But isn’t that a niche case? I’d have thought the vast majority of car usage is short local trips and regular commutes, not road trips. If you’re able to charge the car at home that should cover most usage.
This is where someone always chimes in with ‘but what about people who live in rural Idaho and need to drive eighteen hours to a hospital once a quarter and they need to tow their boat when they do it’
There are outliers who have specialist niche needs. But the vast majority of trips taken by the vast majority of drivers are short range and start/terminate at home.
Most electric car owners don’t rely on public charging infrastructure at all.
With fossil fuels you first drive to the pump, fill up, then take a break for restroom, food, ...
With an EV you drive up to the charger, connect and do the other things. A while later you come back and drive on.
Also instead of a long charging stop when the battery reaches 0% you can plan for multiple short stops, which is positive for concentration. (Given enough chargers)
> Most electric car owners don’t rely on public charging infrastructure at all.
Right. For commute usage you charge over night at home and/or at the office while working and can completely avoid the weekly (or whatever) detour to the gas station completely.
Will this be the case going forward? I wouldn't consider apartment dwellers a niche case. It is a lot to ask for apartment building to install chargers at every parking place.
I can see having one car that’s really only good for local driving, but if I were considering whether to go all electric “this car can handle 90% of what your old car could do” doesn’t sound like a great pitch.
If you do a 1000 mile road-trip once a year while towing a sailboat, does your daily driver really need to be able to do it? Or could you drive something cheaper/smaller and use the money saved to rent a huge truck for that once a year thing?
But yea, I know many families who bought an EV for their second car. Then it became their primary car. And soon they had two EVs and no ICEs.
There are outliers where EVs aren't usable yet, but the new F-150 Lightning will fill a lot of those use-cases.
The 1000 mile trip is something you do often anyway for shorter trips. You take the sailboat to the cabin most weekends and the special 1000 mile trip once a year. Or you take the family to grandma's monthly, and the family on a 1000 mile yearly vacation.
I think the biggest blocker right now is just price. It seems like electric cars are either very expensive or not very good.
Charging networks are definitely an important part of the overall solution but I don’t think they’re the whole story. I think if enough people have EVs, charging networks will inevitably follow, rather than the reverse.
Edit to add: I’m assuming I can charge at home in this scenario, which I realise may not be easy for many people (eg in apartment blocks). I would have thought that’s a somewhat different problem from charging networks, though.
For most people the oversized SUV that can do anything they need is a more economical choice than a similar SUV and even a "cheap beater" car for most of their driving - and of course most people would demand both cars be expensive nice cars.
In the agricultural regions of the US where I’ve lived in the past, distances are intrinsically long even in the small cities and infrastructure sparse. Real shopping may be 70+ miles away (but road speed is 80-85 mph so not that long). In other non-coastal city I’ve lived it was normal for people to do a 300 mile (each way) drive twice a month between cities. While more niche, a lot of working trucks in the agricultural and mining regions of the West are modified to increase their range — almost twice the range of the F-150 Lightning on a single charge. There is little charging infrastructure at all, and what exists is clearly positioned to target tourists from the coast, not the driving patterns of people that live there. There may be charging stations in these towns one day but I suspect it won’t be for a long time and range will still be a very real issue for a significant percentage of people.
There is a chicken-and-egg problem with the lack of range and lack of charging stations that make them unusable in many parts of the US. If no one buys EVs then no one will build charging stations, and the lack of range in regions that really need range means they aren’t a practical vehicle absent ubiquitous charging stations in places that probably won’t pay for the investment.
While I can afford to buy two cars it’s a big capital expenditure that’s extremely under utilized.
And so my wait continues, looks like I’ll be stuck with ICEs for at least a half a decade.
Half a decade seems too optimistic to me though - lack of charging facilities at residences, current power grid cannot support any significant usage of electric cars, little space for charging stations in cities etc.
Though if fuel taxes & prices continue to rise in current fashion, ICE might become too costly to use.
Looks like a huge percentage of car traffic in the most congested cities is under 3 miles: https://cal.streetsblog.org/2019/09/16/bikes-and-scooters-co...