I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it until I am blue in the face:
The Emerald Apartheid and Tesla have actively hurt the adoption of EVs. Even when they were 'the only game in town" (they weren’t) they still were working on it.
Because there is this stupid mindset of “you need massive range. Range is good. Range is everything”.
Range is helpful in three scenarios.
Long road trips
a day spent driving (e.g. being exploited by uber), and
not having any way to charge at home or at work
1 is not something you buy a car based around (unless your definition of “long” is 100 miles). 2… you probably aren’t buying a new vehicle if you are living off lyft.
3 is the interesting one and where I think the real harm was done. Because tesla’s solution is to use their Supercharger ™ Network ™ to Charge ™ their car ™. And it is a damned good network.
But… it encourages the mindset that to own an EV you either need an at home high powered charger or to spend 20-80 minutes (depending on congestion) at a tesla dealership or a whole foods every week. Which in turn means that people think they are stopping for an hour every three hours they spend driving on a roadtrip and so forth. So you obviously need THE BIGGEST BATTERY EVER!!!
When the reality is: That is stupid and not how people should be thinking of EVs. If you have any way to charge at home (and apartment complexes are increasingly providing them while older millennials and up probably have an outlet near their driveway), it doesn’t need to be fast. A trickle charge from a basic socket will get you done overnight. And if you don’t or you are on a road trip?
Don’t charge your battery to full every time you stop. Stop, plug it in, go stretch your legs or take a piss or buy a snack or just go grocery shopping, and 5-10 minutes later you are looking at a decently charged battery. And then do that again in two hours instead of three or whatever. Or twice a week instead of once a week.
Then, suddenly, massive batteries (and their weight and cost) matter a lot less.
Anyone interested in this: check out sites like A Better Route Planner. enter two destinations and then look at what it suggests. It won’t be “sit and charge to 100%”. It is “Stop at this charger when you are at around 10-15%, charge back up to 60% over maybe ten minutes, and then you are good to drive the rest of your trip” and so forth.
For example: one of my favorite weekend trips is a ~400 mile trip to a city a state over where I have a lot of friends. Google says I do that in ~6 hours. ABRP says that will take me about ~7 hours with two 20 minute charges along the way (middle of nowhere so you need to hit up charging stations where there are alternates in case they are damaged). Which… actually is closer to what it takes me when I do that drive because I need to stop for food or to piss or just to stretch my legs to avoid blood clots. Or, honestly, just gas before one stretch where I definitely will have enough left in the tank but might get stuck in traffic for hours if there is a particularly bad accident (and ABRP even suggests stopping in the same town I do. Likely for the exact same reason).
But, because of Hairplugs and tesla, people think they need MASSIVE batteries and the fastest possible charging or else they are trapped in their driveway for life.