People are not gonna buy 5 cars or hire cars just for every use case. They want one car that can handle most of their needs. If the range on these vehicles doenst increase we will never see true mass adoption.
But i dont see how a road trip is an outlier. I get that needing a 4x4 is one, but most people go on some form of long trips a few times every year i would think.
It all depends on what kind of EV you have. Top of the line Model S has 400 miles of range and add to that supercharging. You will be able to drive almost as quickly as with an ICE car - you loose like 20 minutes on 620 miles.
The limiting factor then becomes the driver of the car - rest stops, food and so on.
You're replying in a thread where the issue at hand was more than two hours of recharge, and a bunch of stress around the car's trip planner being way too optimistic about the range of the vehicle in the first place. Maybe your statement is true in some cases, but clearly not all.
Even before owning an EV, whenever I would do a road trip, I would rent a car/SUV. it gave me a piece of mind. I wasn't putting 100s of miles on my car. It was much easier.
A road trip is an outlier for me. I go on maybe 1-3/yr. The other 360 days, my driving is local, and with home charging I never worry about filling up.
This strategy is not working if many people go long trip at the same time. This is happened for a long time in Japan, highway (and train) get jammed about 10 days every year. This is also pain for EV fast charger usage, so govt should encourage people to distribute holidays.
You must have very limited use cases, I tried to do that but ended up with a vehicle that was heavily compromised because half my use cases are at odds with the other half.
I was driving to my office job in an F150, burning enough gas to finance and fuel a new Civic, all while being terrible to drive.
So I did the logical thing, and added a vehicle that was efficient and enjoyable to drive, a motorcycle.
But it's agility made me only further resent the truck during the winter months, so I also added a compact luxury sports sedan.
Worst part was the F150 was both "too much" truck to daily drive, but never enough when I needed to do truck stuff.
Tried to landscape my home with some crushed rock, had to do 9 trips bottomed out because of it's paltry payload. Couldn't tow enough to borrow a friend's skid-steer. Had to buy my bricks a half-pallet at a time, a full pallet bottomed it out before the forklift had even finished putting the full weight on.
Downsized the F150 to a Tacoma, anything over 1200lbs and it's more practical to pay for delivery using a proper commercial truck anyways.
In the end I ended up with 3 vehicles, and if I had the means I'd have 4, I'd split the compact luxury sports sedan into a small sports car and a full sized luxury sedan for long highway travels. And this is all before even adding an EV.
tldr: In the motorcycle community they say the correct number of bikes is always 1 more than what you have. I strongly feel that applies to cars/trucks too.
I recently drove my electric vehicle through my town and saw 5 electric vehicles in a row. This is not terribly unusual now. A friend is buying a hybrid rather than a pure ICE not because of environmental concerns but because it drives better in traffic. A number of countries will make sales of new ICE cars illegal in a few years time.
True mass adoption is already here. Not to say that I don't agree that range needs to increase (although it's incredibly rare I'd want to drive more than 250 miles without a 15 minute break). But I don't think the transition to electric will stop or slow or is really in any danger.
I think at this point most EVs are bought for performance or economic reasons rather than environmental reasons. I still haven’t gotten over the acceleration on my i4.
And that's my point really. EVs have some disadvantages (although for most people these are not as serious as claimed if you can get the longer range versions), but overall they have a lot to recommend them simply as cars, even beyond their benefits to the environment. Even in a hypothetical world where nobody cared about the environment, and governments weren't penalising ICE cars, mass adoption of electric cars would still be inevitable at this point.
I don't think range is really the issue. If charging stations were as prevalent as gas stations, and charging time was much lower, that'd probably be sufficient for most people.
EVs are perfect if you road trip once or twice a year. If you’re road tripping every weekend then they may not be a good solution for you.