and the charging process would have taken HOURS to achieve the charge I needed for my trip.
I see people post this, and honestly it’s usually just not true. It is entirely a lack of understanding and/or education and just assuming you need to treat it like your gas vehicle. Which isn’t unexpected of course, it’s just that fully charging is not necessary in an EV and will just waste your time. Now I’m not saying that the car battery would not take hours to fully charge, that is true… It does take a very long time to take a car battery from 0 to 100%… but you just don’t need to fully charge most of the time. Especially if you’re driving a longer distance.
Fully charging Lithium-Ion batteries actually damages the battery a LOT more than partial charges do, just like on your phone. And charging at a low state of charge is a lot faster than when the battery is nearly full. They’re both using Li-Ion batteries after all. It is actually quite fast to charge from say 20% to 60% on a DC fast charger or Tesla Supercharger. You don’t need to fully charge every time you plug in, on a trip you only need to charge enough to make the next leg of the journey.
In most EVs, you just enter your destination in the navigation and it will take into account your charge level and automatically include needed charging stops along the way. I can tell you from personal experience that in a Tesla, most of my stops during longer trips are no more than 15 minutes long because of how the fast chargers are spaced out. That 15 minutes usually will shove about 50% charge into the battery via a Supercharger. It will have you arrive at the charger with as little charge as possible on purpose because a lower state of charge means power can be sent to the battery faster (within reason, it tries to leave about 20% as a safety buffer). Unless you’re driving to a very remote location, you’re probably pretty close to a charger at any given time.
A screenshot of Tesla’s current US charging map for an example](i.imgur.com/xMrkhMT.png)/. You can check their website if you want to look at your area to see. Destination chargers are located at places like malls, hotels, etc. and are usually an amenity for guests to help charge slowly overnight or while shopping. Superchargers on the other hand will shove power into the pack to charge as fast as possible and get you on the way.