The Tesla Model Y Long Range is rated at 326 miles and in my experience that's accurate and completely practical.
As to your criterion of "500ish" miles, that's unrealistic even for most ICE cars. Granted gas stations are more common than EV charging stations but you also cannot recharge your ICE car at home or at your hotel or at an RV park.
Owning an EV requires a mindset switch; if you approach the EV purchase decision from the ICE mindset and all you see is "OMG the range is too low and what happens if I can't find a charger?" then you're probably not ready for EV ownership. If, OTOH you are able to switch to a mindset where you keep your energy status in the back of your mind (and an EV car helps you with this a great deal) then you might be ready.
For me this mindset switch was easy since I've been RV camping for decades; that's another lifestyle where thinking about such things as energy, water, and waste status are necessary. It's not difficult; it's just different. It requires an awareness that assumptions of infinite sources (of water, energy, etc.) and infinite sinks (for waste disposal) are incorrect, and now you must manage them actively.
In reality, while many manufacturers have grandiose claims of amazing magical batteries Any Day Now (TM) the battery tech being used in real life cars that you can buy today is all fairly similar.
Honestly that's a huge turn off for me. I have enough things on the back of my mind, tracking my "energy status" would have a significant opportunity cost by displacing more productive things.
Something to keep in mind is that electricity is ubiquitous in the first world, and the number and density of EV chargers will only increase over time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
I wish that EV vendors would let you "test drive" a vehicle over the course of a week. It's hard to imagine what your day to day charging experience would be by just driving around for an hour.
For most people, myself included, I bet the charging will actually be a non issue, probably even more convenient than gas, but it still feels like a big leap to take.
Definitely a complex inflection point we're at, but I have hope!
(disclosure: I do not recommend buying a Tesla currently due to their QC and support failings).
Turo is a more expensive than an ordinary rental car because not only are Teslas expensive, but with Turo you really should buy the insurance. (I'd read that personal insurance won't cover you in a Turo car like it will in a normal rental. Haven't verified this. Decided not to risk it.) But even with the expense it was a good way for me to get an idea of what Tesla ownership was like.
Honestly, that's the only type of new car I would buy at this point. I think we are hitting peak ICE complexity at this point and would just as soon not be involved with the mechanical magic that's been introduced to achieve that last bit of marginal improvement with emissions or mileage.
My current EV can do around 280-300km in one go and it hasn't limited me once. Back seat needs a pee-break after 200-250km anyway =)
The car software is well done, and while it isn't updated often that just means you can expect less bugs than Tesla's constantly updated software.
Downsides to the Bolt include OnStar, 3rd party quick chargers are often broken, and their app is absolute garbage. Other than that I think ~$15k for 200+ miles is amazing.
How long does somebody really want to be driving/sitting in a car non-stop?
The solution I've found for this problem is to grab lunch first, then go recharge at the Supercharger and sit in the comfortable climate-controlled car and either have a post-lunch quicknap or watch Netflix for 20 minutes.
I'm guessing you have never been at a busy highway gas station? It is not uncommon to wait for 10-20 minutes at a 20 pump station on a turnpike where cars gas up in 3-4 minutes. Until the charging infrastructure is done to at least half of the current gas stations level mass adoption of EV is a pipe dream.
edit: looks like it has 8.2 inches of ground clearance, so that would be fine. Too bad it's ugly but oh well. Cars don't have to be pretty.
Depending on where you are, 350 miles might not even get you out of Texas!
For local travel electric is decent and you can work around the 1 remaining issue for electric with some planning. For long road trip the refuel is the bottleneck. I think when electric cars can recharge a 300-400 range in 5-10 mins you will see people switch very quickly.
I think it would have been better to have a little bit more range so the stops are spaced farther apart, but charging was cheap and rather fast. The worst part was dealing with some of those chargers; there's usually at least one charger offline at EA stations and some charge really slow (which sucks when you pay by the minute) so there's a bit of trial-and-error.
I honestly kinda liked these forced breaks... usually when we take a long road trip I feel stiff as a board when we arrive, but I felt fine when we got there.
Off-topic but Texan inhabitants I know used to measure the length of the drives in number of beers consumed en route. Austin to Waco was a comparatively modest 5 beer trip, for example.
We did some relatively long trips in our BMW i3 last couple of summers. Even though the charging added about 1-1.5hrs to each trip, my SO, which did all the driving, said she preferred it that way. She felt significantly less exhausted when she arrived, thanks to the charging stops.
So not clear cut for all drivers it seems.
Again the i3 isn't a great car for long distance driving due to small battery, and a big part of the extra 1.5 hrs was due to waiting in line for charging (summer vacation, yay). Both of those issues have gotten better and will continue to improve.
With less range than that, EV charging becomes a constraint on which lodging I can choose or else how I'm going to spend ~hours of my vacation.
I wonder how much the actual battery contributes to the production costs. It can't be trivial, right?
https://web.archive.org/web/20140331102655/http://www.teslam...
Propane capacity isn't going to go down as the tanks age; losing 10% when swapping in an older battery could really suck.
My guess is as the market grows this will become more common.
I would think it's a good portion, at say $200 per kWh of battery a 50kWh pack is $10k.
Add to that a fully charged vehicle every morning without having to make a visit to a petrol/gas station at any point in the week, and you can start to see how it can become more convenient.
All of this depends on where you live and what you use your car for of course.
Fascinating! We drive hours upon hours on the regular in Texas, everything is so spread apart. I take weekend trips to see my family every once in a while and it comes out to 3-4 hours and I do that without really hesitating. One of my friends recently mentioned that one of their parents took a job that's 120 miles away from their house(!!) which, while it's definitely not "normal," certainly happens.
If you don't mind my asking, whereabouts are you from?
Looks aside, something like that would interest me but I don't need the extras. I don't need extra motors and 4wd. Why not just offer the base version with the bigger battery?
Cybertruck will have 250+ miles of range for $39,900, which is the same as the ID.4 this article is about.
what about it is "higher end"?
For a conventional car you'd sell after 5 years or drive it for ten to reduce TCO, so you'd want to compare that with the monthly cost for (say) a 36 mo lease.
You seem to be stuck in a 2010 mindset - battery swapping in particular is a hilarious failure of an idea. Watch out for the world overtaking you.
Re: battery swapping, are you referring to the idea of like, hot swapping batteries on the road, or swapping to an upgraded battery at some point? I'm only specifically interested in the latter.
Honestly, I think if I were to drive a seriously long distance, I'd rent a car. Not only does it save wear 'n tear, but it's hard to find something that's more of a pain than a mechanical breakdown a long way from home with something you own.