It's not contrived. All the points you mentioned about the downsides of EV are true. That's why they're a single digit percentage of the market right now at best.
The point of this article is to point out the compromises that we are currently making. They're invisible to us because they are the compromises we have been making for generations. I can imagine a 538 article that illustrates how much land we allocate to gas stations using several graphs. For some people that article will be interesting. Other people's eyes will glaze over. This kind of article uses humor to make the same point.
I don't own an electric vehicle. I'm very aware of the advantages of electric vehicles for society at large, but reading about how funny it is to not be able to store things in the front of the car made me realize how much of a feature that really would be. Reading about his concern that an gasoline powered car is less safe because you have a giant engine in front of you made sense to me in a way I previously hadn't thought about.
He didn't even make a bunch of other points that I often think about - like the level of soot in cities. Our children will probably look back at us the way we look back at London in 1850 shrouded in coal dust.
The point of this article is to point out the compromises that we are currently making. They're invisible to us because they are the compromises we have been making for generations. I can imagine a 538 article that illustrates how much land we allocate to gas stations using several graphs. For some people that article will be interesting. Other people's eyes will glaze over. This kind of article uses humor to make the same point.
I don't own an electric vehicle. I'm very aware of the advantages of electric vehicles for society at large, but reading about how funny it is to not be able to store things in the front of the car made me realize how much of a feature that really would be. Reading about his concern that an gasoline powered car is less safe because you have a giant engine in front of you made sense to me in a way I previously hadn't thought about.
He didn't even make a bunch of other points that I often think about - like the level of soot in cities. Our children will probably look back at us the way we look back at London in 1850 shrouded in coal dust.