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;
- it’s 20 minutes up to 80% on fast chargers. The remaining 20% is an additional 20 minutes
- sometimes there will be no free charger and other cars are NOT fast charging
- while the range was quoted being 480km it’s closed to 320 with a vehicle full for a 2weeks trip with and additional car roof luggage
- you also need charge at destination. Our last leg was on smaller roads with less chargers
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.
Interesting, thank you for your feedback! I guess my main concern is about having enough chargers to be able to charge all the vehicles at one. Having so many cars stuck for 20 minutes isn’t the same deal as filling them all in 5 minutes or so.
At least here in my region, most charging parks have somewhat between 10 and 40 chargers. Small stations 4 or 5.
I never had any issue finding an empty slot - the trick is to plan ahead a tiny bit and to have enough power left to drive to the next charger, worst case.
Also, chargers post their status online, so my car knows ahead if there is a free slot - and can change the route accordingly.
I’d say that charger state and availability isn’t exactly up to date consistently at least in France and Belgium. We found a lot of degradations on even newer stations and sometimes we had to skip to the next one. You’re absolutely right that one needs to be cautious a out being able to reach an eventual next charging station.
Imho that needs to be ironed out before we can hope to convince the general population of the feasibility of the transition.
Yeah I wondered about the current throughput of a gas station and how would the charging time affect road congestion even given full charger availability. Also the room needed for stations will likely be much larger to account for the increased parking time during charge.
An interesting side effect would be that drivers would have forced breaks from driving, potentially resulting in less crashes due to attention exhaustion.
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.
France is nice for that. Also for their food but that’s unrelated 😅
In Belgium the stupid ass decision to give tax credit to companies that installed chargers is resulting in an over abundance of slow chargers that can hardly be used while charging stations are less plentiful. It’s bugging me to no end 😩
