Surely there was no doubt about this, right? It has a range of 330 miles. You need to charge it 3-4 times during the trip, which takes between fifteen and thirty minutes each time depending on how much charge you want to get. Obviously it's possible.
From a fueling perspective it's nowhere near as time-efficient as a fuel car for road trips. Like compared to my Corolla, you're talking about a swing of about an hour per thousand miles.
But that has to be considered in perspective. That distance is going to take you a minimum of twelve hours to drive. So at most the driving and fueling portion of your trip might take ten percent longer. The only material downside is that you're more limited in where you can recharge.
So sure maybe it takes you 3-4x as long to refuel in the Tesla. But that's 3-4x of a small fraction of the overall driving time. It's like an inverse of ahmdahls law. You can tolerate a significant slowdown in the cold part of a process without taking too much of a penalty on the process overall.
EVs are more efficient at lower speed and the more frequent braking events in city driving give EVs more opportunity to recuperate energy through regenerative braking.
All cars are less efficient at higher speeds because wind resistance increases with the cube of speed, and there are no efficiency benefits to travelling at a higher speed. Driving at 65mph is substantially more efficient than driving at 70mph. In theory, driving at a constant 40mph would be more efficient still, but there are not too many roads where you can drive at that speed over a long distance without hitting a lot of stop lights or stop signs.
Considering I am still answering this question to every non-ev owner prospective buyer or not, it probably doesn't hurt to have more instances of answers to this question floating around. I agree also about the additional time. Usually you’re needing a food break or two on a 12 hour drive and letting your car charge for 30 min is a nice excuse to stand up and walk to grab a quick bite somewhere. Honestly IMO the forced stops actually make long drives easier.
The charging time is a bug, and you always see this "it's a food break" workaround trotted out when it's brought up. Indeed, you should use the downtime in some way other than sitting in the car twiddling your thumbs, but make no mistake this is a bug. We can tolerate it sometimes maybe, but it needs a real fix.
Yesterday I hopped in a car and drove from the bay area to LA in one shot using 3/4 tank of gas. That's a nearly 400 mile trip done in under 6 hours. This is simply not possible in a tesla (or any EV, let's be fair). I had adaptive cruise control and lane assist to offload most of the cognitive load and I was able to hop out of the car at the valet and go right into the wedding hall without even needing to freshen up. It was that painless.
Compare to a tesla where I would have had to leave an hour earlier and also spend 45 minutes wandering around in my suit in a one horse town in the middle of nowhere grabbing fast food and watching tumbleweeds blow by.
I guess this is really 2 problems. Primarily charge time, but also range.
You would have needed to wait at most fifteen-twenty minutes at a supercharger, since that's all the time it takes to get a 200 mile charge. This doesn't take away from your point that the charging time is a demerit, but 45 minutes is an exaggeration. (I do not own an EV for what it's worth, although I certainly would if I regularly commuted by car.)
From a fueling perspective it's nowhere near as time-efficient as a fuel car for road trips. Like compared to my Corolla, you're talking about a swing of about an hour per thousand miles.
But that has to be considered in perspective. That distance is going to take you a minimum of twelve hours to drive. So at most the driving and fueling portion of your trip might take ten percent longer. The only material downside is that you're more limited in where you can recharge.
So sure maybe it takes you 3-4x as long to refuel in the Tesla. But that's 3-4x of a small fraction of the overall driving time. It's like an inverse of ahmdahls law. You can tolerate a significant slowdown in the cold part of a process without taking too much of a penalty on the process overall.