This is one of the dirty little secrets about battery electric cars that many people don't appreciate. I've watched the travails of a good friend of mine who bought a Nissan Leaf not long ago. His is a tale of fantasy vs. reality.
He's a hard-core, very old-school gearhead. Builds hotrods for the fun of it. He's probably built over 200 amazingly crafted machines in his life (I used to help out in his garage pre-pandemic). His wife is a staunch environmentalist, and insisted he get an electric car as his ’transportation’ (to counter-balance all the gas-guzzling V8's in his hot rods). So, he got a Leaf, with the biggest battery available. They advertise it as having a ‘250 mile range’. When it’s fully charged the range gauge usually shows around 260-264 miles.
Last winter, they needed to take a trip, about 150 miles each way, for his wife to attend to some business They thought, no problem, 250 mile range should make 150 miles easy. He’d charge it at a Nissan dealer while she took care of business, and then back home. In a gas car it’s about 3 hours each way. They thought it would be the same, 3 hours each way, plus 1 hour for her business. Leave at 8 am, home by 3 pm.
Their experience was different. The reality of batteries is that range depends on a lot of things. Cold weather reduces range. Using heat (or air conditioning) reduces range. Accelerating hard reduces range. Steady highway driving at high speed (with no regenerative braking) results in lower range. The advertised ‘range’ seems similar to the EPA mileage ratings for gas cars, with a system gamed to get numbers that are sometimes unattainably high.
On the day they went, it was the trifecta of being in the winter (cold = reduced range), they used the heat so they wouldn’t freeze to death (= reduced range), and it was all highway driving, no regenerative braking (= more reduced range). The ‘advertised’ range of 250 miles, and the range gauge that showed 260-ish miles when they left, translated into a real-world range of about 110 miles.
Yep. From 250 miles claimed, to 110 miles in reality.
He was panicking as they drove, because the range gauge was dropping 2 or 3 miles for each mile they drove. By the time the range gauge showed 20 miles left - and they were still 60 miles away - he was in total meltdown (but his wife was whining at him the whole time about not wanting to be late, didn’t want to stop, etc. etc. etc.).
Long story short, he ended up stopping to charge (or attempt to charge) 7 times that day. He stopped twice on the way there; three times while she was at her meeting (which she was very late for); and two more times on the way home. He couldn’t get a full charge at any of the stops, which is why he had to keep stopping again and again for partial charges. I don’t remember the exact order, but some of the problems he experienced included:
Charging station was broken when he got there.
Charging station wouldn’t accept any of his credit cards, or the ‘charge card’ the car came with.
Charging station was low-output (110 volt) which would take 36-48 hours for a full charge, and would only add about 5 miles of range for each hour charged (he ran into this problem more than once).
The charging station limited the charge to 45 minutes on any one day (he ran into this problem a few times, and had to go to another charging station to get another 45 minutes worth of charge - which used up charge to get from one charging station to another).
Charging station only had one plug, and there was a car already there - with the owner nowhere in sight to move it.
The Leaf’s navigation system has locations of charging stations programmed in, so he went to them. But it didn’t show which ones were out of order, or limited to 45 minutes of charge per day, or were low-output 110 volt systems.
He repeatedly called an 800 help line, and a couple of times they were able to take his credit card over the phone and enabled the charge - but it still limited him to 110 volts of slow charge, or the cap of 45 minutes per day.
The bottom line, what should have been a total 7 hour day and getting home by 3 pm, turned into a 22 hour day. They left at 8:00 am, and finally got home at 6:00 am the next morning.
So much for the advertised ‘250 mile’ range of the Leaf. He complained to the dealer and of course got the usual ’they all do that’, ’that’s to be expected with your personal kind of use’, ‘your mileage may vary’, etc. etc. etc. Since then he consistently found that real-world winter driving range (highway driving) is no more than 110 miles, and in the summer, about 150 miles (batteries hold more of a charge at higher temperatures, but are still constrained by high speed highway driving and lack of regenerative braking, and if you use air conditioning).
He ended up giving his wife the Leaf, and got a Toyota Yaris for himself (it was economical enough to pass his wife’s environmental purity test).
A friend of my wife also bought a Leaf, with the basic ‘100 mile’ range battery. She thought it would be plenty. Her experiences have been that the real-world range in the winter in our area is about 40 miles.
The situation is no doubt very different in California, with a much more temperate climate without sub-freezing temperatures, and vastly more charging stations. But this was one person's real-world experience here in New England.
The laws of physics are very strict. Gasoline has about 100 times the energy density of a lithium-ion battery.
https://www.topspeed.com/cars/warp-c...-ar185365.html
Of course there will continue to be incremental improvements in batteries. But there is a limit as to how densely you can pack electrons together (again, those pesky laws of physics). Those same laws of physics govern charging time. It’s difficult to cram electrons in so fast as to fully charge a 300 kWh battery in the same 3 minutes it takes to fill a gas tank. First you'd need a battery that could accept inflow that quickly. Then, unless you’ve invented room-temperature superconductors, there are limits as to how much current a given size cable can transfer (resistance, heat build up, etc.).
As with most things, YMMV.