2 miles is an awfully long way, and 36% of Americans are even further away. That’s 4 miles round trip. Presumably many of those charging stations aren’t that big and disallow you leaving your car overnight. The rest of the numbers are similarly bad.
https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q4-2024-ev-sales/
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/trends-in...
No but it only takes 3 minutes to dump 45 litres of fuel into my car and that lasts about 3 weeks of driving.
These arguments are kind of like horse and cart owners stating that gasoline powered vehicles will.need to be able to get fuel and that's impractical. Its infrastructure and innovation that is still being built out, the that build out is now 10-12 years along for most first world nations.
The demand isn't there. The group of people who buy EVs and don't have a home to charge at is too small. And that won't change until the economics of purchasing an EV fundamentally change.
The point I’m primarily trying to make, repeatedly: distance to a charger is not some universal rule that prevents uptake. The least likely thing to be true is that the market stays the same. If it remains the same in the US for a few years, China will crush this market.
Either a human needs to be employed overnight plugging in and unplugging these cars ($$) or else every single charger that supports this needs to have new fancy robotic arms and some agreed-upon protocol that cars can use to request a charge.
Considering that so far the story of EV chargers in America has looked like "download my app!" people struggling and failing to get credit card readers reliably working, I have no faith that this would happen in a few years.
The benefit is that you can power the cars when there is least demand on the grid, on the roads, on the need for the vehicles themselves, on the time of people who currently wait at chargers for their cars to charge. Fix one thing (and build upon the main innovation of cars driving themselves) and you unlock all this other waste. The charging location can even manage this by setting availability to align with staff, eg 5am to 11pm, or 24/7 if they want to hire up. You can even have roaming staff, eg wander between three locations and just switch the cars out.
The current state of affairs in the US is that having a L2 charger at home and paying $E for 100kwh of electricity is massively less expensive than paying $E*5 for the car to go charge itself via some third party. This will not be a cheap service. The places where people tend to buy electric vehicles, generally coincide with high electricity prices and high labor costs. Maybe the high electricity costs can be somewhat offset by using off-peak power, but that's also off-peak generation due to solar panels, so who knows.
This also relies on the innovation of "cars that can drive themselves to the charger", which has been 18 months away in Teslas for what, a decade now? And Teslas are now a tiny proportion of the EVs sold in the US. Something less expensive and better price-per-range like the Ioniq 5/6 or the Equinox EV don't even have the hardware to take advantage of a system like this if you could snap your fingers and make these overnight charging facilities exist.
I don't think the economics work in the 2020s. Someday, sure.