I was surprised, but most of the points above were Big Oil talking points. Nearly all my friends are far left of center but still can’t bring themselves to let go of their fears about EVs, and I blame Big Oil talking points.
What EV weighs double what a comparable contemporary ICE vehicle weighs? I see 20-50% extra generally: 3776 lbs for a 2027 Chevy Bolt vs. 2625 lbs for a 2025 Nissan Versa (+42%), 4903 lbs for a 2025 VW ID4 vs. 3801 lbs for a 2025 VW Tiguan (+29%), 4266 lbs for a 2025 Toyota bz4X vs 3515 lbs for a 2025 Toyota RAV4 (+21%), etc.
requires hours and hours to properly charge,
On the one hand, sure, it can. But on the other hand, generally, so what? If you can charge at home, even the slowest L2 setup (240V @ 12A / 15A circuit) can put about 100 miles of range back into a EV of moderate efficiency (3mi/kWh) in 12 hours.
It doesn’t matter to me if my car finishes an hour after I get home from work, or half an hour before I have to leave for work the next morning - either way, it always has a full “tank” every morning and I never have to worry about making time to detour to a gas station. A few times a year I go to a concert after work and get home late (more miles driven and less time to charge). It might only recharge to 75% before work the next day (instead of the programmed 80%), but it has never mattered - still got plenty of range for the next day’s driving.
Reasonably fast home charging is possible if you really want it - most EVs will accept 11.5kW AC (48A / 60A circuit) - 35 miles added per hour.
needs to do a bunch of extra stuff like regenerative breaking (which is annoying),
You’re conflating regenerative braking with “one pedal driving”. They have no inherent connection - EVs can slow themselves by running the motor as a generator when you press the brake pedal, regardless of whether they also start braking when you lift your foot off the accelerator. It’s true that some vehicles may not allow the driver to turn “one pedal driving” on or off, but that’s entirely a manufacturer design choice, not a fundamental EV thing. (Read Why An Electric Car's Brakes Work Differently Than A Gas Car's, And Why You Shouldn't Be Scared Of 'Brake By Wire' - The Autopian for how it works)
have tiny side mirrors and no door handles and the profile of a Prius - again - in order to almost keep up with the range of an IC car,
Again, hardly a fundamental EV rule. See: Cybertruck, F-150 Lightning, EV Hummer, etc.
and a potential chemical bomb if your vehicle ever ends up in a house house fire.
As if ICE vehicles don’t have tanks full of flammable fuel that would also be troublesome in a fire?
Exactly. Big Oil placed those doubts in their minds.
They don’t think of their 50+ mile daily commute and the ease of charging at home (if they have it**) vs. going to a stinky gas station every week. They just think of that one road trip they may take every year. And realistically, if I am going someplace remote on that road trip, I could rent an ICE car that week and still come out ahead in charging vs. gas costs and especially maintenance.
** at-home charging for apartment and condo dwellers is still an issue.
This really depends on the use case. For my use case 99% of the time EVs far exceed the convenience of gas vehicles. Almost all our use is daily commuting. In that use case EVs with home charging are … streets ahead … of ICE vehicles. Right now my wife’s new EV is stuck at the dealer with a charging control module problem. Waiting on part. We have a loaner and it is an ICE. I have to go to the gas pump again. Ugh. So annoying.
Mind you the other car, the one that she is now driving but is usually “mine”, is a PHEV. Most of the year never to a gas station, but convenient for the rare need of a road trip. That’s the only times we fill it up. Price to pay is the inconvenience of oil changes and other ICE maintenance.
I get the desire to have a car that can conveniently do a road trip. My road trip use is nonzero. If we had only one car between us it would be the Prius Prime (PHEV). But never again will I purchase a pure ICE vehicle simply because they suck so bad on the convenience front.
I don’t disagree that this is a relevant psychological issue for many buyers, but it’s pretty silly. If you don’t road trip regularity but are concerned about maybe possibly needing to a couple times during the time you own an EV that might struggle road tripping, car rentals are really very inexpensive. Take an ICE on your road trip if you’re worried.
Also, the actual difficulties in road tripping in EVs are both hugely overstated and rapidly diminishing. Unless you’re trying to go up the Dempster Highway to Tuktoyaktuk or something, but even ICE vehicles struggle with range on that trip. Jerry cans are frequently required.
Well, I don’t know that it’s silly, but I suspect that it’s true that most people’s thinking is, “my current ICE car can do a long trip without me having to think too hard about it: I could just get in my current car and go, and I know how and where to fuel up.” And, gassing up is a known quantity for how long it takes, and people think “gas stations are ubiquitous” (and they more or less are, unless you are seriously out in the sticks).
Yes, you’re right, there are solutions such as renting a car, or mapping out ahead of time where you will stop to recharge your EV. Most people don’t want to think that hard.
What’s silly is that the road trip scenario is often both exceedingly rare and quite easy to accommodate. “Mapping out ahead of time” in most EVs simply means entering the destination in the on-board nav and letting it tell you where to charge. That shouldn’t be a big ask of the driver.
The issue of slow charging is a relic of the early years of EVs. Fast charging is already available in a few models, and the car and charging technology to take advantage of it will certainly spread over the next decade, or less.
BYD’s 1,000 kW charging system launched in April 2025 with the Han L sedan and Tang L SUV, featuring operational charging stations that can add 249 miles of range in just five minutes—twice as fast as Tesla’s 500 kW Superchargers.
The first 500 megawatt charging stations became operational in early April 2025, equipped with energy storage systems to deliver consistent 1,000 kW power even where local grids cannot supply sufficient electricity.
The system uses dual DC charging plugs simultaneously to achieve 1,000 kW, with chargers capable of peak output up to 1,360 kW—though current vehicle battery management systems limit charging to 1,000 kW.
Live demonstrations showed vehicles charging from 7% to 50% in just 4.5 minutes, with the system reaching 1 MW within 10 seconds of connection.
Nevertheless, Trump is working to kill the charger network that was in Biden’s plan. The system is showing resistance so he issued another of his slam-the-libs orders that will probably be shut down even by the courts. And even worse, “The Trump administration is proposing to require that federally funded electric vehicle chargers be fully U.S. made — an all-but-impossible target that could kill a multibillion-dollar effort to build a nationwide charging network.”
The US EV market is not suffering a natural death. A normal market with some government subsidies would have the market soaring. Instead, it is deliberately being fed doses of arsenic by a criminal mastermind without any mastery of his mind.
The EV market is alive and well in the US market in the form of the EV hybrid. And for good reason(s). The battery technology is in transition to a faster charging and safer battery. People don’t need the extra cost and weight of a long distance EV. A hybrid doesn’t require an upgraded electrical system/charger for those with a garage or the time wasted searching out and then waiting to charge at a charging station.
US auto industries lost millions investing in lithium battery factories and tooling up for vehicles that didn’t justify the investment. That was money that could have been invested in EV hybrids which would have bridged the gap of the outgoing lithium battery technology. This would have allowed them to focus money on the development of the drivetrain.
The decision to shift to EV’s at the expense of the more logical EV hybrid was legislatively driven. As is often the case, good intentions gone awry. It’s ironic because it defeated the purpose of the EV in first place which was to lower carbon emissions. Something the hybrid would have provided.
Renting isn’t financially expensive, but it’s logistically expensive. I’m prepping to go, need to pack, and i also have to spend an hour or more of regular business hours time picking up that rental? And dropping it off, too? And that will take two people to accomplish, or yet more time and logistics to arrange a rideshare. i think most of us don’t have a rental car option within walking distance of our home.
We had only one car for a while, and we considered sticking with one car and using Lyft when we both needed a car. That would almost certainly be cheaper than buying a second car. But it was a huge pita. We bought a second car. (An EV, as it happens.)
Again: you’re not wrong.
All of us on this board are really good at posting variations of, “if people were just rational, this wouldn’t be a problem.” Reality is that most humans – even those of us who pride ourselves on our rationality and intelligence – are lazy thinkers, make decisions based on gut and emotion, and make incorrect assumptions (based on incomplete or inaccurate information) about how something will go, especially if they haven’t ever tried it before.
Yeah. People who are used to needing to buy gas and track the gas tank all the time don’t realize how freeing it is to never worry about that.
Minor disagreement (and pardon my snip before you go into details on how energy efficient hybrids should be mandated) about the (IMHO) exaggerated problems with EV infrastructure, though absolutely it’s not as prevalent as gas stations. But that’s been part of the chicken and egg of EV adoption since the beginning.
One of the reasons that Tesla was able to expand, was that it worked hard (previously) to extend it’s EV charging grid. The fact that they were abandoning it around the same time Elon went fully mental over Twitter and pissing off a large fraction of his adopters, is part of the major problem we’ve identified for the near future.
But yes, as I said myself upthread, I think hybrids are going to be the default for the near future in the US. My disagreement is that I don’t see a traditional hybrid as a gateway to EV use - instead, the increased milage (as long as gas prices are low) will assuage the owners that they don’t need to change their habits. That’ll likely be the EREVs (thanks for that term btw @reply) if anything for a lot of the US.
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I’ll avoid going into detail on my personal driving needs, but I’m on track for 3 trips a year of 630 miles each way which is absolutely an outlier on needs. Otherwise, as I said, the 40+ miles of all EV range on our PHEVs is more than enough, and being homeowners, easily recharged overnight (off peak) on level 1, much less the new outlet for level 2 line we added for future proofing.
BUT - I think what is still short term killing the US EV market is the government and industries clawing back on infrastructure investment, subsidies that reduced the price difference between comparably featured vehicles (in terms of trim level, leaving out the EV advantage in noise, acceleration and possible maintenance), as well as the lack of easy access to low level charging for a lot of renters.
So TL:DR, there are real cases to be made for a variety of vehicles, but the vast majority of EV denialists are about comparatively edge circumstances and general FUD.
Represent! [ 2025 Prius PHEV owner shoutout, but the Prime terminology stopped in 2024]
I had a PHEV for a while, and it was certainly the most convenient vehicle I’ve ever owned. Also, despite having a tiny all-electric range, (claimed 20 brand new on a warm day, really 12-15) i realized when i sold it that fully half my miles had been electric.
I would say switching to a hybrid IS changing their habit. It also allows the electrical grid to catch up to lower carbon based sources. It allows charging stations to catch up to the needs created by EV’s. It allows people to upgrade their garage to a higher amp service. It allows the environmental train wreck of lithium batteries to be upgraded to a cheaper/safer/faster-charging/lighter battery.
When I rebuilt my detached garage 30 years ago I envisioned electric cars and installed a 60 amp service while it was economical to do so. I dug a trench and completely reworked everything. Most if not all of the garages in my area were built with a 120 volt line strung from the house that would barely run a light bulb. This is the reality of older city communities. It cost me a trencher rental and some sweat equity to make the upgrade.
CURRENT EV’s are ready made for households that A: have a garage, and B: can upgrade it without remortgaging the house. But hybrids broaden the viability with those who aren’t in a position to upgrade electrical service. They serve the purpose of EV’s which is to reduce carbon emissions. And I would go so far to say they do a better job at this than EV’s because they put more electric vehicles on the road. This is where the fantasy of reducing carbon emissions meets the reality of more EV’s because of hybrids.
I think it’s a psychological barrier for some people. For a lot of Americans, an automobile represents freedom. I get to pick when I want to go to the store, I get to pick who I travel with, I get to pick what route I take, and I get to decide what I listen to. If I want to go on a trip, I don’t really want to be inconvenienced by having to plan my route based on where I can charge up nor do I want to spend 30 minutes or more charging.
Keep in mind (and maybe this wasn’t obvious) that many of us here, including in this thread, are EV owners and advocates. We just don’t necessarily think that the rest of the country is, and are trying to come up with reasons why. (As LSLGuy pointed out, more eloquently than I could).
To those points, I think it’s a bit dangerous to just handwave those problems away as minor. They do have quirks and limitations that buyers/drivers should be aware of, and often need to plan around.
The only car I have is a BEV, for example, and while I do love it a lot, it’s not without its quirks. The technology keeps getting better every year on paper, but real-world usability can still vary a lot between car models, model years, climate, and particular chargers.
My 2025 Subaru Solterra (a rebadged Toyota BZ4X) has an on-paper range of about 220 miles, which is pretty bad to begin with compared to some of its peers, granted. But that on-paper range which you see when buying it doesn’t really reflect what happens in real life.
In the winter, even at a relatively mild 30-40 degrees F with climate control set to 70 or 72, its max range decreases to something closer to 150 mi (that’s what the car self-reports). If the weather gets colder or we start driving uphill through a long mountain pass, the range gets even worse, shrinking from its initial estimate as you drive. Realistically, we have about 70 miles of usable one-way range, or 50-60 if we want to play it safe and not risk getting stranded (which is a huge deal, because it takes specialized roadside service to be able to fast-charge a dead EV battery back to usable range, unlike simply delivering a gas can).
60 miles of one-way range is not a whole lot, and we have to plan our entire day around charging if we want to just go to the next town over for some live music and brunch (and we’re not even in that rural an area, just Central Oregon). When we get there, half the time the only two fast chargers are taken and we have to park elsewhere and then periodically walk back to check to see a charger has opened up. If that doesn’t happen quickly enough, we get stranded in that other town until one finally opens up, which may take hours depending on which vehicles happen to be charging there (they all charge at different rates), how considerate their owners are, and whether the station enforces some post-charging per-minute stall occupancy penalty.
Even when we DO get a fast charger spot, I’ve never seen this car charge faster than 50-60 kW, even at the newest Tesla or Rivian stations. That’s far lower than its promised 100 kW max. 30-40 kW is more common, for most of the charging curve.
And as for braking, yeah, there’s less wear on brakes, but EVs also recommend special tires because they’re so much heavier and faster and create more tire wear compared to an equivalent ICE car of similar capacity. It is especially harder to find EV-rated snow tires. You can kinda sorta fudge it by just using the tire load ratings, but that’s not always recommended, and tire manufacturers are only only just beginning to make a few EV-rated snow tire lineups.
We take frequent road trips (once a month, on average), mostly to places closeby. But longer trips are quite difficult since you never really know the condition of the chargers until you get there, unless someone happens to have shared a recent Plugshare report.
None of these are dealbreakers, and day-to-day we absolutely don’t have to worry about them just driving to work and back or shopping for groceries. But they are quirks, and do make road trips and general ownership quite a bit harder. Moreover, you really don’t know any of this upfront when you first buy the EV unless you’ve done a lot of research beforehand.
My salesperson didn’t mention a single word about any of that, and had I not studied them beforehand, it would have been a very rude awakening (especially for my partner, who didn’t know anything about EVs and whose first exposure to them was a dreadful weekend with an early-model Leaf with 50 miles of total range). She’s since come around to loving and preferring them, but for sure the nuances are still a hassle.
And that’s in a household of two already left-leaning, pro-environment people who were predisposed to EVs to begin with. If you forced EV adoption on a right-leaning rural household who didn’t know any of this beforehand, it would be both incredibly frustrating for that household and also quite deceptive of the government and dealership for not having mentioned it ahead of time.
Yes, this is just one experience, and for a counterpoint, another poster’s Tesla (maybe @echoreply’s?) has had far fewer issues with either range or charging or cold weather. But the performance can vary a lot between different makes and models, and there’s not really an easy way to find out upfront which ones are good without a lot of independent research. Your experience (especially on a roadtrip) in a Tesla or Rivian is going to be very different than someone’s experience in an EV “off-brand” like Toyota/Subaru or Volkswagen (whose beautiful but overpriced ID.buzz has a tiny range and also problematic charging). Both the range and charging capabilities of the smaller brands are often quite a bit behind the state-of-the-art. But those differences don’t show up on the retail stickers, for example, and of course the manufacturers won’t want to tell you. It’s not something you ever think about when shopping for an ICE car… their ability to pump gasoline doesn’t depend on the brand and weather.
Maybe (hopefully) one day soon better battery techs will obviate all of those concerns, but for now they are still real and should be considered…
Exactly. We only do a 400+ mi road trip once a year or less, but it was still a part of our purchase decision. We ended up still getting a BEV and deciding to rent an ICE for the longer trips to avoid having to deal with rural charging nightmares. Not everyone wants to (or can afford) to do that. (Subaru helpfully had a promotion that included 10 free ICE rental days when you buy/lease an EV).
But it’s something we had to discuss at length beforehand. I spent hours talking to my partner about this, showing her articles and YouTube videos, etc. Ultimately we decided to choose the car that would fit 90% of our day-to-day needs rather than the one long road trip a year. That was a choice we made understanding the tradeoffs, which is a different thing than the tradeoff not being there at all.
Just for fun, we recently tried a half-distance version of that same trip in our BEV just to see what would happen. We made it, but only barely… some of the stations we had counted on weren’t working, and had I not route-planned backup stations along the way just in case, we would’ve been kinda fucked. It also added an hour to our normally 5-hour trip, making it 20% longer. The fast chargers along the way also cost 50-60¢/kWh, which was actually more expensive than gas, per mile.
It turns road trips from “hop in and drive” into something that requires careful prior planning in specialized EV mapping software to be able to successfully accomplish (unless your car has that built-in; ours doesn’t).
My recollection of the percentage of weight for batteries was dated and hyperbolic, not literal. I should have made that clear. I was giving a popular sentiment among those considering the switch more than a statistic.
Generally, yes. Saying that it’s a negative doesn’t mean that it’s a huge negative. And it’s because it’s generally such a small consideration that I would view solid state cars as being better than IC cars, even though they’re still going to have longer reloading times than IC vehicles (but, supposedly, faster than current EVs).
No, I understand that it’s optional. But it’s often included as a means to boost the range.
My 2023 car, for example, has “one pedal driving” toggle so I manually enable it to go down hills, decelerate on the freeway offramp, or if there’s a surprise red light that’s far enough away to react to without hitting the breaks. But “one pedal” is the default driving mode and I need to disable it every time I turn the car on, and there’s no way to make it not be the default. Likewise, the car starts in “medium fuel efficiency responsiveness mode” and I (by choice) need to set it to “low fuel efficiency responsiveness mode”, on getting in, and manually change the like a stick shift as I get up to medium and high speeds, in order to get the sort of driving experience that I’d want from the vehicle.
These features are there in the EV vehicle, and not in our 2023 IC vehicle, because they’re just not chasing range in IC and so they’re sparing the extra complexity.
As you note about the worsening aerodynamics of EV cars, and as we can see from the fact that I can freely disable all the range features in my car, the car makers are starting to recognize that for the key market of EV buyers - people who just want an EV car for coolness factor, to save the environment, or because the quirks of the math just happen to work out in their case - range isn’t always the key factor and you might engineer against it if, like the Cybertruck, you know that logic and numbers has dick to do with what makes someone buy the thing.
But for most people - the people who don’t have fun money to burn and who can freely choose what cars they want - range is still a meaningful factor and the EVs are just more expensive without much of anything in return, once you start going over the numbers.
I didn’t imply that it didn’t. I said that EVs were worse, not that IC cars had achieved the ideal on this front. They’re just less bad.
I think this is the key point. The market for electric vehicles is pretty much inevitable. But by the time American business executives admit this, auto manufacturers in Asia and Europe will have developed a huge lead on building them and American companies won’t be able to catch up.
Well, the incentives just ended late 2025, so there was a huge sales increase in that last part of the year. And the 2026 model cars were usually designed (and maybe manufactured in part) in 2025 or before.
IF there were to be an EV market crash, I wouldn’t expect it to become truly visible until well into 2026 or even later, when we go through the existing stock.
What has already changed is that many US automakers are pulling back their investment in R&D and manufacturing in EVs, even as they continue sales of existing stock.
In the best case, this just means they move away from BEVs and towards hybrids, PHEVs, and EREVs. That’s not really a terrible outcome in and of itself, and is honestly probably better suited for a country this big and also for the half the country that hates anything remotely green or liberal.
EREVs, especially, still gives manufacturers a way to continue to develop EV technology, just alongside gas-powered rechargers. And lets their customers think about them as “just cars with better mileage”, not some newfangled technology they have to change their habits for, god forbid.
But that’s a pretty big difference from focusing on battery chemistry innovation or extremely simplified drivetrains and unified platforms, which is what the rest of the world is moving towards — they want to be able to produce cars like smartphones, as easy-to-assemble commodities. Meanwhile the US will be stuck on this sort of ultracomplex luxury hybrid mentality that may be more capable on paper, but is also expensive and out of reach for many.
It’s like our approach to healthcare… as long as it’s good enough for the top 10%, it’s fine. Everyone else should just work harder. Get a fourth job already, sheesh.