Maybe we're getting to saturation in early adopter market? Looking around, there are a lot of folks who could not easily live with a BEV, i.e. live in apartment buildings or don't have an easy way to install L2 charging at home.
I built www.letselectrify.org as a side project to make it easier for people in multifamily buildings (condos, apartments, and HOAs) to get their own dedicated EV chargers.
In multifamily buildings, such as my 85-unit condo, there isn’t any at-home charging. At best, there is one shared charger for the community to use.
This sucks for several reasons: 1. You have to remember to move your car when it’s done charging, 2. The HOA is stuck paying the bill for all the electricity, and 3. As more and more people get electric cars, shared chargers don’t scale.
The most common Homeowner Association (HOA) objections to adding more charging: 1. It costs too much, and 2. Nobody wants this.
HOAs are generally risk-averse and don’t want to spend money on discretionary things like EV charging. This means that the only way for residents to conveniently own an electric car is to pay out of pocket (sometimes up to $20k) to install a single charger, which usually also requires the HOA to approve on a case-by-case basis.
Instead of all these one-off installs, letselectrify.org combines everyone that wants a charger into one campaign and lets them split the cost of installation, which ends up being much cheaper.
Even people for whom home charging is not an issue aren't going to abandon their existing gas cars to get an EV that performs the exact same function for a lot more money. Having an EV is not transformational.
Even with a $7,500 discount, there's still a wide gap between the value of the ten-year old gas car in the driveway and the cost of a brand new EV. Not going to a gas station is just not that beneficial to most.
> Even people for whom home charging is not an issue aren't going to abandon their existing gas cars to get an EV that performs the exact same function for a lot more money.
It's an interesting point. Still anecdotal, but our family ended up doing the first part of your sentence - that is, we abandoned our existing gas car. However, it was certainly not a lot more money - in fact part of the equation was that it was slightly cheaper to get the EV, exactly because it was not a super luxurious super long range $100k vehicle. There turned out to be a bonus benefit of 1 year of free charging at EVgo chargers, which we didn't count on but is nice.
Our main reason for this was that the gas car we replaced was requiring a lot of repairs and we were hoping to minimize the time we spend at repair shops. Hopefully the EV will require even less time than an IC vehicle due to no fluid changes.
One other unexpected change we encountered is that due to charging at home, we spend less total time fueling up the car, i.e. no more gas station visits. The time we occasionally use the free EVGO charger is at a department store so it's a side effect of going shopping instead of a single-purpose refueling trip.
Just so. Today, I'd be able to get by with an EV if one were to miraculously appear before me, but none of them could have replaced an ICE for the kind of tasks we use our vehicle for at the time of our last refresh cycle (~6 years ago) at a remotely competitive cost.
Early adopters are going to early adopt, and people in high income brackets who own multiple vehicles can readily afford to have an ICE vehicle and an EV, but there are finite numbers of these folks out there to sell to. I reckon only recently EVs have gotten good and cheap enough to seriously replace ICE vehicles in the mass market.
Personally, I've got zero incentive to replace our fully functional ICE vehicle with any vehicle (EV or otherwise) until its "pretty darn reliable" service life ends - which I would place at least another 5 years in the future - at which point EVs will have closed even more of the gaps.
I agree this is part of it. There are still many parts of the USA where charging is a real concern, as is the need to drive beyond the vehicle's range (I do that several times a month, and would worry about charging along the way or at my destination).
I'm a recent first time buyer of a (used) EV and use the L1 120v charger that came with the vehicle. The daily commute use is low enough that it charges to full overnight.
Before I purchased I thought I'd need to pay for a L2 charger and hire an electrician to install a 240v circuit in the driveway. Turned it that I just needed a short 10ga extension cord from an existing 120v receptacle.
That was me. I had to do my own research to educate myself.
I've done a couple longer trips where the battery goes to 20%. It took a few nights of charging to get it back to 100%. Which was totally fine because our daily use is less than 15 miles per day.
When I was ready to buy, I knew more about EV's than the person who sold me the vehicle. The amount of false information I got from the salesperson was worrisome. Even the amount of sales tax he quoted on the first offer was wrong.
I think the apartment issue is really more of a non-issue, assuming there are fast chargers near you. Can apartment dwellers like myself really not go charge for 10-30 minutes every couple of days? A trip to the gas station is typically ~5 minutes.
At least that is how I rationalize potential EV ownership.
Nah, it's a big deal to not have charging where you park overnight.
A huge part of EV ownership is the minimal thought put into keep track of how full the car is. You drive, you come home, you plug in, you drive later, etc. No worries at all, no effort.
If you don't have that convenience, you're always going to have a bug nagging you "should I go charge?" and it'll wear at you.
Street parking with chargers on light poles, load balancing so they don't pop the circuit? Win. Chargers saturating common area parking that bills you for power you draw? Making people go charge their car at some central location for 45 minutes once or twice a week? Total fiasco.
I get by fine on a 20a/16a 240v (nema 6-20 plug) in the relatively mild new england winters and can drive my car just like a normal car 98% of the time.
