Range Anxiety? What Range Anxiety?
By Tom Kagy | 21 Jul, 2025

Our EVs actually increased our weekend driving range by making it guilt-free and cheaper to boot.

For three years we resisted switching our European ICE SUVs for EVs for the usual reasons: range anxiety, concerns about the reliability and durability of batteries, and the paucity of EVs with appealing exterior and interior styling.  

What finally changed our minds was the release of EV models with the right combination of battery range, styling and price points not too much above those of comparable ICE cars.

We aren't exactly eco-warriors by any means, but just eco-conscious enough to feel guilty about spewing out over a pound of CO2 emissions for each mile we drive.  A weekend road trip with 300 miles of freeway driving would produce well over 300 pounds of carbon emissions.  That seemed like an unnecessary contribution to the 4 billion metric tons of carbon emissions from cars globally each year.  

Guilt had often made us limit our weekend driving to a modest radius of our home.  Contrary to popular assumptions, that range has actually increased with our new EVs.  Let me explain that seeming paradox.

With our rooftop solar panels consistently producing more electricity than we were consuming, we felt less guilty about using that excess wattage to power our weekend trips.  In contrast to what EV intenders imagine, very little charging takes place outside our level-2 home charger.  The charger cost about $500 plus about $1,000 to install which required a simple modification to the trip fuses in our fuse box.  That level-2 charger adds about 30 miles of driving range per hour of charge time.  It means that on a typical weekend road trip we only need a modest amount of power from public charging stations to get us home.  

For example, on a 400-mile round-trip we would start with a 95% charge or about 300 miles of range on my Cadillac Optic or my wife's Polestar3.  Assuming we decide to leave about a 30-mile margin of safety by the time we make it back home, we would only need to add about 130 miles at a public charging station.  On a fast DC-charger delivering between 150 and 350 kilowatts per hour that typically takes only about 20 - 25 minutes of charging time.  We should note here that on average even superchargers (rated at 150 kwh) or hyperchargers (rated at 350 kwh) the actual average charging speed is generally lower, usually in the 100 kwh - 200 kwh range.  

The conventional wisdom is that you want to keep the charge in the 20% - 80% range to maximize battery life.  In my experience that wisdom is an anachronism.  When trickle-charging (i.e. using our home's AC current to charge and not a public DC fast charger) it's fine to charge up to 95%.  I don't even feel too concerned about charging to 100% on occasion which I did during the entire first four months.  And unless we're on a road trip the battery level rarely gets below 65 - 75% from routine driving.  After nearly five months I haven't noticed any deterioration of battery life from my highly non-cautious charging practices.

During our first weeks we became more relaxed about charging as we discovered an abundance of charging stations that can be called up on our dashboard monitors.   Electrify America stations alone meet our need most of the time.  But add to that locations from Tesla (which require an adaptor for non-Tesla vehicles like ours), EVgo, Chargepoint, Loop, several other private charging companies, even a surprising number provided by the State of California for free.  In fact, currently there are more public and shared-private charging stations in California than there are gas station nozzles.

We switch off between our EVs for our weekend road trips so our EVs often go for a week or two before ever seeing a public charging station.  Generally we top off every several days from our home level-2 AC charger which, when called upon for a full charge from empty, takes about 9 hours.  Not having to make the once or twice weekly gas station visit is a definite lifestyle upgrade in itself.

Aside from longer guilt-free trips and never having to stop at a gas station, we enjoy the hesitation-free acceleration, in the 4.4-sec range in my wife's dual-motor Polestar3 and 6.2 seconds in my single-motor Optic.  Either car out-accelerates virtually any ICE car on the road, making it that much quicker to hit that open road.