EV "Kool-Aid" Part 2.

This is more of the flip side to the last article. It is from this article, and unlike the last one, I ACTUALLY believe that this person owns the type of vehicle they claim to own.

You see, I bought a PHEV. I know that the range on my vehicle is low. Just 41 km with the heat/air off. And I was legitimately worried that the purchase would end up being some catastrophic waste. That most trips would start out on battery and we'd quickly run out, and/or forget to keep it charged.

In 4 years, I think we've forgotten to charge it when it got low maybe twice.

What I will say is this: the infrastructure DOES suck (at least, in Ontario as of writing this). But, that it also doesn't matter most of the time.

In fact, I think that most range anxiety is caused by having driven an ICE vehicle in the past. And if that sounds weird, you need to think about how "charging" an ICE vehicle works. You NEED to go to a gas station and virtually NO ONE has one at home.

The first thing I started noticing once I starting driving what was effectively just a low range EV is that I don't typically travel as far as I would have thought. There are 2 reasons for this. The first is that ICE cars are just as bad, if not worse, at reporting range. So, I never really had an accurate sense of how far I would drive in a day. And, because my range in my past vehicles was always anchored around visits to a gas a station, I always had to be sure that I could not only get to/from where I was going, but also be able to fit a trip to the gas station in when I started getting low.

I also realized, I almost never took trips in my past cars which consumed anywhere near a full tank of gas. Running out of gas was almost always a slow, additive (or subtractive I suppose) process.

Plugin vehicles subvert that if you can charge at home. Where I rarely started my day on a full tank of gas, I almost always start my day on a full battery. As mentioned, even at a paltry 41kms, I rarely have to worry about running out of battery for most trips. We estimated that if our Niro had an electric heater and we didn't take a long road trips we could probably make a single gas tank last 1-2 years. This is based on real world usage info. Not some fantasy.

Yes, the story would be slightly different if you had a long commute. But, most commutes are around 100km or less each way. So a round trip is less than half a battery on most modern pure EVs. And if you install a level 2 charger at home, you too can wake up to a full battery. And even take advantage of time of use pricing to drive the cost down even lower.

None of this changes the fact that current infrastructure is lacking. Not everyone has charging at home and/or people are finding other reasons to charge away from home. But, I regularly pull up a charging map and find all chargers around me are busy somehow. 

The article makes a great point about taking an ICE vehicle on longer trips. Most households have multiple vehicles anyway. There is no reason why one them can't be a PHEV, Hybrid or even ICE vehicle to take on those occasions where an EV won't or might not cut it. Or you could rent one.

The reality is that both traditional vehicles and EVs and their like have their own strengths and weaknesses. While I think that EVs are able to address most weaknesses, I would be lying if thought that they out-competed other vehicles in every area. I also concede that there will exist people for whom not buying an EV at the present moment is the better solution.

But, the ironic part for me is that it seems as though most range anxiety stems from prior ownership of ICE vehicles and most people could likely replace one or all of their vehicles with an EV without any impact beyond the sticker shock.

And to add to that irony, if your concern IS range anxiety, then you admittedly perceive yourself as a high mileage driver. As a direct result of that, if true, your savings from not having to pay for gas would much more quickly turn a profit when compared to the average person who should have no reason for range anxiety.