| I mean... One still can. It just has different costs and risks. Just to posit some numbers: If there's 80 miles of range left, and it is 20 miles to the next charger, but mashing the "avoid highways" button makes that next charger 40 miles away instead: I think I wouldn't hesitate to get off of the highway if I felt it would be useful or fun right now. I'll hypothetically arrive at a charger with ~40 miles of range remaining instead of ~60. Ain't so bad. I do similar risk assessments when driving long distances on gasoline and detouring from my planned route to mix things up. Now, of course: There's a decent chance that the charger is broken or slow and being SOL, whereas gas is much more available. That's potentially pretty ugly, and it's ugly in ways that running low/out of gas isn't: It's easy to score some gas in semi-rural anywhere-USA by knocking on a few doors, being polite, and having a bit of cash. (Some people are complete dicks, but I insist that most people are generally good and I am willing to die on this hill.) Or: I have cheap roadside assistance. They'll bring me a small amount of gas anywhere...eventually...as a part of the service that I pay for by the month. It's probably also easy enough to ask nicely to use an extension cord to juice up an EV, but that's a ton slower than dumping in a couple of gallons of gasoline is. And due to limited range, it's more likely to happen with an EV than ICE. But meh. It's still useful to go on a mini-adventure sometimes. One just needs to take everything into consideration. And it'll get easier for EV drivers to do this as time moves on. |