EVs are only practical if you have a garage and can charge it overnight.
(Outdoor chargers don't work because thieves steal the copper wires.)
(Outdoor chargers don't work because thieves steal the copper wires.)
Until we fix this, people without a house and garage to have their own charger are going get screwed badly by the forced EV transition.
Yet in reality thousands of people charge their cars in their driveways every day without this problem.
Also, how many charging stations are there compared to the number of parking spaces? The markets I've seen have 2 charging stations with about a hundred parking spaces. The stations are always in use, so they're fairly useless unless you want to hang around for most of the day.
Level 2 chargers that generally push 6kw of power and take hours to fully charge a car aren't very useful for brief charging stops like this.
Modern BEVs typically need 30 minutes to charge from 10 to 80% (it slows down asymptotically above 80).
I have 150kW chargers around here (southwest UK), which add 80 miles of range in 10 minutes. My weekly shopping usually takes longer than the car needs to fully change.
80 miles from 15kWh would be over 5 miles per kWh which seems quite high.
What’s the cost per mile compared to petrol?
How many 150kW chargers are at your local supermarket? How many car parking spaces in total?
I've had EVs since 2019, and in the meantime the infrastructure in the UK went from one broken charger per city, to every McDonald drive thru having a DC charger. In the western EU it's even better with a good 300kW charger coverage along all highways.
150kW * 10/60 = 25kWh. That's 80mi at 3.1mi/kWh.
Charging used to be dirt cheap before the Russian invasion. Rapid charging prices have increased 4x since then, and per mile they're unfortunately on par with petrol now.
Last time I ran the numbers is was 8 to 10 years before I hit break for an ICE vs an equivalent EV (in feature set that I cared about) given my driving habits and operating costs for either. And there's some electrical work that needs to be done to properly support charging a BEV without juggling what's drawing power when all the time. Upgrades to happen either way but they'd have to be rushed if I had bought a BEV, vs taking the time over the next few years.
So at least to for my situation it makes more sense to stick to ICE for now. If the BEV evangelists are right and battery prices drop down to the point where the purchase price of a BEV is the same as an ICE, then it makes more sense to wait. Buy ICE now, get everything in place, evaluate everything again in a few years.
This foundered the entire rationale for "cash for clunkers" to switch to more fuel efficient cars, but facts didn't matter. Politics did.
That assumes your time is worth zero.
The best feature about having an EV or plug in hybrid is that if you can charge at home, you never have to waste time going to the gas station, except for road trips.
The gas station is right on the route home. Any which way I used to go home, it's on the route on the right side of the road. When I was commuting every day it I was refuelling roughly every 3 weeks taking 3 to 6 minutes depending on if I had to wait for a gas stall to open. I work from home now so it's not entirely valid but use this for the sake of easy comparison.
Let's say it takes 10 seconds to unplug/close door/stow cable when you leave, and another 10 seconds when you get back. 5 days a week plus weekend trip for errands or whatever, so 6 minutes every 3 weeks. In other words, about the same as buying gas.
But then that leaves out the issue of DC fast charging, which inherently does longer, even when everything is working. Right now, the fast chargers not named Tesla are a bit of a gamble and now you have to consider time spent looking for an alternative charger if the one you want is occupied or out of order. Then throw in that my problems with locating a fast charge are made more so because I don't have a data plan on my smartphone, which limits which chargers I can use and cuts me off from knowing chargers are working and well...
So I'm not overly keen on that argument.