They keep saying they’re pulling ahead of everyone else. But as the owner of a Model 3, with a deposit in for a Cybertruck, all I’ve seen materialize in the last year are “cold weather improvements”.
The hype is accelerating but the actual production offerings aren’t keeping pace.
Does it matter? I’m saying that the software they’re providing me for my Model 3 and the hardware they’re offering for purchase have stalled out. There hasn’t been a significant change to either in the last year.
All the software updates have been minor tweaks. The new car models keep getting pushed back. Meanwhile the hype continues to accelerate.
Given that their delivered progress is ~0, and the hype clearly >0, they’re not pulling ahead relative to anybody.
The progress for your situation might be zero. But every day, there’s new Teslas being shipped and people finding more value in it than competing EVs. That is “pulling ahead”.
What is your source? I see lots of anecdotes about Tesla service problems which doesn't seem like more value. I believe Tesla in general has a fairly dismal quality rating, but IIRC they don't allow participation in stuff like JD Power surveys.
I mean look at the BMW i4 - it starts at around $58k, same as a Model 3 Performance - it has less range, slower 0-60 and it's RWD.
If you want to somewhat match the Model 3, you have to add $1000 for heated steering wheel, comfort access and expanded storage, another $3000 for wireless charging, autopilot alternative, another $500 for parking assist (though BMW's actually works), etc and it adds up to quite a bit just to match what you get for free in the Model 3.
Of course BMWs have higher quality pretty much everywhere and have more options like a sunroof, etc
In the end do people want to pay less to have more range and a quicker car, but less quality or more quality for less range and a slower car.
Also, fun fact, EQS comes with 8 CPU cores, 24 GB RAM and 46.4 GB per second RAM memory! I wonder if I can buy 64 GB RAM from newegg for the EQS in the future! Would be a shame to not be able to run an entire homelab in there [1].
> 550km real-world driving range (565km using US-based EPA ratings and 584km using the European WLTP cycle which Tesla also shows on its website in Australia).
Things are getting into interesting ranges though quite short of most ICEs still.
The thing is with EVs, you don't need a range the same as ICE. I'm not sure if you've ever owned an EV, but the vast majority of trips are done relatively locally and with a home charger, you're pretty much always "full" after you plug in overnight. The nicest thing is that I never have to worry about going to a gas station.
For longer trips the range sort-of matters, but at least with Tesla, the Supercharger density makes most road trips not only possible but perfectly comfortable. I happen to enjoy the regular 15-20 minute stops, which is enough to go to the bathroom or stretch. I've heard the same from others who swore they'd hate the forced stops. Sure, some may want to bee-line it, but I don't believe that's true for most.
The only other place having slightly longer range would be nice is for cold (going into the mountains to ski in my Y is fine based on where I live, but uses a good chunk of range and much more than the actual driving distance would imply, but it's cold, up a mountain, and with a ski rack on top) or towing (which I don't do, but in generally even a light trailer will halve your range).
>the vast majority of trips are done relatively locally and with a home charger
Surely this depends on your use case. This is likely true if you use your car to commute, or you live in a rural area so you need to use a car to go shopping. But not everybody uses a car for those things, and you've just listed a bunch of use-cases where the range would be useful. This an option that those who do need it can opt into, which makes perfect sense to me.
If current EVs don’t support your use case, your use case is in the minority. Average daily round trip commute in the US is ~32 miles. You’re never further than 100 miles between Superchargers in almost the entire country, and that will only improve as governments support rapid charging station deployments.
If you’re hauling horse trailers or routinely commuting 150+ miles in a day, sure, EVs don’t meet your needs yet. But for most, they already do. There are several taxi services that have Model Ys in their fleet, so even high utilization use cases are served by existing EVs and related infrastructure.
The US use case doesn’t represent the world, and doesn’t resemble the majority of the EV market. Even in the US, not everyone is a homeowner with a dedicated port as the OP suggests. Personally, if I switched to an EV I’d be jockeying every evening for one of the ~50 public charging spots in my neighborhood, which are already mostly occupied.
Are you saying installing more EV chargers can’t be solved? I know folks who charge once per week at a Supercharger for 20 min if they can’t charge at home, or their employer offers charging.
Of course it can and will be solved; I'm rebutting the idea that these issues aren't a problem today for most people, based on the assumption that the typical use case is a US suburban household.
Here in northern Montana, there are no super chargers anywhere except on interstates, and more than 75% of the state is more than 100 miles from an interstate. Same for the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Nebraska. 100 miles may be true weighted by population, but it is certainly not true by area between the Mississippi and the west coast.
It’s taken $600 million and 10 years for Tesla to mostly cover the developed world. Give it another year or two for the most rural areas to get coverage. Most of the country lives outside of Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Nebraska.
Remember, we’re talking the majority of people, not the long tail.
Sure, but don't you think that EVs ought to support minority use cases? After all, they are aiming to replace ICEs wholesale. I don't think most people need longer range to adopt EVs, but I do think that manufacturers should still be looking to build cars with longer range.
I think compromises will need to be made, and those who can’t use an EV should pay for their combustion emissions if EVs don’t meet their needs. EVs should, in my opinion, meet most use cases eventually (and meet the majority today) except for edges where energy density or charging speed for EVs falls short.
It's alright when you can guarentee your stop is 15-20 minutes. But it will probably look a lot different when there are 2x, 3x, 10x more EVs on the road. Imagine being in line when everyone has to charge for 15 minutes?
You need less chargers than gas stations and they are somewhat cheaper to deploy and maintain. Tesla has been doing a good job keeping up with demand building out new charge stations.
All you need for a charger is enough power. Fortunately, high power power lines tend to follow the same routes as highways and interstates.
The supercharger network is something tesla does a lot better than the competition.
If you read the article you'll see that Tesla didn't announce anything. The writer of the article found some plain docs Tesla filed with Chinese authorities and decided to editorialise and call it "super long range".
Note: Edmunds tested to a display of zero miles remaining, not to a dead stop, yet even with adjusting for that, only 2 of 6 Tesla models could meet their advertised range.
I’m surprised by the number of model Ys I see. I think it’s Tesla’s least flattering vehicle and the price when optioned is comparable to the model S. Maybe, it’s the fact that it’s a crossover, but the model X in comparison is a ghost. Any ideas on why people seem to love the Y more than the other Tesla models?
Completely personal opinion, but the Y seems to satisfy a larger family/roominess requirement, and the X does much the same thing while adding HELLO EVERYONE LOOK AT MEEEEEE whenever you open the gull wing doors. :P
Tesla is very obviously chasing the BMW market with the Model 3 and Model Y, which represent the 3-series sedans and X3 respectively. You can see this when you compare prices and specifications (cabin size, curb height, HP) of similarly-outfitted vehicles. The next level up in BMW’s SUV lineup is the X5, which begins at about $60K and goes up to about $82K fully loaded. Whereas the Tesla Model X begins at $80K and can go $91K or even $100K if you get the options (I’m not even talking about “Plaid”, which is $120K.) So TL;DR the Y is more popular than the X because it’s a much cheaper car (when equivalently optioned), and the X is competing with a much more expensive category of luxury SUVs.
The price of the X over Y is pretty hefty and, frankly, the interior is outdated and due for a refresh. I'd not buy a model X at this point for those 2 reasons.
I'll bet the X gets a refresh around the same time cybertruck is released. If I were to guess, I'd guess that X will go to the same platform as cybertruck (right now its built on the Model S platform).
Maybe I'm weird, but I feel like range anxiety is overblown. Most people don't go that far in a day and while recharging isn't instant, it's getting quite fast. Back in the day, it was easy to be bored. That was so little to distract you while waiting. Now, I have a smartphone with me all the time. Even when I'm home, half the time I'm on my smartphone by choice. Ok, that's an exaggeration, but it's so much easier to wait half an hour. Get a drink and a snack, derp around on my phone, etc.
If I'm doing Boston -> DC via Tesla Model 3 Long Range, it'll add two stops for 20 minutes and 25 minutes. However, I'm going to have to stop for gas along the way at least once so the 45 minute penalty should maybe be a 30 minute penalty. Realistically, it isn't a bad thing to stop a couple times, get drinks/snacks, stretch my legs, etc. It feels like it's a 5% penalty which just doesn't seem significant for something people rarely do.
I think some of it is the psychology that a 20 minute stop feels like a real stop while a 5 minute stop doesn't feel like a real stop. Even if you spend 10 minutes in the convenience shop or get lunch, that's your "choice" rather than the car's need. A lot of gas stops are longer than 5 minutes on road trips.
I think people buy cars for things they almost never do - and have a weird hate of themselves if their car can't accommodate something. I had a friend whose car couldn't fit a piece of furniture and he had to pay $100 to have it delivered. He said that he hated himself for not buying the larger (and $5,000 more expensive) vehicle he was also considering the three times this had happened. In my mind, that's not something to regret. You've come out $4,700 ahead! Yes, sometimes your car won't accommodate everything and that's ok. Maybe your car will need 5% more time to do Boston to DC, but that's not a big deal in your life.
I agree with your last point. I don’t own a truck because I can rent an 8 foot bed truck at uhaul for <$100 with little notice. It’s been fine.
But range “anxiety” (concern?) has stopped me from buying an electric car so far (though the next one will be).
Your first example doesn’t account for variance, charging where you wind up, and fluctuations in demand.
Most people travel on busy travel days. So this could be a problem if I’m going to the beach on a Saturday. Suddenly I’m in line behind 3 other cars that drove the same distance to minimize the number of charges they need between my city and the beach. So I now need to wait 1 hour before I can start charging, and I don’t have enough fuel to get to another charger. Now I arrive at the beach house and I either can only slow charge or need to find a charger.
I can also go 500 miles on a tank of gas. That’s one trip without stopping (realistically 250 miles over 3.5 hours of highway driving). That’s right on the edge of charging, and then it’s making a 3.5 hour trip a 4 hour trip, which makes a difference. That’s an hour out of the weekend.
> Most people travel on busy travel days. So this could be a problem if I’m going to the beach on a Saturday.
In my experience, I've only had to wait to charge once. There are generally more than enough chargers for weekends. It's holidays you have to watch out for.
> Now I arrive at the beach house and I either can only slow charge or need to find a charger.
24 hours of charging will fill up most EV to 100%. Most EV owners would say "Yeah, slow charge at the beach house, why look for a fast charger?". You probably aren't doing anything at night and even if that's the only time you slow charge, 16 hours would give you a pretty decent chunk of range.
Agreed, but I think it’s going to be a mess in the next couple years when ford starts shipping the lightning. There are going to be way more trucks than chargers to handle them for long trips. Practically that doesn’t make a difference (and I’d probably take my gas vehicle for long road trips).
And slow charging works at the vacation spot, unless you’re at a condo / parking garage without power outlets. It’s just enough inconvenience (with fairly significant consequences if you run out of charge [half day of vacation waster]) to make it less practical right now as a single car solution.
> Agreed, but I think it’s going to be a mess in the next couple years when ford starts shipping the lightning.
Agreed there. The lightning is going to sell like hotcakes. I only hope ford starts investing in charge networks.
This won't really affect tesla's, but it will put a lot of strain on these smaller networks.
> And slow charging works at the vacation spot, unless you’re at a condo / parking garage without power outlets. It’s just enough inconvenience (with fairly significant consequences if you run out of charge [half day of vacation waster]) to make it less practical right now as a single car solution.
Personally, I plan my lodging around EV chargers. Though, I'd be the first to say that sometimes there's not enough chargers for everyone that wants to charge.
My hope is that as time goes on, we'll see bigger expansion of L2 chargers. It's something that I believe more EV adoption will drive more L2 deployment.
I think psychology, cars in the US are connected with independence and liberty in the US rather than just utility. If your car fails to let you be independent (because it can’t do something you only need three times in your life) then maybe that is actually a big failure of its “promise” to give you independence and personal liberty and that therefore decreases your perception of the value of the car by a lot.
I realise this whole argument for pricing the car is ridiculous from a rational standpoint but I think it matters more how it feels to ordinary Americans.
I bought a Model Y last year, in spite of my range anxiety. My first road trip alleviated that concern for me. Range anxiety is real, though. While I think the need for a "super long range" model isn't necessarily needed, it can go a long way to solving the short-term dilemma in consumer mindsets.
The problem isn’t interurban driving. It’s driving to the countryside. Drive to Grass Valley for a weekend and then to the countryside from there or drive to lake Sebago and drive to the countryside from there. That’s what people in metro areas do for their weekend jaunts. Go to a nice place far from the urban area then want to explore the countryside surrounds there.
There may be areas where that works but I think the anxiety for that is reasonable.
It may surprise you to learn this, but there's a fast charger in Grass Valley. [1]
It's really pretty stunning how many fast chargers are popping up in rural locations.
They are usually 50kW chargers, but still, that will get you to where you need to go in an hour or 2 (if you need to).
On the other hand, if you are spending a weekend there, you can often slow charge at wherever you are staying. A weekend is more than enough time to get a full battery, even at 120V.
I agree with you, but I'll throw in a few things on why I still want longer range cars (I currently own a 2018 long range model 3).
The first big thing is shorter stops. A 500 mile range battery can charge at a higher rate for longer than a lower range battery. Where you might need to go up to 90% to get to the next charger, a bigger battery means that you actually only need to hit 60 or 70% in order to get to that next stop. That means a longer time charging at 250kW which ultimately gets you further for the same time spent.
Now, for total trip time, maybe this matters less. However, for a charging infrastructure it means that you are cycling through cars more frequently. That means during holidays you have less cars that need to charge and when they do charge they need to charge for a shorter period of time, relieving congestion.
The other thing, and this may just be my neck of the woods, is tesla really needs to do a better job at charger placement. In the west, a lot of the chargers are in bad spots. They are often in hotel parking lots or general mall spots. This means that while at a gas station you might walk out, use the restroom or grab a snack, at a lot of these charge locations you are stuck in the car. You need to make a seperate stop to do all that.
We need more gas stations installing chargers. But if they do that, they'll probably want to do CCS and not Tesla... which means tesla needs to come out with a CCS1 adapter for the US.
None of this has made road trips in the Tesla terrible. I've done a 2000 mile trip and it really wasn't all that bad. That said, I'll certainly opt in for a larger battery pack when they are available.
Range gives you options. My gas cars all have 400+ mile ranges. I've been in several places in the last 3 years with 130+ miles between (gas) services. That's scary even when the range estimator is saying "you're cool".
I just drove from STL -> Chicago -> Yellowstone -> Seattle. Range helps a lot since we multiple time deviated from the plan (Rushmore to devils tower). We would have had to be very specific with a lower range electric. Also our options for lodging would have been much more greatly restricted and we would issues have missed several cool small towns. And we'd have had to, while exhausted, charge the car at the end of a long day.
To get real detailed: Looking at their trip planner, and ignoring you can't charge up in most of yellowstone, CHI -> Rushmore -> Devils Tower -> Lusk -> Canyon Village is 390 minutes / 6.5 hours charging. Due to the limited number of stops in the trip planner, the remainder of the trip (which assumes a full charge at the start) would be another 110 minutes, (~2 hours) of charging. For a grand total of probably 9 hours of charging, or a full day of driving over that trip. I filled up 8 times on the trip, call it 10 minutes each, so 80 minutes. So call it 7 hours (420 minutes). That's 560 miles of drive time spent charging, which is basically a full day over that trip.
I did see several teslas in the park, but I'm guessing they were coming in and out from Jackson / Gardier / West. We did 250 miles a day in the park easy and we stayed in the park. Also exhausted at the end of each day.
Note I'm not a charging expert nor hyper optimizer so you may be able to do better but I had trouble just booking the hotels for this trip due to covid's impacts on everything.
My buddy drives for work as an engineering sales person. They go to factories from North Cali to Vancouver BC, and out to MT. Drives from Portland, OR to the UP, Michigan for fun 4 times a year. Those trips would be a PITA with a standard low range EV.
A year ago I went from Tuscon -> Ozarks, MO -> STL -> Chicago. IIRC the Tesla trip planner had us doing 7+ hours at the charger. We did the trip in 2 days in a gas car and went all over the place.
In 2019 we went from Cairns to Brisbane over 13 days, which is about 1100 miles, even less options.
In 2018 we did Sea -> Crater Lake -> Crescent City -> Tahoe -> Yosemite -> CV -> LA -> and then the 1 on the coast up back up to Seattle. 3800 massive miles, 82 hours driving. I can't even imagine what planning that trip with a low range EV would look like.
Sure I don't do it all the time but I'm averaging one large (2500mi+) road trip every year or so.
And this doesn't even consider things like ski trips where you're blowing a whole day if you can't get a charge/refill on time. There are a lot of EVs in the Seattle area, that means a lot of people using the chargers in remote areas and you're already exhausted and dealing with tired kids.
I'm personally waiting on a suv-ish ev with >500 mile range. And even then my cars are all in great shape, so it'll be a while before I buy one.
Typical EV user case involves a homeowner with a charger in the garage. Worse comes to worst, you can always plug the car overnight.
But someone like a student, who lives in a rental, might experience difficulty keeping their car consistently charged.
Even when public chargers are nominally available, they might be inoperable, used by others, or just taken up by a non-EV taking up a convenient parking spot (which, according to EV owner groups, happens frequently).
The term "super long range" is not used by Tesla. They filed documents with Chinese authorities simply stating the range of the new variants. The writer of this article is the one who decided to call it "super long range".
66 comments
[ 9.4 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadThe hype is accelerating but the actual production offerings aren’t keeping pace.
All the software updates have been minor tweaks. The new car models keep getting pushed back. Meanwhile the hype continues to accelerate.
Given that their delivered progress is ~0, and the hype clearly >0, they’re not pulling ahead relative to anybody.
If they stopped selling cars to more people, they’d be “falling behind”
https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v...
If you want to somewhat match the Model 3, you have to add $1000 for heated steering wheel, comfort access and expanded storage, another $3000 for wireless charging, autopilot alternative, another $500 for parking assist (though BMW's actually works), etc and it adds up to quite a bit just to match what you get for free in the Model 3.
Of course BMWs have higher quality pretty much everywhere and have more options like a sunroof, etc
In the end do people want to pay less to have more range and a quicker car, but less quality or more quality for less range and a slower car.
So, you missed the Model S Plaid release?
[1] https://www.mbusa.com/en/future-vehicles/eqs-sedan
/s
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/10/22618661/mercedes-benz-eq...
Things are getting into interesting ranges though quite short of most ICEs still.
For longer trips the range sort-of matters, but at least with Tesla, the Supercharger density makes most road trips not only possible but perfectly comfortable. I happen to enjoy the regular 15-20 minute stops, which is enough to go to the bathroom or stretch. I've heard the same from others who swore they'd hate the forced stops. Sure, some may want to bee-line it, but I don't believe that's true for most.
The only other place having slightly longer range would be nice is for cold (going into the mountains to ski in my Y is fine based on where I live, but uses a good chunk of range and much more than the actual driving distance would imply, but it's cold, up a mountain, and with a ski rack on top) or towing (which I don't do, but in generally even a light trailer will halve your range).
Surely this depends on your use case. This is likely true if you use your car to commute, or you live in a rural area so you need to use a car to go shopping. But not everybody uses a car for those things, and you've just listed a bunch of use-cases where the range would be useful. This an option that those who do need it can opt into, which makes perfect sense to me.
If you’re hauling horse trailers or routinely commuting 150+ miles in a day, sure, EVs don’t meet your needs yet. But for most, they already do. There are several taxi services that have Model Ys in their fleet, so even high utilization use cases are served by existing EVs and related infrastructure.
Remember, we’re talking the majority of people, not the long tail.
https://supercharge.info/map
It's alright when you can guarentee your stop is 15-20 minutes. But it will probably look a lot different when there are 2x, 3x, 10x more EVs on the road. Imagine being in line when everyone has to charge for 15 minutes?
https://thedriven.io/2021/06/30/tesla-owners-line-up-at-supe...
It will be interesting if charging stations can keep pace with EV adoption.
All you need for a charger is enough power. Fortunately, high power power lines tend to follow the same routes as highways and interstates.
The supercharger network is something tesla does a lot better than the competition.
This would only be a 8% increase.
https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-range-and-cons...
Note: Edmunds tested to a display of zero miles remaining, not to a dead stop, yet even with adjusting for that, only 2 of 6 Tesla models could meet their advertised range.
I'll bet the X gets a refresh around the same time cybertruck is released. If I were to guess, I'd guess that X will go to the same platform as cybertruck (right now its built on the Model S platform).
The base Model S is $90k and the base Model Y is $53k. That's a big difference.
If I'm doing Boston -> DC via Tesla Model 3 Long Range, it'll add two stops for 20 minutes and 25 minutes. However, I'm going to have to stop for gas along the way at least once so the 45 minute penalty should maybe be a 30 minute penalty. Realistically, it isn't a bad thing to stop a couple times, get drinks/snacks, stretch my legs, etc. It feels like it's a 5% penalty which just doesn't seem significant for something people rarely do.
I think some of it is the psychology that a 20 minute stop feels like a real stop while a 5 minute stop doesn't feel like a real stop. Even if you spend 10 minutes in the convenience shop or get lunch, that's your "choice" rather than the car's need. A lot of gas stops are longer than 5 minutes on road trips.
I think people buy cars for things they almost never do - and have a weird hate of themselves if their car can't accommodate something. I had a friend whose car couldn't fit a piece of furniture and he had to pay $100 to have it delivered. He said that he hated himself for not buying the larger (and $5,000 more expensive) vehicle he was also considering the three times this had happened. In my mind, that's not something to regret. You've come out $4,700 ahead! Yes, sometimes your car won't accommodate everything and that's ok. Maybe your car will need 5% more time to do Boston to DC, but that's not a big deal in your life.
But range “anxiety” (concern?) has stopped me from buying an electric car so far (though the next one will be).
Your first example doesn’t account for variance, charging where you wind up, and fluctuations in demand.
Most people travel on busy travel days. So this could be a problem if I’m going to the beach on a Saturday. Suddenly I’m in line behind 3 other cars that drove the same distance to minimize the number of charges they need between my city and the beach. So I now need to wait 1 hour before I can start charging, and I don’t have enough fuel to get to another charger. Now I arrive at the beach house and I either can only slow charge or need to find a charger.
I can also go 500 miles on a tank of gas. That’s one trip without stopping (realistically 250 miles over 3.5 hours of highway driving). That’s right on the edge of charging, and then it’s making a 3.5 hour trip a 4 hour trip, which makes a difference. That’s an hour out of the weekend.
In my experience, I've only had to wait to charge once. There are generally more than enough chargers for weekends. It's holidays you have to watch out for.
> Now I arrive at the beach house and I either can only slow charge or need to find a charger.
24 hours of charging will fill up most EV to 100%. Most EV owners would say "Yeah, slow charge at the beach house, why look for a fast charger?". You probably aren't doing anything at night and even if that's the only time you slow charge, 16 hours would give you a pretty decent chunk of range.
And slow charging works at the vacation spot, unless you’re at a condo / parking garage without power outlets. It’s just enough inconvenience (with fairly significant consequences if you run out of charge [half day of vacation waster]) to make it less practical right now as a single car solution.
Agreed there. The lightning is going to sell like hotcakes. I only hope ford starts investing in charge networks.
This won't really affect tesla's, but it will put a lot of strain on these smaller networks.
> And slow charging works at the vacation spot, unless you’re at a condo / parking garage without power outlets. It’s just enough inconvenience (with fairly significant consequences if you run out of charge [half day of vacation waster]) to make it less practical right now as a single car solution.
Personally, I plan my lodging around EV chargers. Though, I'd be the first to say that sometimes there's not enough chargers for everyone that wants to charge.
My hope is that as time goes on, we'll see bigger expansion of L2 chargers. It's something that I believe more EV adoption will drive more L2 deployment.
I realise this whole argument for pricing the car is ridiculous from a rational standpoint but I think it matters more how it feels to ordinary Americans.
There may be areas where that works but I think the anxiety for that is reasonable.
It's really pretty stunning how many fast chargers are popping up in rural locations.
They are usually 50kW chargers, but still, that will get you to where you need to go in an hour or 2 (if you need to).
On the other hand, if you are spending a weekend there, you can often slow charge at wherever you are staying. A weekend is more than enough time to get a full battery, even at 120V.
[1] https://www.plugshare.com/directory/us/california/grass-vall...
The first big thing is shorter stops. A 500 mile range battery can charge at a higher rate for longer than a lower range battery. Where you might need to go up to 90% to get to the next charger, a bigger battery means that you actually only need to hit 60 or 70% in order to get to that next stop. That means a longer time charging at 250kW which ultimately gets you further for the same time spent.
Now, for total trip time, maybe this matters less. However, for a charging infrastructure it means that you are cycling through cars more frequently. That means during holidays you have less cars that need to charge and when they do charge they need to charge for a shorter period of time, relieving congestion.
The other thing, and this may just be my neck of the woods, is tesla really needs to do a better job at charger placement. In the west, a lot of the chargers are in bad spots. They are often in hotel parking lots or general mall spots. This means that while at a gas station you might walk out, use the restroom or grab a snack, at a lot of these charge locations you are stuck in the car. You need to make a seperate stop to do all that.
We need more gas stations installing chargers. But if they do that, they'll probably want to do CCS and not Tesla... which means tesla needs to come out with a CCS1 adapter for the US.
None of this has made road trips in the Tesla terrible. I've done a 2000 mile trip and it really wasn't all that bad. That said, I'll certainly opt in for a larger battery pack when they are available.
I just drove from STL -> Chicago -> Yellowstone -> Seattle. Range helps a lot since we multiple time deviated from the plan (Rushmore to devils tower). We would have had to be very specific with a lower range electric. Also our options for lodging would have been much more greatly restricted and we would issues have missed several cool small towns. And we'd have had to, while exhausted, charge the car at the end of a long day.
To get real detailed: Looking at their trip planner, and ignoring you can't charge up in most of yellowstone, CHI -> Rushmore -> Devils Tower -> Lusk -> Canyon Village is 390 minutes / 6.5 hours charging. Due to the limited number of stops in the trip planner, the remainder of the trip (which assumes a full charge at the start) would be another 110 minutes, (~2 hours) of charging. For a grand total of probably 9 hours of charging, or a full day of driving over that trip. I filled up 8 times on the trip, call it 10 minutes each, so 80 minutes. So call it 7 hours (420 minutes). That's 560 miles of drive time spent charging, which is basically a full day over that trip.
I did see several teslas in the park, but I'm guessing they were coming in and out from Jackson / Gardier / West. We did 250 miles a day in the park easy and we stayed in the park. Also exhausted at the end of each day.
Note I'm not a charging expert nor hyper optimizer so you may be able to do better but I had trouble just booking the hotels for this trip due to covid's impacts on everything.
My buddy drives for work as an engineering sales person. They go to factories from North Cali to Vancouver BC, and out to MT. Drives from Portland, OR to the UP, Michigan for fun 4 times a year. Those trips would be a PITA with a standard low range EV.
A year ago I went from Tuscon -> Ozarks, MO -> STL -> Chicago. IIRC the Tesla trip planner had us doing 7+ hours at the charger. We did the trip in 2 days in a gas car and went all over the place.
In 2019 we went from Cairns to Brisbane over 13 days, which is about 1100 miles, even less options.
In 2018 we did Sea -> Crater Lake -> Crescent City -> Tahoe -> Yosemite -> CV -> LA -> and then the 1 on the coast up back up to Seattle. 3800 massive miles, 82 hours driving. I can't even imagine what planning that trip with a low range EV would look like.
Sure I don't do it all the time but I'm averaging one large (2500mi+) road trip every year or so.
And this doesn't even consider things like ski trips where you're blowing a whole day if you can't get a charge/refill on time. There are a lot of EVs in the Seattle area, that means a lot of people using the chargers in remote areas and you're already exhausted and dealing with tired kids.
I'm personally waiting on a suv-ish ev with >500 mile range. And even then my cars are all in great shape, so it'll be a while before I buy one.
Typical EV user case involves a homeowner with a charger in the garage. Worse comes to worst, you can always plug the car overnight.
But someone like a student, who lives in a rental, might experience difficulty keeping their car consistently charged.
Even when public chargers are nominally available, they might be inoperable, used by others, or just taken up by a non-EV taking up a convenient parking spot (which, according to EV owner groups, happens frequently).
Is this really new or just incremental range gains from the new chassis battery stuff?