I think range anxiety is over-played because 1. people don't drive for long distances all the much anyway and 2. battery capacity improves 8% year on year, within 9 years it will have doubled and it will be a moot point.
If an EV supports 120V outlets, then chargers are already more common than gas stations by many orders of magnitude. Fast charging is a different story... But for long road trips, taking a break for a couple hours every 400 miles doesn't sound like a bad idea, and we already have ample rest stops along most highways.
People like to make it sound like cultural problems are insurmountable. Sometimes, that may be true. Other times... we just have to suck it up and realize: The future is already here, and it requires change. Personally... I'm excited to get away from a gasoline automotive economy -- at least electricity is agnostic as to the source of EMF.
(In fact, a whole bunch of car batteries hooked to the grid sounds a lot like distributed energy storage required to smooth demand curves...)
I mean, doing 1500km travel (which i do 1-2x per year) would mean 4 hour drive, then couple of hours of forced wait, again drive and so on? completely useless
If you regularly drive more than 300km, then yes, ICE vehicles will remain your only option. But if you are a suburbanite or city-dweller who has a typical round trip commute of 70 miles or less[1] then in the very near future a Tesla Model 3 or equivalent will be the economically rational option for you to purchase.
I think about buying a EV in the same way as I would think about choosing the number of bedrooms in a hypothetical house purchase: do I overpay for a house with one extra bedroom, in the rare case I have relatives or friends once or twice a year, or do I offer to put them up in a nearby fancy hotel for that rare case? Similarly, do I buy the car that fits my needs for 95% of my day to day driving, is economical to run, and rent a car when I need the extra range, or do I overpay day to day for the rare edge case where I need that extra range?
Then again, plenty of people choose ridiculously oversized SUVs to drive their kids to school so we shouldn't expect drivers to suddenly become economically rational in their vehicle choice.
> I mean, doing 1500km travel (which i do 1-2x per year)
which is it? Things you do once or twice per year are exactly what the GP is talking about. Rent a car that can.
Besides, I believe the Model S can go for about 400km at 130 km/h, so realistically you'd have two half-hour breaks at a supercharger. It's not so bad if you combine it with lunch / coffee. If you were to take the recommended driving breaks (at least 15 minutes every 2 hours) and increase the interval from 2 to 3 hours (because people who do 1500km pushes probably don't take as many breaks as they should), then you end up with 30 minutes more. That's not ideal, but not too bad either.
And then you don't need to go out of your way to buy gas!
But, that considered: I see a lot of stories about developments in rapid charging. IMO, in about 5-10 years an EV will be able to charge to 90% capacity in 10 minutes.
That's about as long as I spend at a gas station when I drive long distances. (I usually go to the bathroom, stretch my legs, ect.)
that's assuming people have more than one car. a person can get a rental car, this is added mental task that you're asking a person to do. if you're requiring the user to think/work you're going to lose a lot of users.
That's the marketing angle that will be played, obviously for people here in a general socioeconomic sense there's no problem affording an EV and no problem getting a rental at the drop of a hat anywhere on the planet. Like claiming those airplane thingies will never catch on because people don't like renting cars and we are all familiar with suddenly having a transoceanic or cross continent travel dropped in our laps so we'll all be forced to live on houseboats or something. I mean, everybody travels all the time, so no body should be permitted to own a car that isn't for travelers, right?
The marketing push we can all look forward to is exhaustive explanation via legacy TV commercials and perhaps product placement on sitcoms, etc, that only poor people can't afford to rent a car for weird long trips and being poor isn't cool, so that'll kinda take care of itself.
Unless you forget to plug the car in the night before.
Unlike switching the lights off you have to get out of the car to plug it in.
If the car is going to beep before you get out then it's not a reminder for something I've forgotten,as with lights left on, it's just irritating UX noise, like the "don't forget your mobile phone" message. After a very short time I go blind to that.
If it's an alarm on a mobile/smart watch it's still a tedious chore to have to plug in a car when it's raining or I'm in a rush or I've parked in a spot without a charge point.
People _will_ forget to charge their cars, just as they forget to charge their phones and they will be late because of it.
If purely electric cars are to be brilliantly convenient everyday repacements for fossil fuels they'd be better with either some kind of induction charging, fast charging that doesn't take hours or hydrogen fuel cells.
If we had better ways of splitting hydrogen we could "fast charge" anywhere water and electricity is available.
But no, it's not a huge issue. New cars seem to come with apps nowadays, so as you said your car can just send you a notification to your phone if you haven't plugged it in five minutes after arriving back home. And maybe another one if it's still not plugged in before you go to bed.
Unavailability of charging (see sibling comment) is a bigger issue that won't be as easy to tackle. But reminding users to charge their car isn't what's hindering EV adoption. You can be late if you forget to fill up your petrol car, too. That can easily take ten minutes if there's a bit of a queue.
Unless, like many people in my city, you park on the roadside because your 19th and early 20th century houses don't have carparks.
Having an EV-only inductive charging parking spot every here and there might help in the future (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_charging#Electric_ve... - it's coming), but probably will neither be cheap to retrofit nor very practical.
This is an issue that needs to be solved for EVs to become practical here.