Can a Tesla Charge Faster at Bucee's than a Honda can Get Gas? 

One of the flaws with this test, the Tesla Model 3 wasn’t Pre-Conditioned for peak charging speeds. If I arrive at a Supercharger without Pre-Conditioning my Model Y, I would get about 130 to 150 kWh. If I am Pre-Conditioned, I will get a peak of 250 kWh when at ~20%. On a Road trip, your car would have started Pre-Conditioning automatically with your car being ready at time of arrival.

For those of us who devoutly wait in line to get costco gas, this is almost the same principal. Charging is not much of a inconvenience for me.

My experience at the new 250 Tesla chargers at the Buccees in Royce City TX with my model 3 was outstanding. Plug in, go inside and use the restroom and back out and you got 150 miles added for like $5 😂.

No doubt Tesla is the future. I just did a road trip from Dallas to Miami and Atlanta covering 3100 miles in my Model 3 refreshed RWD with no issues I had several of Buc-ees with similar experience. I love your honest video ❤

With a female passenger, you leave Buc-ees with 100% charge.

I 100% agree with the podcaster. Here in Delmarva we don’t have Buckee’s . We have Royal Farms, WAWA and Sheetz. The principal difference is you can sit inside or outside and eat. For anybody over 50 or traveling with kids. It’s a wash because you are going to have to stop. The EV works out cheaper because gas here is $3.50 to $5.00 a gallon. The charging infrastructure is great. The Atlantic Coast doesn’t have infrastructure problems. Due to population density they want everybody in an EV or a Hybrid

I’m a 2022 M3 LR owner. The slight disadvantage is only on road trips where you don’t charge at home. Advantage: Tesla when home and around town because it charges while I’m sleeping.

Of course, for home charging, (which is what EV drivers do 90%+ of the time, sometimes with home grown solar power), refueling the Tesla is going to be just a bit faster. Pumping up that back yard oil and then refining it to gasoline with home tools takes a lot, lot longer.

Actually, now you can fill up in Hillsboro at the new Buckys

$2.89 for 87 is wild.

It would be interesting to see the difference in cost of the stop. That was a good price for gas, and a high mileage car, so it's pretty much a best case for the Honda. You can't beat a Buc-ee's.

$2.89! Yikes! In California it is $4.49, and that’s the cheap gas. $5.39 at Chevron for Regular grade gas. Road trips are unique with each one being different, even if it’s on the same route. Also, some of us can do a 5 hour nonstop trip. The question is always which is bigger? Your bladder, the battery, or the gas tank? Then there is the time spent in the car, and the total cost of the trip. My 810 mile trip done in one day is getting more difficult as I age, but still doable. (I go by myself) In my PHEV it takes longer, because I gas up, and recharge the car twice (level 2 for one hour). Faster than an ICE? My record of 10 hours and 10 minutes still stands, but I have made other records, like 5.28 miles per kWh with 61 mpg.

Context is everything. Good example of a single stop trip would could make a decent regional trip. Like you said if you have to stack stops and cover greater distances then the gas car will trounce it. And you do the drill in ABRP with the M3 LR with speed constraints adjusted and tell it fewest stops you will see a gap opens up with a LR version of the M3. But it is good to be able to show people the differences and show how it can be not that difficult to live with the Tesla. Thanks for sharing!

One interesting factor: SUVs take way, way longer to refuel than a Honda Civic. Sometimes they take so long that someone will go in and shop while waiting for it to fill up.

We need Buc-ee's in California!

Love this we go to WinStar from Waco and we go to Galveston from Waco for cruises and we use the Buckys to charge our model three love it

Consider many gas cars leaving for a long trip may need to stop and fill up before leaving town when all EV owners could leave home at 100% charging over night. You ever leave early for a flight or late for some trip and forget to fill up your gas car? Now you need to stop and that’s when gas stations are backed up usually. With an EV it’s less likely to happen.

The wife and I took back my daughter’s car back to her in college we both had to charge and fuel up. The Tesla won by 15 minutes because she had to wait for a pump to come available. Like I tell all of my friends after you own a Tesla you will not go back to gas. We mostly charge at home. We also have solar so we save a ton of money

I love this test

I’m another fan of a more leisurely charging experience.

If you navigated to the Supercharger the battery pre-conditioning would have sped up that charge even more. Anyway, you already know that but this is what a lot of people don't understand. We don't always need to fill to 100%. It's really only what we need at the time. Even on long trips in my Model 3, my average stop is 10 - 18 minutes or so. What often happens at a lunch stop is I'll get more charge than I need because my shopping or lunch takes more time, so all that bonus energy just makes my drive have fewer stops down the road. I love my Model 3! Thanks for the fun "test."

Great job 👏

I sure enjoy road trips in my Tesla far more than any gas car I’ve owned.

I plan my charging stop with lunch and or dinner. I can't finish my meals before my charge is finish. Sometimes I take a nap so I won't fill sleepy to the next charger 200 to 250 mile away.

Ah yes this brings back memories. I remember decades ago when people would be doing comparisons of which car could fill up first the diesel or the petrol.... Oh wait... I hope a better way is found soon because having to focus on the time it takes to get your energy source into your mode of transportation should ideally not be a thing. No I am not talking about incredibly fast chargers either because transferring that amount of current over a 5 to 10 minute span is a bad idea.

Close is really good enough, most people are not in a huge hurry on a road trip. Add some kids in there and just TRY to hurry. And what time you lose on road trips you more than make up for at home plugging in overnight instead of going to gas stations.

we recently got a Bucee's in Missouri but sadly no chargers.

So 15 minutes of charge got you go to 80 miles with some percentage of buffer whilst the Honda got a full tank of fuel and could go hundreds of miles? Am I reading this wrong? That 15 minutes of charge got you from what percent to what percent and how many miles of range. I might have missed it. When I drove x-country (Chicago to Salt Lake City) my full stoppage time was just over an hour (65 minutes) for 4 full refills of petrol. How long would it take to get this tesla to 100% to go 300+ miles?

More like 100 pumps. Most people don’t move from the pump.

Great point at the end that gas drivers usually stop every few hours anyways. Makes the difference more negligible on a road trip. If you did pull up at 5% state of charge and left when you had a 5% buffer, you’d have won by a big wide margin. Out of Spec style, like you said. Great video.

I think it would have been interested to repeat the test with the rule that you have to eat the sandwich as well as buy it (and eat it at a normal pace, not wolf it down), and also have the Bolt, Model 3, and Honda Civic all do the test together. My guess is that when you account for the time to eat the sandwich, the Model 3 and gas car end up being an exact tie, with the Bolt only a few minutes behind. Throw in a little line for the bathroom, even the Bolt could potentially finish in a tie as well.

Looking forward to my slice of real life New Jersey pizza pie during my charge stop tomorrow. I have a child with autism he loves breaks from riding and my teenager hasn't complained about the EV either. It'll be my husband's first EV road trip, so we will see his reaction.

Bucees in GA have 100+ pumps

I've gotten into plenty of discussion likes this. And what a lot on non EV fail to realize is the vast majority of us come from the gas car world. Not only that but many of us still own a gas car or two. I've often commented, like you and your son, that on a road trip where you've been driving for a couple hours you're bladder is ready for a bathroom break. You're ready to stretch your legs and maybe a snack. And if you have kids with you or a pet that needs to be attended to or walked then that will increase your time. So the notion that with a gas car you're in and out in 5 minutes is a fantasy. I've done it plenty of times. After driving for a couple hours I need a break. The fill up does take 5 to 7 minutes depending on how much gas you need and how big of a tank you're filling up. But once you dip in to use the rest room or to stop and get a snack it adds time. And I know that with my wife, women take a little longer to get into the bathroom and out than guys typically do. So I've found that it's not that much of a time difference at gas/rest stops. But the advantage a gas car has over y EV is typically not needing to stop as many times to fill up. Depending on how long your bladder can last, you may need to stop as many times as I do in my EV but not every stop in a gas one will need to fill up or top off the gas...rather simply stop and use the rest room.

If you had a Hyundai Ioniq 6 with a 350kw hyper fast charger like those at Electrify America you would beat him. Alas no EA chargers at Bucee’s.

Out of Spec style, about 5% to about 50% charge, would have won.

Ok what did it cost you to charge the Tesla

Maybe the son didn't wash his hands in restroom... He saved 30 seconds... Maybe he didn't piss...🤔 another few seconds 🤔

That’s a fair challenge. But as time goes on there will be more and more EVs on the road, and at a location such as that there might be a wait to plug in your Tesla. That might end up adding 15 minutes or more to your time. Just saying.

That pump handle must have like a million touches of sweaty nuggets, 🤮🤮🤮 ....

I don't buy this test at all. The Honda FILLED the tank and did NOT have some fancy shmancy computer telling where it HAD TO STOP for its next gas stop. How long would it have taken to FILL the tank on the Tesla? Or maybe you should have calculated the gas needed for the Honda to reach that next Tesla charger and ONLY put in the 3 gallons needed for those 105 miles. Then, what happens when you get to that next charger and it isn't available because all the spots are full OR some copper thief stole the charging cables? (That does happen.) I routinely take long road trips. If someone told me that I had to stop every 100 to 150 miles for gas in a car that can go 350 miles and NOT be close to empty, I would tell them where they could put their Tesla. This test is an apples to watermelons comparison.

Forget Buc-ee's, can a Tesla charge faster at *my local* than a Honda can get gas? Because that's where most of us fill up...

This is what the situation is now when EV adoption is under 10%. If there were more EVs on the roads, the EV would have to wait in line for others to charge unless Tesla adds more chargers at each location.

😅

Love the videos, but this was just silly. I’ve never taken that long to find a pump and pump gas at Bucee’s. First he passed up open pumps because they had diesel on them and then stopped at one with a diesel pump on it. Then he couldn’t get the pump started. It’s like he never pumped gas before. When he goes in the store you could tell he’s taking his time filling up a drink playing with the foam. There was no hurry. Contrast this when with the EV charging one, he’s speedwalking out of breath through the store. To make this even remotely reasonable because it’s not going to be scientific, you would have to have one person that doesn’t own an EV and trying to win the competition versus someone with an EV that’s also trying to win the competition. I’m on the electric vehicle side. Once I got my Tesla, I liked pumping gas on my ICE vehicle that much less. Unless I’m on the road trip, I rarely use a supercharger. I don’t mind stopping and taking my time while my Tesla charges on long trips. I am not going to pretend it’s even remotely close to refueling a gasoline car when it comes to speed and I don’t care. It gives me time to stop and take a breather.

5 minutes to fill the tank, at the gas pump. Camry Hybrid gets 630 miles of range on a tank of gas. Tesla cannot compare to that !

Americans love the flashy stores, for sure. This corporate chain knows how to get high profit by having 50 plus gas pumps by a “Walmart” style store. Sorry Walmartians, no gas at Walmart stores.

Literally wasting 5 minutes pulling in the wrong way and sitting by the gas car until it's full and leaving the Tesla to charge on it's own is supposed to be a fair comparison? I usually see people leave the gas pumping while leaving for gas/snacks. Not to mention a full tank instead of a half charged battery. Having an ev with a home charger saves time but I'd hate to wait everyday if I didn't have a home charger.

My husband had that model Civic, and it routinely delivered 40mpg on the highway. (Automatics were a bit less.) So in the time indicated, the Civic added 296 miles with hundreds of miles to spare. The Tesla added 150+ miles with nothing to spare. Tesla's algorithm would get you to the next supercharger location, period. I understand that the Musk-o-philes consider this perfectly normal, but the rest of us think it's nuts.