Tl;Dr: etiquette is weird when ‘filling’ your car takes 1.5 hrs, maybe top off at home?
High voltage chargers charge your car pretty fast, but much less fast than a tank of gas (which is why gasoline is so explosive and a key advantage of gas cars). If your lithium battery is below 80% charged, a high voltage charger will charge quite quickly… Up to 80%. Then it goes slow. Charging the last 20% on our Leaf takes an hour at a 100kW charger.
We are headed on a trip today, and when we stopped at our favorite charger both stations were in use. Each station has a CCS port and a Chademo port. One Chademo was free (but the CCS for the station was busy) so I ended up double parking in front of the CCS dude so I could charge.
Inconvenient, but not a huge deal. I talked to them to let them know what I was doing and told them I’d stay with it.
And… Dude was complaining about how slow the charging was. He was well over 80% charged, and said ‘It ain’t no Tesla’s. He seemed totally clueless that the last 80% takes more time.
So yeah – given the scarcity of chargers, maybe top off at home.
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