> most people who wanted EVs had already purchased them
You should really reconsider where you get your information from.
“Volkswagen reported more than 70,000 orders for its new Electric Urban Car Family within just a few weeks, while European BEV orders increased by more than 50% in Q2.”
https://www.volkswagen-group.com/en/half-yearly-financial-re...
It just means the US market is too unattractive and low-volume for EVs that aren't a Tesla.
If you have home charging, it's more likely that you'll have a mostly full battery than that the power outage will occur when you have a mostly full tank of gas.
It's a bit more work and expense but some EVs can even act as automatic or manual whole-home power backups.
Unless you live somewhere that regularly loses power for a week+, an EV might actually be a net benefit.
Don't get me wrong. The electric cars work just fine in cold weather. As long as your trip isn't too long. I however discovered the hard way last winter about a week after I got my electric car that when the weather is below zero Fahrenheit it gets about half the expected range and I had a trip that was just a little bit over half the expected range - I'm lucky there was a slow charger along that trip, there were no fast chargers anywhere along the route. (An hour charge over lunch got me the 10 extra miles I needed to get home - I didn't eat at my first choice but it worked)
You could run your house for weeks off a 100kWh traction battery with V2G.
The people I know who are afraid of outages/EV usage are ones in CA, where an earthquake could knock out power, and they'd need to go a very long distance to get somewhere safe/stable.
If power is out in that large of a radius you would also likely have trouble getting gas.
And you don't need the expensive equipment to just run an extension cord from the EV to power critical appliances.
As for powering critical appliances, I'd need a super long heavy duty extension cord to power my fridge, and I don't even know if my vehicle is capable. I'd also have to have my garage door open while it's plugged in, which is not ideal to say the least.
> need a super long heavy duty extension cord to power my fridge
Why on earth would you need a heavy duty extension cord for something which pulls so little power?
I otherwise agree with the sentiment, however, it is way more convenient to set up your panel so you can backfeed it to power the whole house (or a nice chunk of it, at least). My Lightning will power all the important bits of my house for the better part of a week, all from the plug in the bed of the truck.
That it would be more convenient in the long run if I could backfeed to my panel, but almost no EVs in the U.S. are actually capable of this. The F-150 Lightning that you have is quite unique in this regard.