I go by a Tesla charging station every day and see cars there for up to several hours. This seems like a waste of a huge chunk of your personal time so owning an electric vehicle sucks in that respect imo. What are people doing or can do that is productive during this wait time?
Charging your car on public in no mans land is a weird american invention. In germany you can charge your car at home, at the grocery store and in the city. Its not perfect but its improving a lot imo. Obviously it depends on where you live too.
But the fact that people travel to their work place is another completely senseless idea. The absolute least I would want is sharing the load with the employer or work from home entirely.
The whole idea of traveling hours a day to go to work for a job literally 100 people closer to the employer could do is nuts, along with the idea that you need to work to eat.
OP never mentioned commuting to work you’re just on an unrelated tangent. And yes, believe it or not a lot of people have jobs that require making service calls or being on location.
I feel like everyone’s missing the point. Even 20 minutes a week is almost a day a year of your life sitting at a charger. I fill up my gas tank once a week and it takes maybe 5 minutes which is 4 hours a year that I spend feeding my car, staring at the stupid advertisements for a bacon-egg-and-cheese cinnamon roll covered in maple syrup or whatever other impulse items lie within the gas station. 5 minutes isn’t enough to do anything whereas if I plan for 20 minutes, I’m going to go get a tea or something.
On the other hand, something we can all agree is a waste of time is, “how many hours of your life have been/will be spent sitting at a traffic light?”
Several hours? Those people are parked and charging their car while they are doing something else. It takes about 15 minutes to get 200 miles of range at a Tesla charging station. People sitting in their cars, waiting will be there for far shorter periods of time.
A vast majority of charging also takes place at the drivers destination (such as the drivers home), saving on the time it takes to go to a gas station to refuel (not to mention the time saved from not needing oil changes, smog checks, etc).
As for what to do while waiting, I’ll either use the time to grab snack, go to the bathroom, or watch something on on of the streaming services available from the console.
You’re completely wrong. A Tesla supercharger is a fast charger, so you usually don’t need to wait for more than half an hour to charge. And that’s something you’d only do when you go on a longer trip. If you charge at a level two charger, which does take a couple of hours, you don’t wait around. I usually change at work, i.e. I plug in when i get there in the morning, go to my office and get the car before going to lunch. Zero hassle.
My car gets about 250 miles on a charge, so I’m only ever at a public charger if I’m taking a trip longer than that. At that point my day is pretty much fucked by traveling, and it’s actually really nice get off the road for an hour. Usually I find a nearby coffee shop and work on the same stuff I would at home, and when I get back on the road I can feel that I’m alert and focused.
