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> If you go deeper into the country though, there are many places where car ownership is nearly mandatory, especially for people who can't WFH.

This is true, but it's also worth noting that it's true because small and medium-sized cities systematically dismantled their public transportation systems between the 1920s and 1960s, replacing them with infrequent bus services.

One of the things I do when trying to understand how so many of our smaller cities became car hells is to Google "$CITY streetcars 20th century." We had the infrastructure and chose to remove it.

Yes, my city is one of those. Sadly it leads to a death spiral. The bus sucks, so nobody rides it, so the bus gets no money, so they cut routes, so the bus sucks more, so fewer people ride it.......

> but once or twice a year, we take a 1000 mile road trip that would be considerably more painful in an EV. If we're only going to own one car, it still needs to be ICE.

You could just rent a car for those two trips like you suggested yourself in your first paragraph ;). Optimise for the most common scenario, not the least common one.

> Would I still be able to run a 2023 EV in 2044? Will the batteries last that long, with any sort of usable range?

Replacing the battery pack on an EV once every 15 years is certainly cheaper than all the maintenance that goes into an ICE in the same timeframe. Hopefully we can start recycling batteries properly before the current generation of EVs is up for battery replacements.

The cost to rent a car for a week is getting close to the cost of just owning a car. (very much it depends, if you only own new cars renting is cheaper, but most people own older cars which are much cheaper). Plus when you rent they worry about little scratches and such which limits what you can do on vacation.

I’m not sure what math you’re on, usually the metric is 1-2 months to match ownership.

I recently hired a small car for £20 a day. Not a special deal, that’s just the price. A week would make that £140. An old car would cost almost twice that in taxes. Then you have maintenance, insurance, MOT, and devaluation.

If you can use a small car. I have a family, so I need a larger car (minivan, but typically they give me a large SUV). $100/day. A used minivan amortized over years is pretty cheap.

Yeah probably. Every EV comes with an 8+ year battery warranty, and it seems pretty rare to actually use it. No one I know has.

From anecdotes I've seen online, the only people who experience serious serious range degradation are atypical users (eg a taxi with 500k miles that exclusively uses fast charging) or owners of cars that don't have any thermal management for the battery (e.g. Nissan Leaf).