Porsche just proved that stopping to charge an electric car doesn’t ruin the great American road trip
Between finding working charging stations and plugging in for hours, traveling long distances in an electric car can be daunting. After all, in five minutes you can fill up a tank of gas and be on your way. But you might have to plug in 30 or 40 minutes, sometimes much longer, to charge a battery.
However, the age of the electric car will not kill the great American road trip, as Porsche recently proved. Last month, the company said it took one of its Taycan electric sedans on a 2,834.5-mile trip from Los Angeles to New York, spending just 2 hours, 26 minutes and 48 seconds at charging stations.
Porsche has broken the previous off-road charging record for electric vehicles by almost five hours. More importantly, the company has shown that electric car road trips are entirely doable and might not require as much fuss and sacrifice as you think. On any normal cross-country journey, most people would probably stop much longer than 2.5 hours between bathroom breaks and meal breaks.
Of course, this was a meticulously planned marketing event, not a spontaneous trip. But there are still some valid takeaways. Especially as EV charging gets faster and there are more powerful charging stations, long EV trips won’t cause the headaches they can now.
The 2021 Taycan used here can travel 225 EPA-rated miles on a full battery, but independent range tests suggest it can go at least 300 miles in optimal conditions, maybe much more. That still doesn’t put it at the top of the heap: A Tesla Model S can go 400+ miles, while the Lucid Air is rated at 500+ miles.
But the Taycan is among the fastest charging electric cars you can buy. According to Porsche, it can accept a charging power of 350 kilowatts, allowing it to add 75% of its battery capacity in 22.5 minutes. At one stop, the Taycan took just 22 minutes to charge from 6% to 82%, the company said.
That sort of charging capability is a rarity in today’s market, but it’s slowly making its way into mainstream models like Hyundai’s new Ioniq 5 SUV. In addition, charging stations that can deliver so much energy are still rare and there is still a lack of charging infrastructure in large parts of the country. (Porsche used the Electrify America charging network, owned by its parent company Volkswagen.)
Still, Porsche’s cross-country journey hints at a fast-charging future where electric vehicles are just as comfortable to drive cross-country as petrol cars, even without the pressure of a Guinness World Record to spur you on.