Yes, people who drive mountains in EVs are well aware of this phenomenon.
if that is CA-17, getting on is taking your life into your hands, regardless of what you are driving. 
Back on topic, people!
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Posting this because IMO it is important for those who are evaluating the option of and EV to understand some of the very real pitfalls.
Left the house yesterday with 240 miles estimated range
It’s a 140 mile round trip
Came back towards town today with an estimated 80 miles of range left (so 20% range loss due to hills, cold temps and my own lead foot)
Had plenty of time to precondition the battery and decided to supercharge to 90% (it’s faster and cheaper than home I have a lot to do this afternoon)
Arrive at super charger and plug in. GREAT it will let me go to 90%
Wait…whaaaat…1 hr 30 minutes to go from 30% to 90%??? That’s just wrong. I notice the 250 kw/hr charger is charging at 45 kw/hr.
Stuff happens…move over to another charger. Plug in…hmmm…whats’ up? No calculation appearing…until I get ‘charger not powered unable to charge’.
Okay…go to another bank of chargers, plug in. Whoopie… 25 minutes to charge. Okay…but wait the kw/hr charging rate keeps dropping and the time estimate keeps increasing and I’m also limited to 80% because it has now become a ‘high use’ station.
So at the end of 35 minutes I added 110 miles of range.
Calculated I saved $5.00 over having used the ICE vehicle. But, I spent an extra 30 minutes of my life doing this…there are 6 gas stations between me and home. And I still don’t have a full tank.
Meanwhile I notice an elderly couple in a Volvo going from charger to charger…apparently not all of them have the needed adapter. Not sure of what eventual success of failure befell them.
This was ‘just’ an inconvenience. Garnering a few more miles here at home before I head back out in 10 minutes. But this would really be an infuriating issue if we were on the road.
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Sorry you were frustrated. I’ll share how I view things, not to argue with you or dismiss your experience but just to provide a different view.
I almost always charge at home overnight. So given the details of your trip, I’d have left home each morning with 80% or 200+ miles range (if needed, I’d have topped off to 90 or 100% overnight). My car would’ve been waiting for me at exactly 70 degrees with seat and steering wheel already heated.
I understand you’ve had power outages so perhaps that’s why you didn’t charge at home.
My experience at public chargers has been almost universally positive. Sure I’ve had to move over on occasion or encountered a slower charger but the effect on my life has been pretty minimal. (I’ll say that if I was charging in an area with power outages or an extreme weather event, I’d probably cut the chargers some slack).
I usually figure around half an hour to get to 80% from 20-30ish. Sometimes it’s shorter, sometimes a bit longer. Varies by car obviously. If I’m in a hurry and don’t need 80% then I take advantage of the fast part of the charging curve and charge for ten minutes or so.
But I don’t really view that as time spent charging because I’m usually doing something else while the car is charging. It’s not like filling gas where I’m in line, then actively attending to the process. With the EV it takes a minute or less to get it going, and the rest of the time I’m going about my life (email, zoom, food, shopping, rest room, etc.).
In the aggregate I spend far less time charging now than I used to spend filling gas.
One of the reasons not to charge above 80% or so is that charging speed slows as the battery fills up, so charging above 80% isn’t a very efficient use of the chargers. The limits you’re describing are a Tesla thing though, not an EV thing. As far as I know, other public charging companies like EA and EVGo don’t limit charging above 80% (though I wish they would).
As for the Volvo owners that sounds more like just a familiarity/education issue. Some tesla stations have the magic dock for ccs and some don’t. The app is pretty clear.
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This may be tangential, but check with your local electric companies to see what incentives they are offering for EV drivers. I had been on their nite flex plan (400KW for free every month) but when covid hit that became pointless b/c we were home during peak hours. So they are now starting a pilot program and I was invited. I got $20 for being on the zoom presentation, another $25 credit for signing up for the beta program, and will get a $7.50/mo credit as long as we don’t charge (with one or 2 excuses if needed) during certain peak hours (which vary summer/winter). But I set it to charge at night, so its all free money for me.
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I spend about five minutes or less every two weeks putting gas in my truck. I almost never have to wait in line at the pumps. If I do, it’s only for a few minutes. I get about 550 miles out of those five minutes of my time. While my truck is being fueled I usually take that time to squeegee my windows.
I’ve never driven or charged an electric car but I imagine if I was in a road trip that waiting a half hour or more for my vehicle to charge would be more interrupting than waiting five minutes to fuel up.
Okay, 5 minutes to gas up. I recall spending more time than that, but fine.
It takes me just a few extra seconds at home to reach the charger off the wall and plug it in. I could do that 4-5 times in a month and drive 1k miles. But because it’s quick and easy I do it every night. So figure a marginal time cost of 5 seconds per 200 miles of range when charging at home, overnight, to 80%. I suppose I could drive 6K miles a month and spend only 2.5 extra minutes fueling.
My experience with road trips is that when the car is charging I’m doing something else that I’d be doing anyway. Just as you’re counting windshield washing as doing something else. The difference is that I can leave the car unattended so I have more options. Pretty much everyone in my family prefers to move around a bit every few hours, stop to eat, use the rest room, stretch the legs, check email, etc. To us, stopping a total of 30-60 minutes in a 3-5 hour drive would happen whether EV or ICE. YMMV.
For me, charging the EV is about as much extra work and hassle as keeping my laptop charged. Insanely easy most of the time, occasionally a bit more difficult when flying or out of town. Not really enough hassle to make me wish for a gas-powered MacBook 
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A road trip isn’t the typical use case for most people though. I agree that an EV is less convenient that an ICE on a road trip. 100%. If I only owned one car, I wouldn’t have an EV for this reason. But the use case the others are talking about is local daily driving, what most people do 95% of the time. Where they have a charger at home and never have to hassle with how long it takes because its happening while they are eat, sleeping or enjoying themselves at home. Zero effort, zero minutes.
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Finally joined the club after years of lurking and now drive an EV9. Upgraded from my Volvo XC90. Loving it so far. Spend years following and test driving so many others – the Tesla Y and X, the Rivian R1S, the Ford Mach-E, BMW iX, Hyundai Ionic 5, Caddy Lyric, etc.
Canceling the reservation on the EX90 and Rivian. We won’t miss the EX90 and the better half liked the EV9 way more than the Rivian. But I still have a soft spot for the Rivian so a little sad to see it go…
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Last time I charged at a public charger was 6 months ago in September. I just plug in at home and wake up to a fully charged car ready to go. It’s far more convenient and waaaaaayyy cheaper where i live than buying gas.
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Saw Elon’s butt ugly “truck” at the mall today. It was a special display at the showroom, and Tesla employees were giving out red envelopes with candy in them… the envelopes had “S3XY” written on them. Great job, Ford, grabbing that letter “E” from under Elon’s nose. 
What an atrocity. Looks like a commercial fridge placed on the side and equipped with some wheelbarrow wheels.
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Setting aside the really bad design, the unimaginative front end, etc., are those the ugliest wheels or wheel covers ever made?
That’s one thing (oh, there’s more than one) that drives me nuts about Tesla’s, the wheels. 
And I’ve never seen a tire with tread on the sidewalls? What’s the point there? Does the car ride on one side/two wheels?
It is beyond ugly! And we noticed that there were some visible human paw prints on the steel panels of the “truck.” Maybe that’s why it was all roped off
Oh ya, that reminds me. I wish them, all the new owners, great luck in maintaining the stainless steel exterior.
Hopefully, it won’t oxidize or tarnish over time, and make sure to stock up on vinegar and olive oil. But I’m sure Musk has invented some space age cleaner and polish for it.
Remember, polish with grain. I’d polish it to a mirror finish, but that’s just me. 
Just chiming in on charging times. We finally broke down and got a home charger for our Bolt. Previously we had been charging it off of the wall outlet, but the Bolt is currently our only car, and we were finding that trickle charging was sometimes insufficient. The home charger is way more than we need for our usual around-town driving, but we’ve been helping out a lot with out-of-town family needs this winter.
It takes seconds. I love not having to go anywhere to fill up the tank.
On the other hand, we recently took a trip to visit UNC Wilmington and NC State, and unfortunately the public charging capacity in my state is not keeping up with demand. We live in the Triad. This trip is less than 400 miles and should have taken about 6.5 hours of driving, plus charging time. Our schedule was tight but there are public chargers everywhere and I would only need to charge twice, so I was not worried.
I should have worried. Of the five(!) level 3 public chargers we ended up trying, we were only able to charge at two, and for one of those we had to wait 1/2 hour (no choice here - we only had about 12 miles of range left at that point). The other three were too busy, ICEd (grr!), and out of order respectively.
We ultimately made it on time to both my daughter’s tour appointments, but we had to leave the UNCW tour a few minutes early so that we had time to drive 60 miles per hour up I-40 (to conserve charge) and still be on time for the NCSU tour.
It was a pretty disappointing experience, especially since our last road trip in the Bolt went so smoothly!
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After six years of Bolt ownership, I also have my first unplanned servicing story to share! Our Bolt’s 12V battery died a few weeks ago. By coincidence, our daughter had had to replace the C-Max 12V only a few weeks prior. Pricing for the two replacements was similar, but the time to replace was not. The C-Max battery was easily obtainable while the Bolt’s battery was a special kind that had to be ordered by the dealer from out of town.
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What was the cost for that replacement battery?
What happens to the old battery? Does it get recycled or go to the dump?