Okay–but your skepticism seems to be based on your personal anecdotes and is running in the face of expert data collection. One way to convince people that there’s adequate infrastructure is to market an actual buildout of the charging stations as described in the Biden-era infrastructure bill. The plan was for half a million charging stations by 2027; but as of February 2025, 56 stations were up and running based on the bill, and Trump almost immediately threw up roadblocks to more stations on taking office.
My anecdotal experience is that there aren’t enough charging stations to make things convenient for road trips, and I think it’s obvious that I’m a pretty big booster of EVs. The experts are saying that the lack of chargers is a barrier to increased adoption. I’m just not sure why you’re holding onto your skepticism.
(To be totally clear: it should be much more convenient, but it’s also a long way from impossible. It’s less inconvenient than hitting a traffic jam, for comparison’s sake.)
The current infrastructure was both adequate and incredibly inconvenient when i rented an EV (because that’s all they would give me, and i was desperate.)
We couldn’t get in our garage for a two week period and did absolutely fine using our 120V exterior plug to get us through that period. Rather than plugging in once a week or so, we plugged in nightly (we didn’t even need to do that some nights).
I get tired of those gotchas that are so commonly brought out. Seems like there a lot of people that routinely go on the Cannonball Run that resort to peeing into their empty Gatorade bottles to shave off 5 minutes.
And for you, and the roughly third of the car purchasing market like you, I am unsure that it will be an easy sell even when public charging is available to you but a bit of a walk to your building, or at a price premium. You shouldn’t be the focus now.
And yet … I, a longtime huge EV fan, am hesitant. I still want the PHEV for that trip. Even with a next car that can use the Tesla charger network and even if it has 300 plus miles range. Not just because it would be untested by me the first time, but because under ideal conditions being able to drive on gas is more convenient for that use case. Filling up is faster and reliably available within fifty miles or so.
@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness I want the infrastructure built up. It is in my best interest. But “experts” using polling with questions worded carefully are not necessarily on target for how sentiment changes and what people actually will do in the future. Appeal to authority, especially self interested authority which is sometimes the case here, is weak argument.
Here’s what I observe, even if you dismiss it as mere anecdotes - individuals who said they’d consider an EV if only the infrastructure was there, seeing people they know get EVs and raving about how great it is to just plug in at night and never have to waste time at a gas station, starting to think about it, as long as the household still also has a gas car … and NO ONE who has bought an EV ever going back to buying a car that they cannot plug in.
The trend over the past years was increasing regularly for a reason. Up from under 1% a decade ago to over 10% and used EV sales taking off as the affordable choice. The short term blip last year is more than just statistical noise, it is the result of major effort to kneecap the demand to undermine anything the Biden administration had accomplished. But even that is still a blip.
Sales share will increase again with a few years and it will reach a behavioral tipping point. Chargers across rural America byways are not going to be what gets us to that tipping point.
This is another good point against rentals. While you a given rack on almost any car, how you attach it differs, that can include custom feet to mount it to your vehicle. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t get add’l mounts until you know what vehicle you’re renting & at that point, it’s probably going to be too late to get the mounting feet. You also need two able bodied people to put on, & preferably to remove the rack.
As for towing anything, it may not even matter if it’s allowed as most rental cars don’t have a hitch mount, let alone a brake controller, which is required for larger trailers. You don’t need a brake controller for a little trailer, like one towing kayaks or canoes or even a bike rack. Better bike racks have the bike wheel(s) sit in a tray & attach the bike via the wheels not the frame. They only come in roof or hitch mounts. Trunk racks only attach the bike via the frame which can cause damage to the paint/decals.
I did. I have a PHEV, and traded it in for a gas car. But the market wasn’t where I was comfortable buying another EV at that point. (And also, i kinda only had one car, as my daughter was the primary user of the second car.)
But yeah, most people who switch to EV remain with EV.
(And if I remember right this time, your PHEV was the same as mine, the CMax Energi. It was good enough but its range low enough that gas station stops still had to happen regularly. Even with my short commutes.)
Yes, it was a CMAX. And I was amazed at how rarely I had to buy gas. My commute was mostly by train, I only drove a couple of miles to the train station, and maybe swung by the supermarket on the way back. I found public charging stations at many of my more common destinations, too. Most days I didn’t burn any gas. When I went square dancing, I got to the venue on battery, charged up there, and started burning gas about a mile from home. I had never before thought about the fact that the venue was downhill from my home.
This is the point of a whole Ezra Klein book. Lots of people have very good reasons to have problems with many of his views (“let’s just be nice to Nazi’s, and then they’ll be nice to us!”), but after hearing the book tour he did of my podcast feeds, many of the points he and Derek Thompson make in Abundance are legitimate.
The big problem is that many regulations were put in place to fight genuine harms. Either the harms are gone, the regulations have unintended consequences, or they never worked in the first place. So as a result of the regulations, projects can be blocked and slowed down at lots of levels by any group that opposes the project. Even if there is no organized opposition, just meeting the regulations can cause slowdowns and expense. I’m not sure of a solution that doesn’t involve some sort of magical thinking: only let good projects be built quickly.
These big slowdowns happened recently with the broadband expansion stuff, and the charging stuff.
I can guarantee that there is plenty of charging available along that route. Having a car that can use Tesla Supercharges will really help, but even if your stuck on the other sources, it should be fine. The apparent sparseness of crossing Ohio or Pennsylvania just does not compare to how spread out Wyoming or the Texas panhandle are, and I’ve crossed those places in an EV.
I too was very nervous before taking my first EV road trip, with lots of planning and contingency scenarios on A Better Route Planner. After doing one, it got so much easier. Just drive to the next charger, plugin, do some stuff while you wait, and then do it all over again. A remarkable lack of drama.
This is the other app (in addition to plug share) that my friend the EV pioneer recommended, I’d forgotten its name because I’m not currently planning to take the thing on road trips.
We clearly understood that charging is not convenient for you now. My comment was that even IF it WAS available within a two block walk it might STILL be a hard sell.
This is really the key when it comes to EV adoption.
We can have extensive charging infrastructure and we can have affordable EV vehicle options and technology can improve to the point range is less of an issue, and, yet, even for most of the people for whom it would make sense (yes, yes, I also understand it does not for a significant number), that still wouldn’t be sufficient to overcome hesitancy.
There are some technology hurdles but the psychological hurdles are at least as big, if not the major factor. And this includes people who intellectually understand they would financially benefit from EVs. It’s not even that surprising. As a species, we tend to focus on unusual one-off events over mundane everyday occurrences. Great as a survival strategy for savanna apes, less so for a technological civilization.
And I don’t see any easy solutions for that. We’re making progress the longer EVs exist and as awareness and understanding improves (and an improved charging network can only help), but we’re far from general acceptance. I hope there’s something that really kicks that into higher gear but I fear it’s probably more of the long, slow grind we’ve had to date. At least in this country. And it’s not helped at all by the recalcitrance at the federal level.
Thing is that I don’t think going from under 1% to 10% of new car sales over ten years is that much of a long slow grind. And I do think that overcoming psychological hesitation will reach tipping points in different cohorts over time.
Here’s how I kind of see the difference with a bit of an analogy. I grew up in the southwest, where distances are big and the spaces between empty and good luck sometimes even finding a gas station for quite a while. And I went to many national forests and monuments and parks where the same thing applied. Sure, there might be some services and water and some sort of toilet at the visitors center or a campground but you can’t count on it and definitely not once you got further in, much less if you got into the back country. So all my trips into even national parks where I plan on mostly driving places have assumed that I’m going to need a full tank of gas, a reasonable supply of water, and that nobody will serendipitously wander by if I get into trouble.
And then you get to a place like say Yellowstone that has established cabins and a hotel and gas stations and all those priorities that you really had to worry about in say Arizona or Utah doesn’t matter as much in Wyoming because the infrastructure is different. And even in those other places maybe you didn’t need to be completely sure of that full tank of gas and a couple extra gallons of water but it meant one less thing to worry about while enjoying your vacation.
There are aftermarket noisemakers you can buy. Wanting to sound like the Jetson’s flying car I looked. Unfortunately virtually all of them make your EV sound like an ICE – Flathead Ford V8 and Lambourghini Countach were popular.
Mine makes a gentle chime when moving slowly. I think it’s now required, for pedestrian safety. It’s also handy. With the C-max i had a lot of weird issues where i was in a parking lot, trying to get out, and a couple of people were standing in the driveway chatting, and they didn’t know i was there. So i would sit there for a while hoping they’d notice, and then either honk or open my window and say something to them. But… You didn’t have to do that if your car isn’t silent, pedestrians mostly move aside without thinking about it, and without the driver needing to do or say anything.
