I wondered/worried about that the first road trip I took from Boise to Portland Oregon. It didn't feel noticeable or inconvenient at all. You take three stops along the way of that 430 mile trip. Some friends of ours did that drive in a gas van, and they happened to hit all three of those stopping places anyway-hmmm. Going to Salt Lake City, it's two stops for 340 miles. Those are pretty normal amounts of stopping every couple of hours. Yes, you can sit for four or five hours straight, but I don't necessarily want to.
First tip, don't go into it planning to just plug in and then sit there in the car staring at the screen watching the miles count up. You WILL be bored, and it will feel like it takes a really long time. Go into it with the expectation to plug in and go walk somewhere and do something, anything. If you go walk down the street and get an iced tea or something, 15 minutes will disappear without your even noticing it, so it makes the time go faster. People fly through 5 or 10 minutes on their phone sometimes if they're sitting with a coffee. So don't focus on
waiting; focus on
doing, and the time will seem much shorter.
Second tip, someone mentioned about a traveling rhythm. It helps to intentionally try for alternating short/long/short/long for your stops if they're about two hours apart. You're going to eat sometime, right? So go plug in, and go eat somewhere. Don't try to rush to grab food and go in 10 minutes, but take your time to sit and eat. That may be 30-40 minutes or more, including a little walking time to and from. The car will have enough before you are done, so you're not waiting for it at all, and the car will get quite a bit of extra charge. So then when you stop at a Supercharger a couple of hours later, you still have some extra energy leftover in the battery, so that Supercharger stop is a quick one, like 10-15 minutes. Then two hours later, it's four hours since you ate, so maybe it's time for your dinner break to eat again. And so on...
I have to do a lot of planning and research before each trip online. What's the temperature? Is it uphill or downhill? Which supercharger has stuff around to do while charging? Can I get to a supercharging around meal time to eat around there? The planning also went down to which hotels we are staying... does it have EV charger so we could charge overnight and get started full the next day.
I found this kind of interesting. You can do that level of planning if you want to, but I don't think it's very necessary anymore. Most of my life I've wanted to do some kind of huge road trip across the country, and in February, I got to do it by myself. Because of this kind of preconception some people have about electric road tripping, I intentionally didn't plan much of it at all, just to show to myself and others that Supercharging really does make this pretty easy and isn't as much of an obstacle as some people think it is. I hadn't even picked which cities I was going to stop in. It was 5,332 miles in 11 days. I drove from Boise, down to I-70, all the way across to Ohio and Michigan, and then on the way back, decided to take a different route down through Oklahoma, Texas, etc. on I-40. I had some temperatures down to 9 degrees across Colorado and Kansas, and up as high as about 83 a few days later in Oklahoma, which was a little crazy. My levels of planning mainly consisted of getting up in the morning and deciding how far I wanted to go that day, and then booking a room on AirBNB for that night. I was going to visit family in two places in Missouri, so on the way, I was trying to get to their places on Saturday and Sunday, but that was the only scheduled part of the trip that I arranged ahead of time.
