They really need to work on charging infrastructure before they convince me to buy an electric car.
And the cost still needs to come way, way down. It seems like every electric car that has any decent range is a luxury car. I don't want a luxury car, I just want a super basic cheap car to get me from point a to point b.
You can't even get a quality EV with a shorter range though for less than 50-70k. I'm not even sure I've spent that much on my car over the last decade, including gas, insurance, repairs, and initial cost. Makes it hard to justify the upgrade.
Seems like there may be 500evs coming back next year, so may look into that.
Bolt EUV is around 30k
One reason it's shame we'll never see the Bolt on Australian roads is because it actually stemmed from an electric vehicle concept designed here by GM’s Australian design centre and went into production in 2017.
Now, of course, with GM all-but out of Australia – apart from its ties to the shrunken GMSV outfit here – it's less likely than ever we'll ever see the Bolt models here.
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1139848_sub-40-000-evs-...
Having to drive five to ten miles and wait for most of an hour to charge is just a bad experience.
The trick is to distribute chargers everywhere, because your car is going to be parked somewhere long enough to charge unless you’re a taxi or some other high utilization use case. Most will charge at home and or work, but some cannot.
My office and home don't have chargers and probably won't for a while, so I'd essentially have to make a special trip out on the weekends to charge my car while I get lunch nearby or something.
If I had to drive around for a while to find an open charging spot, I'd have to be more opportunistic about where/when I charge to stay ahead on it.
China this year reached $10k car with BYD introducing its $10k cars with sodium ion batteries, these are not like previous cheap cars which were practically golf carts. With the prices of batteries and solar electricity falling 10%-12% a year on avg I think electric cars are going to take over a lot faster than people are expecting. Main reason being cost ice cars are almost 3 times as expensive to run today as an electric car already. It will be 5-8 times in 5-8 years.
Hardest part is for apartment buildings. No big incentive to install chargers for public use.
Same thing for at work.
And checking the charging maps shows very few options anywhere near me and the few places that do only have a couple plugs. Would be annoying to find it's in use by the time I get there so I would have to wait for them and then me.
Sure maybe in years it will be common enough, but that’s my entire point. It doesn’t seem common at all around me yet, and I’m not going to buy an EV before charging is reasonably available.
Hence why I think it will expand outward from urban centres, motivated by e.g. ULEZ requirements.
I live in Wisconsin between Madison and Milwaukee.
There are perhaps 20 chargers in total in the entire suburb. Maybe 8 of them are fast chargers. There are another 20 in neighbouring suburbs.
And no, it's not an American suburb with single family homes. It's an European suburb with apartment complexes.
Around me there were very few places until McDonald's suddenly decided to have a charger at every drive-thru, and now I have as many chargers as McDonalds' around me.