Porsche just proved that stopping to charge an electric car won't kill the great American road trip

• Porsche drove one of its electric Taycans from LA to NYC and only spent 2.5 hours charging up.
• It broke the previous cross-country charging record by nearly five hours.

Between finding working charging stations and spending hours plugged in, traveling long distances in an electric car can be daunting. After all, you can fill up a gas tank in five minutes and be on your way. But you may need to plug in for 30 or 40 minutes — sometimes much longer — to top up a battery.

The era of the electric car won't kill the great American road trip, though, as Porsche proved recently. Last month, the company said it took one of its electric Taycan sedans on a 2,834.5-mile journey from Los Angeles to New York and spent only 2 hours, 26 minutes, and 48 seconds stopped at charging stations.

Porsche shattered the previous cross-country electric-vehicle charging record by nearly five hours. More importantly, the company showed that electric-car road trips are perfectly doable — and they may not require as much fuss and sacrifice as you think. On any normal cross-country road trip, most people would probably stop for far longer than 2.5 hours between bathroom breaks and food stops.

Of course, this was a meticulously planned marketing event, not a spur-of-the-moment trip. But there are still some valid takeaways. Mainly that as electric-car charging gets quicker — and high-powered charging stations become more plentiful — long EV journeys won't cause the headache they can now.

The 2021 Taycan with the Performance Battery Plus option used here can travel an EPA-rated 225 miles on a full battery, but independent range tests suggest it can go at least 300 miles — perhaps much more — under optimal conditions. That still doesn't put it at the top of the heap: A Tesla Model S can go more than 400 miles, while the Lucid Air is rated at more than 500.

But the Taycan is among the fastest-charging electric cars you can buy. It can accept a charging rate of 350 kilowatts, allowing it to add 75% of its battery capacity in 22.5 minutes, according to Porsche. At one stop, the Taycan took only 22 minutes to charge from 6% to 82%, the company said.

This sort of charging capability is a rarity in today's market, but it's slowly making its way into mainstream models like Hyundai's new Ioniq 5 SUV. Moreover, charging stations that can deliver that much energy are still few and far between, and there are still large swaths of the country that are sorely lacking charging infrastructure. (Porsche used the Electrify America charging network, owned by its parent, Volkswagen.)

Still, Porsche's trip suggests a fast-charging future where EVs are just as convenient to take cross-country as gas cars, even without the pressure of a Guinness World Record prodding you along.