Sixty cars, one road

What the road is actually teaching you

The numbers are tuned to be plausible rather than exact, but every mechanism in here is real and each one is worse in February than the brochure suggests.

• Temperature is the whole game. Drag it from plus twenty to minus twenty-five and consumption climbs from 16.5 to 28 kWh per 100 km, range falls from about 400 km to 240, and a cold pack goes from accepting 150 kW down to 22. Three penalties stacked, which is why winter is a cliff rather than a slope.
• Preconditioning is the highest-value button in the car in real cold, and pointless in summer. At minus twelve, arriving cold means 45 kW instead of 150, which triples your stall time and grows the queue behind you. At plus fifteen the pack is already warm and the two kilowatt-hours are wasted. The game will punish you either way if you do not check.
• Charging to 90 percent is where the taper is worst. You sit at 30 kW for the last quarter, holding a stall that somebody else is waiting for.
• But charging as little as possible is not the answer either. The sites are not equal: 250 kW at Sundsvall, 75 at Hudiksvall, 50 at Ånge. Arriving empty at a fast site is ideal, because the taper only bites above half. Arriving empty at a slow one means an hour you did not plan for. The skill is banking energy where the power is and taking the minimum where it is not.
• The queue is not the site's fault. Stalls are sized for a normal Tuesday. Sportlovet Saturday is not a normal Tuesday, and no operator builds for the worst weekend of the year because the asset would sit idle for the other fifty-one.
• Your choices are somebody else's queue. That is the whole point of racing sixty cars instead of a clock. When everyone charges to 90 because everyone is nervous, everyone waits.

The same constraint from the other side of the plug: try building the charging site and see why nobody put more stalls in Ånge.