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“Then it takes what an hour to recharge?”

So lets do some quick math here. a horse power is equal to 745.7 watts. That”s 6.214 amps. Assuming the car had 20 horse power, that would be 128.28 amps hours (at 120 volts) for every hour the car was driven.

Most houses in the United States don’t have an electrical service that would charge the batteries that fast.

"Most houses in the United States don’t have an electrical service that would charge the batteries that fast."

If electric cars ever become the norm - and they might - then "gas stations" would become "recharging stations" and some technology would be developed to make it work. The recharging would not necessarily need to take place in the home. I know there's a lot of snobbery and corporate cronyism going on with electric cars, but they are probably our future.

I'm surprised to hear so much negativism coming from a website that is supposedly comprised of conservative Americans with a "can do" attitude. If this had been our attitude during the horse-and-buggy days, the automobile as we know it would never have been developed.

“Most houses in the United States don’t have an electrical service that would charge the batteries that fast.”

One of the options when you order a Model S is to get either “Single” or “Dual” charging circuitry. Either way, you would need to also install a wall charger provided by Tesla in your garage. It operates at 240 Volts and needs either a 50 or 100 Amp circuit from your garage depending on if you got the Single or Dual option in your car.

With the Dual option, the home charger can charge 58 miles of range per hour. With the Single Charger option, the home charger can charge 29 miles per hour. Either way, the home charger is mostly used for overnight charging.

A Supercharger (basically Tesla's version of a gas station that they have installed around the country and that customers can use for free) can charge 170 miles in 30 minutes. (source)

But the bigger picture is that the vast majority of an owner's charging will be done in the convenience of their own home while they sleep. Which, not to mention, is when the electric grid has lots of excess capacity. Also, electricity costs about 60% less than gasoline on a per-mile basis. It is even less if you get one of the discounted nighttime electricity plans that electric companies have started to offer around the country. (I went more in-depth about this in this post.)

Right now, you wouldn't buy a Model S to save money. But you might with the mass-market Model 3 that they are going to build with the Gigafactory.