There is still no widespread charging infra. Oh sure, there are chargers. If you're lucky and your town is on a state highway there might be one or two chargers in the entire town — their purpose being so visitors don't become stranded.
Outside of cities, they are not there in sufficient quantity for widespread adoption.
The apartment problem has not been solved either, and people do not have the time in their lives to dedicate to charging at a shared public charger.
Europe still loves its compact manual transmission cars; but what we may see is a transition away from diesel to petrol vehicles strictly for cost reasons.
You can charge your car at home on a simple reinforced 230V socket. Even city car which should be bad for this purpose have at least 200km of range.
In the US Electric vehicles are easier for those who can park a car next to an outlet they own. We have a lot more suburbia with people owning their own charging.
the distances traveled in rural areas, along with the power you need to get through that terrain, makes combustion a decision made from a different dimension. excited for solar tractors however!
this looms much larger in the imagination than in reality given that the average urban European drives about 9-15km per day. If you're living in a space where charging space is in short supply you in all likelihood drive so little you maybe need to charge 3 times per month.
History may look back on them as having done rather a lot to move the world off of fossil fuels.
It'll kill them, the Big 3 should be losing their everloving minds over it.
A big step up from my old Ford fiesta, just look for the deals
https://movingtotheuk.co.uk/cost-of-living-in-the-uk/average...
Many people don’t have the elasticity in their month-to-month expenses that is assumed here.
> My Hyundai Kona EV (64kWh) (2022 plate) was £18K
Completely fkn tone deaf.
Also, EVs have been around for quite a few years now so it is no longer necessary to buy them new.
https://www.acea.auto/publication/report-vehicles-on-europea...
What do you do when, say, the insulation on the motor’s windings disintegrates over night on a whole production run of thousands of cars.
Or the batteries turn out to a fail at some yet to be revealed number of charge cycles.
file:///home/blarsen/Downloads/How-durable-are-electric-vehicles-BVRLA-report-by-New-Automotive-September-2026.pdf
Your download folder path is leaking : D
ICE engines eat themselves in many more different kinds of weird ways: timing chains and belts, coolant leaks, any number of problems with valves and actuators. They're extraordinarily complex devices and it's a testament to engineering genius (and persistence) that we've made them this reliable. But they fail much more often than batteries or motors. They have many more moving parts. It's just the devil we know.
I've got two EVs. Basically zero problems. I've known one or two people who have had issues, but never with the drive train. Always something dumb like the "infotainment system" or (for a Tesla owning friend) stupid buzzing and vibration they couldn't make go away and stupid problems with door handles.
The Tesla weirdness is part of why I went with Nissans. They're 100% normal cars except for the electric drive train. All the other parts can be purchased at AutoZone and everything else can be worked on by a normal mechanic.
There's some mechanics in my area that have been learning how to do stuff with EVs like aftermarket battery upgrades on older models, but it's a bit expensive. Mine are 5 and 13 years old respectively and both batteries are fine. The 5yo one is the same as the day it was bought. The latter's lost some capacity but still very usable as a city car.
Also just about the only shade tree mechanic EV. Even swapping a battery is doable by the typical car guy. Rebuilding one isn't much harder due to no cooling.
My tesla goes 3 hours at 80mph. I can get to any charger I need. There are considerably more than I ever imagined.
Unpredictable closures of highways can happen in the middle of nowhere after you’ve already been driving for 3 hours. I’ve had unplanned detours of up to 150 miles more than once. It is more common than people expect.
There are stretches of highway where it is 100+ miles between gas stations, never mind chargers, so it becomes a range risk even for ICE cars. I’m not the OP but when I’m driving in that part of North America I try to keep my range above 200 miles for this reason. It has saved me from being stranded more than once.
Alternatively, a backup plan for people with experience in those areas is to use ranch and forestry trails to route around the highway closures if feasible. This requires a vehicle suitable for that terrain. Few if any EVs are.
That said, most Americans rarely do long-haul driving in the backwaters of the American West. But if you do it enough, high ground clearance and reliable 400+ miles range in all weather conditions is a safety requirement.
The only reason I don’t have an EV is that most of my driving miles are like that. I don’t drive in the city where I live. No EV currently made credibly delivers that kind of performance but a lot of cheap ICE vehicles do.
Eventually EVs will get there but they aren’t there today.
With a 30 year mortgage the $56K base model payments could be doable.
Although, I don't think the base model will do 492 miles, I'm guessing it's more like 250-300.
I'm still not sure whether GM just completely mis-managed the thing (which GM is known to do) or not. I say that because it is full-size-ish, but that creates the problem of it being a heavier unibody, and when we talk about EVs, 'weight of base vehicle and the batteries to move it' can become a Delta-V-ish problem.
As a sort of example, I'll point to the Cybertruck; it's honestly probably even more 'brick-ish' aerodynamically than the Silverado EV, but it weighs 1000 pounds less (or so) and thus gets 20-60 miles more range than the Silverado EV base despite the battery being not much larger as far as capacity.
Possibly also worth noting though, that Delta-V-ish problem means the Silverado EV in some configurations has a curb weight high enough it can't go on some residential streets.
IDK. GM got kinda-smart with how they handled EVification of their CUVs (i.e. start with midsize, move down, be aggressive on pricing) but the Silverado EV still strikes me as classic GM WTFery
Kalispell MT to Minot ND -- 688 miles between chargers
Anything in Alaska that isn't along the route from Anchorage to Fairbanks
Much of Ontario 11
All of Newfoundland
Of course, they're not high traffic routes, but these are places you can still easily find gasoline.
Furthest I can see on 11 is 250km.
Newfoundland has a ton of chargers.
Did you even check before posting?
We're talking about people taking long rural trips -- stopping at a 50kw charger adds 50% of time to an 8 hour trip -- nobody driving a gasoline car would stop for that long. You'd need a 250kw charger to do what a person would normally do on a trip like that -- stop, piss, stretch your legs and get some fast food. Nobody who drives that route wants a 4 hour layover at the Speedee Mart gas station in Ainsworth, Nebraska -- if they can get the charger to work.
But yeah those 10 people that regularly drive those routes should probably stick with their ice vehicles.
More importantly, these highways can be closed at unpredictable times for an unpredictable duration. It is not guaranteed that the route you planned is the route will take.
Go check one of the charger maps and get back to me with a distance of 400 miles between charges.
It's not necessarily 'normal', but it did happen to me last year.
Vacation in St Ignace Michigan. Stayed at an AirBnB rental.
No proper EV charger on-site at the rental, admittedly maybe the owner had an extension cord or something. Still, Then we'd be charging at a fairly low rate of mileage gain.
One day trip was 100 miles each way for optimum route. (Only charging stations known are near the AirBnB)
Another day trip was 76 miles each way for optimum route. (Only charging stations known are near the AirBnB)
The shortest day trip was 50-ish miles each way, but a whole thing happened where my wife left her phone at the restaurant so it was a total of 200 miles driven that day. (There are charging stations at both points for this one, but none in between.)
BTW, when I say 'optimum route' for the first two, I mean that for at least one of those the trip wound up being longer because of road construction.
I know one could say 'Well plan out charging in the morning'. But at the end of the day that just messes with the rest of the itinerary for a vacation where one could instead be exploring what you actually went on a trip for.
This attitude of dictating others' car needs for them is one of the biggest hindrances to EV adoption and is also why rolling back CAFE regulations is going to be more popular than you think it is.
The general public doesn't like being told what to do.
The current crazy pricing is mostly due to supply that was cut off during covid -- those would all be prime used cars today -- but many were never made, so used car pricing is crazy -- and manufacturers have no incentive to create cheap new cars if buyers don't have other options.
I could do it in a 2002 Jetta. Why can’t I do it in a vehicle 25 years newer?
Human endurance is more about the end-to-end time. Breaks barely help at all.
I've done a few road trips (2023, 2024, 2025) where It was 10 or more hours of driving without even factoring stops in.
Fuel-ups can be as fast as 5 minutes, if you have a co-pilot to run in and grab whatever else you need from inside while you travel. Might have one or two longer breaks in there for a proper lunch.
> Human endurance is more about the end-to-end time.
Yep. You also optimize for the drive itself; i.e. metering your overall methods and timing of hydration etc to avoid needing extra bathroom stops, making sure any food eaten can either be eaten quickly, or safely eaten while driving on a long boring highway (i.e. Tacos bad, simple burgers or sandwiches good.)
For an 800-ish mile drive in one day, longer stops make a huge difference from being able to make it all the way through with reasonable daylight.
> Breaks barely help at all.
Yep, too long of a break winds up having a negative effect where you get too relaxed.
Heck, in 2020 I did a shorter drive to a different region, but instead of a Ford Maverick that got 35-40MPG and 400+ miles to a tank, I was in my WRX which got maybe 330-ish miles per tank, and the extra stops definitely had me much more drained by the end of the trip.
(Although, it's also worth noting that the Maverick is a lot more 'comfy' than my WRX from a posture standpoint, which may have been a factor.)
I've also been on 24+ hour trips where we switched off drivers every 6 hours or so. Stopping too long for too many times on a trip like that adds up.
If there's a charger close enough to a restaurant you'll eat at, that sounds convenient, and I've seen a lot more chargers on my long distance drives... but usually not at the restaurants I want to go to.
Now I am stuck in line ups for gas because I can’t decide I don’t need it. This is true even just around town.
Maybe it’s a first world issue. It gets better all the time though. Maybe next car.
Like I said though, the whole convenience isn’t just single trip range.
Not if you have the right plumbing and a bottle with you.
That protectionism is just as much in place for the sake of GM, Ford, and Stellantis, and their suppliers. In 2008 it was estimated that if the big three (Well, back then it was Chrysler instead of Stellantis) went under without a bailout [0], that up to 3 million jobs across the country were at risk. Michigan alone would have possibly lost over 8% of it's jobs.
We do see similar-ish protectionism in other countries as well, FWIW. Part of Toyota and Honda's lack of aggressive shifting to EVs is that a 'full shift' would remove millions of jobs from the workforce. Toyota has even published what could be considered propaganda in their home country about it [1].
It's an elephant in the room. European automakers are all struggling with it too, with various degrees of failure.
If there is one irony I will point out, it's that if they had all been more aggressive about hybrid technology for at least the last 15 years, they could have at least kicked the can down the road. Which honestly may have helped; part of the problem is that when things like engine or transmission plants are built, the amortization of the costs between the factory itself, training workers, expected retooling etc is measured and planned in the 10-30ish year range. The complacency means they have a bunch of assets that would be unpaletable write-offs.
Cause, Let's face it; every carmaker could have at least been doing even basic hybrids for most of their non-truck models for over a decade, which aren't perfect but would have raised the bar for MPG and improved the economies of scale faster [2].
[0] - For whatever it's worth, Ford at the time did not need a bailout, but did ask for a line of credit that it never had to use in case the others totally collapsed, because if that had happened it would have been a huge impact to their suppliers.
[1] - https://electrek.co/2021/11/11/how-toyota-sneakily-spreads-a...
[2] - I'll point to the Ford Maverick, which initially launched at ~22K and got 35-40MPG in base configuration despite being a very large compact truck. IMO if the automakers got serious about the tech in 2010, we could have seen something at that price point at least 5 years sooner.