Two to four hours, township to township. The roads are mostly asphalt and mostly of national-road standard, so the surface itself is not what slows you down. What sets the time is terrain and altitude — and that is why the days on this kind of trip are short, and why "only 150 km" can still be a morning.
The surface is better than people expect
This is the misconception worth killing first. Visitors arrive braced for dirt tracks and are met with tarmac: two-lane, marked, signposted, and good enough that a normal car can drive it. Most of the routes here run on national-road-grade asphalt, and long stretches of it are genuinely pleasant to be on.
So the drive is not slow because the road is bad. It is slow because of what the road has to do.
What actually eats the time
Three things. First, the climbing and the descending: a road that gains a thousand metres does it in curves, and curves are slow. Second, altitude — the car is fine, but the driver and the passengers are thinner on oxygen than they were that morning, and the sensible answer is to drive shorter days rather than longer ones. Third, the ordinary interruptions of a mountain road: a herd of yaks on the tarmac, roadworks, a truck that has to be overtaken carefully.
None of that shows up on a map. All of it shows up in the day.
Why two to four hours is a useful planning number
Because it is the scale of the place. The townships on these routes are two to four hours apart — not twenty minutes apart, and not eight hours apart either. That single fact explains most of how an itinerary here has to be built: you get through two or three of them in a day and stop, rather than stringing six together and arriving in the dark.
The individual routes on this site carry their own drive times, and those are the ones to plan against: the five-day Sichuan loop · Chengdu to Yushu · a Chengdu day trip.
Questions I get on this one
Are the roads paved?
Can an ordinary car do this?
Why does a short distance take so long?
Do these times include stops?
Written from driving these roads rather than from a guidebook. Related: getting here · every route I've written up · all essentials