stop every ~2h30 and charge during that time.
Don’t even need kids - I tend to get very sleepy after 2-3 hours of driving anyway, so getting to take a little walk for 15-30 minutes is way healthier than loading up on energy drinks / coffee in a five minute stop.