Reasons:
* the driving experience is just much, much better: punch & acceleration, stability, quietness, etc.
* if you charge at home it is a lot cheaper than gas
* it is so easy to "fuel": you plug it in when you arrive home and unplug the next morning
Edit: also, after I installed solar cells at home, I drive almost for free!
On the go DC fast charging is already not cheap. It costs as much or more than gas.
Only if you trade in a gasoline SUV for an electric SUV. A hatchback EV weighs about as much as a compact SUV, and is cheaper to buy and operate.
Because trucks also used more gas. EVs don't.
And can always charge L1 120v, even if it's unbearably slow.
Or, they can just tax the car based on some average mileage statistics. That's what my state does. Registering an EV is substantially more expensive than an ICE vehicle.
The EV will pay for itself in saved gasoline after about 53K miles.
That’s not breakeven time; that’s “the car is free” time.
Breakeven was less than half that long because the old ICE car would have had non-zero depreciation.
Apples-to-apples break even would have been 10-20K miles (ignoring free charging at work), but it ended up being closer to 300 miles. Thanks to a fuel crisis, the price of the EV increased by $5K shortly after I bought it. (It’s back down now.)
My car got totalled in September and I had to replace it. Since I didn't drive much at the time I entertained just getting a super cheap old ICE to replace it. Then I started remembering all the annoying maintenance.
Still, back to DC fast charging... I use it rarely. But it's not cheap. And it's a shit non-standardized, fragmented experience.
I had plans that involved driving 8 hours each way. Electrify America chargers were all broken. Luckily, CircleK chargers "worked", slowly. An hour and 30 min to go from 10% to 90%. Had to charge twice each way. Time I will never get back.
After this experience, I talked to Hertz. There is evidently no way to note "no EV ever" on a reservation. I am avoiding hertz from now on (and dollar/thrifty that they own). Enterprise allows you to note "NO EV" on a rental reservation, and honors it.
Until EVs can charge at every corner and in 3 minutes, no thanks! I have places to be, and those places are not "90 minutes on a deserted CircleK parking lot"
My charging takes less than 1 minute, really. I arrive at home at 4:30, it takes 20 seconds to plug the car and then 20 more seconds to unplug it the next morning.
And what about all the 12 hours between that? Well, I am living my life, I am not charging a car! The car is doing the whole work of charging itself, alone.
That's several orders of magnitude better than going to a gas station.
Boy, it sucked. Even with a Type 2 charger at work, and maybe 2 miles between the office and my hotel, charging was a huge hassle. And with an ICE vehicle I can refuel before dropping it back off at the airport in about 5 minutes. It's just not practical to recharge my EV after driving 1.5 hours to catch my flight.
The only other noteworthy experience was making an adjustment in a parking space and having 2 or 3 alarms going off concurrently without any indication of what they meant. (Excluding the proximity sensor, if memory serves.)
This is what I do. Love it. Never ever going back to ICE.
Those very few times I have to make longer journeys and need to charge? Have found a few fast chargers on routes I take that I try and use, but its majorly inconvenient and stressful compared to ICE. A big downside.
So great for being our personal car for local journeys. Bad for long journeys.
Bummer about the broken EA chargers. PlugShare has been really great for finding working chargers. People leave reviews and notes on how well the chargers are working and tips about using them.
I think once all cars are NACS and can use Tesla stations too the charging situation will be much better.
> I had plans that involved driving 8 hours each way.
That's a Hertz problem not an EV problem. The car was patently unsuited to your particular needs on that one trip. Daily commuting doesn't involve 16-hour round trips.
You can either use that non-representative experience to reinforce your pre-existing anti-EV ideology. Or reflect on your EV hate rationally.