250 miles is enough, when it only takes me $20 and 10 minutes to drive to a fueling station and pump the 8 gallons of gasoline required to take my range back up to full capacity.
It isn't enough when I need to find an outlet I can use legally--which will likely be NEMA 14-50 240V, if you can find one--and then spend an hour waiting for the charge to finish for every 20 to 30 miles I drove off my range. That's 8 hours. Lengthy, but doable for overnight. But I can't wait 8 hours every time I drive 4. My modal road trip is 700 miles, with an overnight at 420 miles (or 280 on the return). The current state of electric charging stations is such that I couldn't drive that trip with just "level 2" AC outlet charging.
If it's just a 120V outlet, it'll take 2.5 days to recharge 250 miles of range. The electricity will still cost much less than gasoline, of course, but road trips in the US can easily total thousands of miles. It's a big country, with lots of highways, crappy passenger train service, and airline service with increasing numbers of drawbacks.
DC fast charger networks are an absolute requirement to combat range anxiety. It isn't just how far you can drive at once, but how long it takes to refill your range. Your range circle shrinks as you drive, and you need to recharge before it gets too small to have a charging station in it. So you can't just drive out your full range. You still have to plan your hops between charging stations, and if those are 180 miles apart, any extra range below 360 miles won't make a difference, because you couldn't skip a charging opportunity otherwise.
It isn't enough when I need to find an outlet I can use legally--which will likely be NEMA 14-50 240V, if you can find one--and then spend an hour waiting for the charge to finish for every 20 to 30 miles I drove off my range. That's 8 hours. Lengthy, but doable for overnight. But I can't wait 8 hours every time I drive 4. My modal road trip is 700 miles, with an overnight at 420 miles (or 280 on the return). The current state of electric charging stations is such that I couldn't drive that trip with just "level 2" AC outlet charging.
If it's just a 120V outlet, it'll take 2.5 days to recharge 250 miles of range. The electricity will still cost much less than gasoline, of course, but road trips in the US can easily total thousands of miles. It's a big country, with lots of highways, crappy passenger train service, and airline service with increasing numbers of drawbacks.
DC fast charger networks are an absolute requirement to combat range anxiety. It isn't just how far you can drive at once, but how long it takes to refill your range. Your range circle shrinks as you drive, and you need to recharge before it gets too small to have a charging station in it. So you can't just drive out your full range. You still have to plan your hops between charging stations, and if those are 180 miles apart, any extra range below 360 miles won't make a difference, because you couldn't skip a charging opportunity otherwise.