Because the average driver goes to the gas station once per 1-2 weeks, but park it at home or at work for hours long stretches every day. They don't go to the gas station when their odometer says they've driven 300 miles, they do it by looking at the fuel gauge. If you have a 20 mile daily commute and a 40 mile electric range and charge daily your battery gauge won't go under 50%.
Yeah, and?
Sure, if you don't have a garage or live in an apartment it's absolutely a concern. That's why I said something like the $7.5k incentive should be targeting installing home and public chargers. Level 2 chargers cost much less than $7.5k (you can probably install 4 of them for that cost). They don't have to be free to use, you'd just have to be cheaper than gas and quick to plug in (maybe with NFC tag payment system). Make chargers available everywhere you can park. It will make it easier to not market EVs based on battery range.
I mean, yes, but I think people are greatly underestimating the burden of maintaining these chargers outside of the usual places people fill up at. Most of them are in nicely lit and maintained 24 hour gas stations and you still find a bunch out of order, just throwing out hundreds or millions of chargers all over the place is going to be an awesome one time thing and in 4 years 3 quarters of them will be scrap. Like what entity is going to be responsible for these chargers at work places, apartment buildings and other private places? Who is going to ensure they're maintained? Upgrade their payment methods, check for skimmers and shit like that? I just don't think most places really want that headache. I think you'll get people to sign on initially but I don't think it's a realistic future where they remain working after the initial investment.
I think it's far more sound to push to install them where people initially expect to find them, gas stations are ideal, obviously in a way electric chargers are a bailout for them because without the need for someone to gas up many people will go somewhere cheaper, they'd have a vested interest in maintaining whatever chargers they install at some point, especially once ICE vehicles are on their way out. A homeowner definitely also has a vested interest in maintaining a station(if one is needed), I'm all for incentivizing people to install them in their homes.
Places like places of work, businesses, apartment complexes, shit gets a lot more complex there. There's clearly going to be some places that'd love to have them but having lived in apartment complexes all my life I can tell you, for many tenants, getting them fixed once they're broken is going to be hell. Unless there's some Federal money and employees that drive around the country and keeps repairing these things for free they're going to be in disrepair pretty fast.
Lord help the people who live in apartments who don't have enough chargers for all the Tenants, man, going to be a lot of gun deaths over that shit.
It's not even that I think you're wrong from an environmental standpoint it's just that I find myself asking what country do you think this is? People roll coal here to own the libs. They unplug your EV when you're not looking out of spite. They destroy chargers to deny people the ability to charge their EVs. Hell, until there are enough charging stations setting one up could even be a liability, now people are using your parking space to charge their cars using shit you envisioned for your employees or tenants. Couple that with wanting to install these things at places where it isn't even their core "business" and they're apt to be some after thought and this world of being able to charge wherever you need to go just isn't going to happen here.
Democrat-controlled state and federal government aggressively mandated better fuel efficiency for ICE vehicles, something that the industry wouldn't have done on their own. The government can figure out something for EVs as well to discourage the trend of hauling around over 1,000 lbs of batteries in 200+ mile range models. You can buy a Chevy Spark or a Kia Rio but no equivalent EV in the US because they wouldn't be able to cram enough batteries to hit 200 miles in that size, not to mention how the batteries raise the minimum price of low-end models.
They couldn't even discourage the existence of giant ICE SUVs.
I mean, I'm in agreement that for a lot of people large hybrids are just as wasteful as large ICE vehicles were. I just think you have things a little backwards on who's creating demand for what here. Our fellow Americans are the ones clamoring for larger vehicles, they're not being hoodwinked by the automakers into wanting large vehicles.
Yes, ultimately the government could solve this, ban ICE vehicles tomorrow, mandate EVs, limit EV size through legislation and people would beg for shit to be installed everywhere.
Really though we should be building out public transportation.
