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.
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.