I hear you all - ironically, things were not as they seemed to me! And I've learned to "be better" as the note suggested - so it's all good.
re: not doing long journeys on the Leaf: We had done less long trips as with a 5 year old 30kWh leaf the range isn't particularly great. Chademo charging is not as abundant as CCS, so it all came down to time. Driving slower to preserve the battery - wasting time looking for a working/available charger (yes, I see the irony here), and then the slow charging of the battery - this didn't make it a nice "day out" experience with the family. So to avoid the charging issues, we would try to limit trips to places we could reach and get back home to without charging. We did 2 or three long-ish journeys (2 charges) and they were OK - but sometimes doing an 40 mile trip (+40 mile back) could be an issue as we needed a small topup to make it home, and one time only the 4th location had a working Chademo charger - and I had to wait 40 minutes for a Tesla to finish charing to get my 15 minute topup!
The ZS EV LR changes all that in a number of ways - bigger battery & the more common CCS. This makes charging on the go less essential and less stressful.
Here's some very rough maths:
Although the ZS EV LR has an WLTP of 273 miles - I gather it should do around 200 miles at 70mph (motorway speeds).
But if you start your long journey with 80%, and aim to arrive to any destination/stop with 20% for headroom/finding a charger/battery health reasons - then you only have 60% to play with - around 120 motorway miles before you need to top up the charge.
So on a really long trip, that's a 60% charge (from 20% to 80%) every 1h45mins of driving (120 miles @ 70mph) waiting time of 42mins @ 100kW or 1h @ 50kW
Ignoring all other factors (traffic, temperature, wind, rough maths, entering exiting motorway) - in ideal conditions, doing an endless journey from 80% charge would therefore be something like:
e.g. 360 mile journey starting @ 80% and ending with 20%:
80% > 120 miles @ 70mph > 20% = 1h45
20% > charging @ 100 kW > 80% = 42mins
80% > 120 miles @ 70mph > 20% = 1h45
20% > charging @ 100 kW > 80% = 42mins
80% > 120 miles @ 70mph > 20% = 1h45
approx 1.5h charging time.
It would be interesting to properly calculate this and to compare it with the effect of travelling slower e.g. 65mph, 60mph, 55mph to see if the overall time is shortened (i.e. slower drive but less time charging could be faster overall)
Naturally, if your journey is 200miles long, you could start with 100% and drive it to 1% you'll get 200 miles in one go.
This has certainly been my approach in my occasional 40 mile journey.
It's 40 miles B roads or 65 miles A/M roads. For this journey, on the leaf, I always opted for the shorter journey at slower speeds to get most range with just a short charge on the way home. Now with the ZS EV LR I could go on the faster roads and get back without charging once.
Anyway, I better get back to work so I can pay off the car. I'm doing a 300 mile round trip tomorrow, then I'll report on my experience/impressions of the car in a new thread.