The internal combustion engine-powered relatives they will eventually replace are better than the electric vehicles. They're much more efficient because they can recover energy under braking, and they're quieter. Their batteries should last for a long time as well as a gasoline engine. If we can't get a handle on the reliability of the charging station, EV adoption will run into real problems.
Even the biggest EV enthusiast can't ignore the fact that it takes more time to charge a battery than it does to fill a tank. Most of the time, this isn't a problem for most car buyers. The average person only drives 29 miles a day, so even short-range EV should meet the needs of most drivers.
That's a pure rational take.
It's not possible to separate yourself from the cultural context of the car, which is now tightly bound to the American sense of identity. The freedom that a car means is being able to travel from coast to coast on a whim. If you want to travel far enough that you need to plug-in in public, you're going to have a hard time.
Some of the more EV- comfortable readers might think that you just need to plan. Due to charging station locations, the most direct route isn't always possible. Plugshare and A Better Route Planner are two good apps that make it easy to find a route, and most EV's have onboard navigation systems that are aware of charging stations. The efficiency of your journey will be taken into account by many of these.
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Even if you add another 50 miles to your road trip, you can still find a charging point. According to the Department of Energy's Alternative Fueling Station, there are 1,433Tesla Supercharger locations and another 4,556 public DC fast charging locations that use the CCS plug, which will charge every EV on sale other than a Nissan Leaf.
Billions of dollars are being spent on expanding EV charging infrastructure between networks and plans from the White House.
The issue is whether or not any of the charging points will work when you arrive. Since Superchargers are painless to use and appear to be extremely reliable, it's probably not a good idea to drive a car with one.
I need to apologize to the universe at this point. The Wall Street Journal published a story about an EV road trip that went wrong. I rented an electric car for a four day road trip. I spent a lot more time charging it than I slept.
I was a self-proclaimed EV expert and a EV enthusiast. I thought to myself that they just didn't plan well enough. It took me a few weeks to drive from DC to Watkins Glen in the Finger Lakes region of New York in a BMW iX. I spent almost as much time arguing with the charging machinery as I did pulling the electrons into the car's battery pack.
I ran into problems at each stop. There was a five-minute wait to see if the car and charging station would communicate. It wasn't unusual to wait 10 minutes. After just a few kWh, an error somewhere in the loop would shut everything down.
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