The reason EV owners keep pushing back against this argument is that the experience of owning one often (obviously not always) leads to a massive recalibration of what you thought you cared about.
Road trips was something that was I was worried about when making the purchase in 2018, and it turned out to be a complete non-issue. In all that time, I have waited for a charger exactly once, for under 5 minutes, because we decided to stop at a busy outlet mall. During road trips, I'm not going to argue that we don't spend more time charging than we would stopping for gas, but it's not enough to bother me or my family, and if we include getting snacks or a bathroom break, the car is ready to go before we are.
It is wildly offset by the convenience of never having to fill up the car outside of those occasional road trips. People in the comments are talking about gas cars as the ones where you just get in and go without having to think about it -- there's very much a mirror image of that situation with an EV. When I had a gas car, fueling it was a constant chore. I had to think about it orders of magnitude more often. It simply doesn't come up with our EV. Every time it leaves the house, it does so with hundreds of miles of range. The idea of getting another car where I have to watch the gas gauge is almost reason enough that I'm going to stick with electric forever.
It is absolutely true that my experience is highly dependent on where I live, the kind of use I have for a car, the places I go, resources available to me, and just dumb luck. Others' mileage, literally, may vary. I'm not trying to sell you on this. It's just really easy to overestimate the importance of EV range.
> I'm not going to argue that we don't spend more time charging than we would stopping for gas, but it's not enough to bother me or my family, and if we include getting snacks or a bathroom break, the car is ready to go before we are.
The concern is that as adoption of EVs increase, the availability of places where one can charge on a journey outside of one's home range will not keep up with demand. I hope it becomes a non-issue, but I am hesitant to commit until it is clear it will not be.
At some point, there will be a tipping point where finding gasoline becomes the harder problem, but hybrid technology seems to me the most pragmatic way to get over the hump, if there will be one.
> The concern is that as adoption of EVs increase, the availability of places where one can charge on a journey outside of one's home range will not keep up with demand. I hope it becomes a non-issue, but I am hesitant to commit until it is clear it will not be.
This is the opposite of my experience. There are way more superchargers now than there were when I bought my car in 2019. Road trips are much easier. I worry about charging/waiting much less.
From the Bay Area, where Teslas are as common as Camrys, tons of people travel to the Tahoe basin for the holidays. I just did so last week. Charging was a complete non-issue even during this cold, extremely popular time.
And if you think about it, the same argument could be made about gas stations, that given how many ICE cars are on the road, places where you can fuel up on road trips will not keep up with demand — and is also not a reflection of reality.
Road trips was something that was I was worried about when making the purchase in 2018, and it turned out to be a complete non-issue. In all that time, I have waited for a charger exactly once, for under 5 minutes, because we decided to stop at a busy outlet mall. During road trips, I'm not going to argue that we don't spend more time charging than we would stopping for gas, but it's not enough to bother me or my family, and if we include getting snacks or a bathroom break, the car is ready to go before we are.
It is wildly offset by the convenience of never having to fill up the car outside of those occasional road trips. People in the comments are talking about gas cars as the ones where you just get in and go without having to think about it -- there's very much a mirror image of that situation with an EV. When I had a gas car, fueling it was a constant chore. I had to think about it orders of magnitude more often. It simply doesn't come up with our EV. Every time it leaves the house, it does so with hundreds of miles of range. The idea of getting another car where I have to watch the gas gauge is almost reason enough that I'm going to stick with electric forever.
It is absolutely true that my experience is highly dependent on where I live, the kind of use I have for a car, the places I go, resources available to me, and just dumb luck. Others' mileage, literally, may vary. I'm not trying to sell you on this. It's just really easy to overestimate the importance of EV range.