I have never not been in a Tesla where the driver isn't constantly fucking with something. I will grant you - it's only the charging menu when they're in the garage. Point taken, though - that's a failing of Tesla, not a fundamental problem of the charging experience. I will say that in 1994 we learned in vehicle design that a thousand pounds of batteries was not only forty thousand dollars, it was also the energy density of a gallon of gas. Then cell phones came out and it became ten thousand dollars and three gallons of gas. By the time the Nissan Leaf came out it was three thousand dollars and five gallons of gas. And by the time I was test-driving used Nissan Leafs, the battery packs were half-dead and it was more like two gallons of gas. Practically speaking, electric cars should be "just cars you put less gas into" but every other electric car ride I've ever taken has been a "will we make it" dance. They definitely have their place, and that place gets bigger every day, but "we have to stop in Hawthorne to charge up for an hour because I passed too many cars on my way from Newport to DTLA" is not something non-electric drivers say.
I drive a 2017 BMW i3 with a gas-powered range extender. It has a 33 kWh battery. I bought it used. If I drive at 70-75 mph on the freeway, I get about 100 miles of electric-only range before the range extender needs to kick in. If I drive slower, or have a higher mix of city driving, I can reliably get 120 miles. If I'm only driving in the city, that number can go even higher. And I'm not a hypermiler--I drive it like the hot(ish) hatchback it is, though I'm very good at using regenerative braking. I (believe I) am a typical car commuter. On office days, my commute is about 40 miles round-trip. On the weekend, it's not uncommon for me to have a 100-mile day in the car--charging outside the house is optional. Based on my last year's worth of driving, my little go-kart is about 96.5% EV (14,000 miles driven). I burned about a dozen gallons of gas last year (including 2 road trips >250 mi). I'd say 96.5% of my driving is not a "will we make it dance". For about $10k more I could've had a 2019 i3 battery-only EV with a 42 kWh battery with 150 miles of range and accomplished the same thing with a dozen fewer gallons of gas. For the same price, I could have had a new Chevy Bolt with 250 miles of range. I think people tend to buy cars for their edge use cases (I'm going to go on so many road trips!) and over-index on convenience (but right now I've got a 500-mile gas tank! I only have to go to the gas station every 10 days!). Yes, it's easier to say because I park in a garage at night where I've got a level-2 40A charger, but a $25k (new!) Chevy Bolt with 250 miles of range could be fast-charged (DC/level-3) once a week in the time it takes you to do your grocery shopping.
That's the Pareto Principle right there, though - 80% of the time, you won't use that last 20%. I've long argued that any fool can do 80% of someone else's job. I don't care what that job is. Clearly, Tesla's Autopilot will get you there safely 80% of the time. It's that last 20% that fucks you over, and there's no way around it. That's why Tesla rolled out their autopilot while Google's self-driving technology remains a lab curiosity 10 years later: Tesla and Uber are perfectly happy to sell something that will do the job in anything but an emergency while Google knows emergencies are where lawsuits happen. An electric car would get my wife to and from work 99% of the time. It's the home visits that might be a problem, but not realistically. Now - what if we want to drive out to the coast? That's gonna be 300 miles, realistically, and if we have to do it in my Porsche I will be the only one having fun, and that fun will last until we make it and recognize just how much luggage we had to leave behind. So I could buy my wife an electric car? But I'd also have to either (A) pay for an extra car for when we want to get somewhere or (B) get rid of my car so we probably won't be buying one. And that has been my experience with electric cars, and with everyone I know with electric cars: they're awesome if you have a fallback because it fucking sucks to have to rent a car just to take a road trip and makes you feel like a choad. Is that going to change? Undoubtedly. Will there come a time when I don't hate every electric vehicle I could buy? Probably. Will it be a Dodge Charger? Definitely not. I built my first and second electric cars in 1995. I worked on them off and on through the '90s. They've come a long damn way - longer than we ever imagined back then, thanks solely to the advances in battery technology engendered by the Razr and iPhone. Hybrids? I mean the difference between a Prius and a Chevette is the smugness. I think the future is bright? But I'm not ready to say the future is here. Now if you'll excuse me I need to go attempt to rationalize an Aptera deposit again.I think people tend to buy cars for their edge use cases
I'm off for three days and you guys start talking about EV charging. Literally doing 1200km in two days in a 66kW Hyundai. A few points to add to the discussion: 1) you charge where you park. You top up in quick breaks when you need to go further. Nobody wants to fastcharge, so we expect it to become a much smaller part of driving than gas stations are now. Over here we expect just 13% of all EV charging to be at (highway) fast chargers. Imagine if you could fill up your car with water. Would you really opt to fill it up at a random industrial parking lot you could also drop a hose in it on your own driving lane and at work for half the price? How about your employer realizing they could make money by offering you free charging when you allow them to use your car as a battery storage? Opportunity charging, which is that you charge when your car is standing still anyway, is the inevitable way forward. 2) The US is dearly lacking in both fast and destination chargers. Range anxiety disappears once those two are remotely reliable - I know this from first hand experience and from a bunch of studies done on the Dutch charging station network, which happens to leave every other country in the dust. As soon as it's a common sight for there to be a charger in a parking lot, people stop complaining. Because I already have the luxury of a dense and reliable network of destination and fast chargers, I almost never have to worry, and I also almost never fastcharge. Colleague of mine has a charger at home and at work and he's never even used a fastcharger. Because if you leave full and can charge at your destination, that's two charging stops eliminated. So a <car range> mile trip both ways is made possible by just one charger at my destination, that happens to also be a decent way to make money for businesses with a large energy connection. Tesla drivers love their Superchargers, but normal people will avoid them if they can. And if you do need them - for most people, as soon as your EV can do 100+ kW of fast charging, which is "most new models and probably whatever first model upper class people will buy", nobody minds the stops because you'll be ready to drive another 150-200 miles right when you're done taking a piss or grabbing a coffee. Especially when you factor in that charging is cheaper per mile than gas. 3) What will drive the change in chargers? Well, the business case for EV destination chargers is decent. The case for rapid chargers is VERY good as soon as you hit a certain level of daily users. There is less overhead and less insurance than a gas station. It never needs refills, and you can basically just plop one down and wait for your investment to pay off. Even a small station can draw traffic, or can boost sales. The number of rapid chargers that aren't Tesla has doubled in less than eighteen months over here. We fully expect every supermarket, DIY store, McDonalds and Starbucks (any place that you will park at for more than 20 minutes and that owns the land it's on) to follow suit. 4) Smart charging capabilities have been made mandatory on all public slow charging stations here. The collective energy use of EVs will be a hit on the grid, but it's in the form of "small spikes in many places", which is something that grids are in theory perfectly capable of handling if dimensioned correctly. The real problem that will fick things up are heavy vehicles. They consume a factor 10-15 more energy than cars per km and require near 1MW chargers if you want to top them up along the way. The energy use of industrial zones can easily increase by TWh's if adopted widely, which is not the case of personal vehicles. And the TCO, which is nearly always the main driver of any EV adoption rate, however is good enough that the trucks will be here before the infrastructure is upgraded. 5) I still dream of a V2G system of energy brokerage whereby we can delay daily power use with cars and home batteries. The realities are complicated, and the rise of EVs seems to be going just a bit too fast for V2G to catch up. My city is one of the first to realize what you guys are theorizing about. But it's the result of one incredibly entrepreneurial dude who's been at this problem for 8 years. Wider adoption... I don't know. I hope so.
I hear car crashed and drained it’s 12v battery so and it needs to go to the service depot for a software reload is also a common ev problem. I’ve never had any of my gauges fail but my Tesla owning coworker has only had it happen around once a month. He loves it though and so do the mice that are eating his wiring