I don't know how anyone with any knowledge of EVs whatsoever can make this argument in 2023. Maybe this was forgivable 10 years ago, but now? This feels like bad faith.
> The future is hybrid
The future of personal transport vehicles is battery-electric, full stop. Why? Because you no longer need any of the trappings of an internal combustion engine. People forget why cars were awesome in the first place -- because you didn't need a horse anymore. In the same way, the big gain in the BEV is NOT adding the battery and the electric motor, it's getting rid of the ICE.
Getting rid of the ICE is only an indirect benefit. It makes the car lighter and cheaper. If you don't need gas for anything, then getting rid of it is worth it. However if you need the gas for something (long trips?) then you need it.
I've almost never spent longer than 15 minutes charging on long car trips, unless we're also going to a restaurant. And even then, we usually don't have to, and could have made it a 15 minute stop if we wanted to. Most of the time, the car is done charging enough faster than we could stop for coffee, and I have to extend the charge using my app.
That said, there was one occasion in a trip through Big Sur, when the Ventana supercharger went offline, when I did a 45 minute charge session, and I drove 30 minutes out of the way to catch a supercharger on another occasion. So 2 occasions like that in nearly 3 years.
The situation is pretty good now. In another few years, it will be even better!
This. The haters think that Level 3 charging takes 60+ minutes. There are times I wish it did. Instead, if I leave my car on the Supercharger next to Denny's and get seated right away, I will finish charging and have to move the car before my food comes. Every time.
Maybe someday we will actually have large numbers of free Level 2 chargers at shops and restaurants, so we can eat a leisurely lunch in peace while our cars charge.
Seems likely that it won't be long until 90% of people won't need gas for anything. Just a single doubling of range from current levels, and a reasonably build out of charging infrastructure would do the trick. I'd be surprised if we don't see both of those in the next 20-30 years.
And of course for many people the tipping point will come earlier.
This is one of the big issues. EVs are for the class of people who own houses with garages, in the suburbs of large metros.
People didn't care about getting rid of the horse at first, either.
My grandpa remembered the horses and didn't miss them at all. They had an ugly temper and you had to feed them daily even if you didn't leave the farm. They were purely a cost sink worse than a car or tractor.
The battery is the single most fragile, heavy, dangerous, expensive, stressful ("range anxiety") and annoying component of an EV, and one which degrades at an alarming rate, just by using it normally.
Guess what, a fuel tank doesn't shrink every time you fill it.
And it doesn't shrink even FASTER when you fill it to the top.
Or let it go empty.
Or run in cold weather.
Or hot weather.
Or you drive fast.
Or too slow.
Or when you fill the tank too fast. Where "too fast" is dripping it in for 30 to 60 minutes a pop.
Or when you don't drive the car for too long.
On top of that, the starting range of the top BEV is half an ICE car. That's on a new car, before all the magical "shrinking" happens.
Batteries are WORSE than anything the automobile industry has from the past 50+ years. And people are slowly realizing that.
EV sales are still at only around 20% of the market, which is a lot! But given that the majority of lithium batteries are already going into EVs now total battery production needs to go up by something like a factor of 5 by 2030 just to meet EV sales. That's a huge amount of growth for any industry, let alone high tech manufacturing.
I would not be surprised to see the relative growth of EV sales stall soon as manufacturers have trouble sourcing enough batteries, and in response we may see some Hybrids or EREVs coming onto the market to meet the shortfall. After all, a battery that gets you 50km is good for 90% of trips for a significant number of people, but you couldn't buy it without a range extender because of that last 10%.
If fossil hydrogen ever gets off the ground I still have hope for fuel-cell/battery hybrids. Since they generate water vapor as a side product they'd also be beneficial to a small extent for arid climates.
I'm not happy if the harvesting of fossil hydrogen harms the subterranean ecosystem, but then I'm not happy about the ecosystem harms of oil or mining either.
