What is the sweet spot range for Electric Vehicles? 350km?

Cars with about 350km range which charge very fast is what's needed for normal people with normal budgets.

I speculate: If the batteries are about 45kWh, but can charge at 170kW, then you can pick up 250km driving range in 15 minutes.(Most current cars with this battery size charge at a peak of 70 to 100kW at the moment, and taper down to 25kW).

That means that a regular compact 4 door car can be great for commuting, but be driven in longer trips with a short stop every couple of hours. So you can take a long trip with three to four charge stops, if you need to.

In practice chargers are never in the most optimal places, they are not where you have 1% left, so there is about 30 to 50km of the battery that is unusable, so you need to charge up before you are at empty.

I am talking about regular suburban commuter cars used for daily driving and errands.

People who do long drives, all the time, can buy cars with huge batteries, they will save on petrol costs, but most people mainly need a cheaper commuter car and will never want to pay double the price for a nice-to-have car for the range they need two days per year.

Long range, sales rep drivers can use specific long range vehicles.

I have a EV with a 150-170km long trip driving range, but the DC chargers are generally 25 to 75km apart where I live, I drive out of my commute range (up to 70km each way) about 30 days per year.

About 15 days per year I need 2 or 3 charge stops to drive up to 400km.

I have driven 600km, on one day, that was just a weird experiment to see how far I could get, but after 6 charges, the charging got so slow, it was not practical to go further. No car company should build a car like this now.

In practice, I can drive about 100km between fast charges, because I don't arrive empty and I cannot leave full. It is faster (because of charging curves) to do a bunch of 60% charges, 20% up to 80% rather than to charge to 95%. 20% represents about 35km, so I don’t want to get that low on a road trip in unfamiliar terrain.

So, if I had a car with 350km range, there would there would only be a few days per year I would need to charge along the highway.

But I would only need one or two charges in any day, so two 15 - 25 minute charge sessions on a day with seven hours of driving would be fine.

Almost anyone could drive any distance in 200km hops, recharging for 15 minutes, each hop.

However, this will need a network of chargers with both higher speed and more outlets for more cars at each location. Because although you won't need to charge as often, there will be a big driving time penalty if the chargers are busy. New Zealand pretty much has a 50kW charger every 80km.

This means that the charging network will have to keep adding faster 300kW+ chargers with dual outlets (charging 4, 6 or 8 cars per site) while maintaining their existing 50kW chargers (mostly 1 or 2 cars per site).

But at the rate of expansion it will be a few years before there are more 300kW chargers than 50kW chargers. Also, barely any cars can sustain charging over 120kW at the moment. But that will be in time for cars the charge faster.

Conclusion: I think that for regular commuter cars 350km range is the current sweet spot, this would require a 45kWh battery in a compact efficient car.