Urban = Core

Suburban, inter-city = Fringe

Your point stands, but your assumptions are a bit off.

Range anxiety is real, and you're underestimating its magnitude. Today, gas stations are practically ubiquitous along major population and travel corridors, so there's a huge install base of infrastructure when you're stuck in unfortunate or unusual circumstances and you need to acquire more fuel.

EV-related infrastructure has a lot of catching up to do, when your EV is one traffic detour away from being inoperable, because only dozens of charging stations exist in your area.

To add to the edge case -- my normal commute is 50 miles a day. But on closing day of the sale of my old house, and purchase of the new one, I had two closings to attend to, in different locations. Had to drive from my old house to the one closing (about 30 miles in one direction), then to the closing on the new house (30 miles back, plus another 20 miles to get to that closing's location). Then had to drive to the storage unit to get a few things I needed for that night at the new house (bedding, some furniture items). An electric car with a 200 mile range would have had me extremely anxious. Oh, and when it was all over, still had to drive into the office for an hour for a meeting.

With the Tax incentive in California, a used Nissan Leaf could effectively cost $6K used now.

And then if your work or city offers subsidized electric charging stations... it would definitely be worth switching now.

However I think there is a real chance that a fleet of automatic driving Ubers may make ride sharing cheaper than buying an electric car for most people.

I can get a 2014 Nissan Versa in good shape with 60,000 miles for ~$7,000 here, so the maintenance and fuel savings would have to be more than $3,000.

I pay around $1/mile to drive my (rather new) ICE car. Of that, less than a quarter is fuel. The majority is value depreciation. I haven’t seen any detailed calculations of EV ownership costs but I think it looks optimistic to hope for half the cost.

Or was the “half” just the marginal cost of the last mile driven and not the TCO per year divided my miles driven?

If you're going to buy a car anyway, it might already be today.

If you're deciding between a used Nissan LEAF and a ~2005 Honda Civic, the Honda is still going to be cheaper all-in. By a lot.

I daily drive a LEAF and like it a lot. It's still cost us a LOT more than my wife's 2005 CR-V over the last 3 years, because of depreciation and carrying collision insurance (due to financing the car at a 0% interest rate, but I still need to carry insurance, so the collision insurance is effectively the finance charge for me).

Per mile, I pay about 0.25 kWh, which at MA electric rates comes to ~$0.05/mile for power. That would equate to a 35 mpg car buying gas at $1.75/gallon. Plus, the car needs no oil changes and is very easy on brake pads. But a 12 year old Honda (or Toyota) will be tough to beat with an electric on an all-in basis.