A gasoline car can charge from 0% to 100% of its range in 5 minutes. It usually takes longer to take the slight detour and line the car up with the charge por

A gasoline car can charge from 0% to 100% of its range in 5 minutes. It usually takes longer to take the slight detour and line the car up with the charge port than it does to fully charge the car. Recharging this kind of car does not damage its most expensive part nor does its fuel tank shrink. The newest electric cars take a half hour to do this (a non-trivial amount of time) and only go about 2/3rds as far (less on the highway), so if you actually want to go somewhere you're taking on about an extra hour of charging for 6 hours of driving. Recharging this kind of car damages its most expensive part- the fuel tank- and it shrinks every time you charge it (whether quickly or slowly). Now, if the car had 1600 miles of range, then a half-hour charge time and the slow shrinkage of its gas tank is more acceptable because you're getting approximately the same rate of recharge per minute (as it would be if the 200-mile range electric cars charged as fast as a gas car does). With a range or charge time like that, the other inherent disadvantages to electric cars are muted to a massive degree (a 20% range degradation isn't as big a deal for a car that can still go 1200 miles, and a 30% range reduction in cold months isn't as big a deal if the car could be charged in 3 minutes). But neither of those things are currently true, and that's in large part why these kinds of cars don't really sell unless they're known to be rolling gimmicks or transformative in other ways (the electric trucks that let you run power tools off their batteries are the best example of this). Which is why Tesla's cars are the way that they are, and why every other major manufacturer who doesn't have a good idea of how to sell their inferior cars take the "look, we can do a massive screen in our car too just like Tesla" approach (and fail specifically because they aren't Tesla), or they just keep developing really good gas cars (an approach currently favored by the Japanese companies).