As my wife has now experienced twice with her EV. Was late for work because she had to charge for an hour one morning (forgot to plug in at night) and was late for something else I don’t recall for the same reason. Twice in two years is not bad but it was still stressful.
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Sure, but the consequences can be hard to manage if you forget to plug in when you’re low. That’s why it’s range “anxiety.” It’s a thing you have to keep track of in a way that you don’t with an ICE. If you’ve got a 45-mile drive to work, you had better make sure you plug in each and every single time you’re getting low - because if you don’t, you might have a serious problem. That is a poor fit for how a lot of people live their lives. Many folks want to have the ‘escape hatch’ of being able to put a few gallons in the tank in under two minutes to save their daily schedule, and an EV doesn’t offer that yet.
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You can, but you must pre-plan it. You can’t simply leave the house and realize you need gas on the way to work/store. If you are too low to get to your destination and back, you might be stuck at home for an hour or two charging.
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…and the dealership culture has a deeply engrained influence on “Detroit’s” stuck-in-mud thinking.
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Interestingly enough, surveys have found that between 20 and 40% of EV owners switch back to an ICE vehicle for their next purchase. One could call it a form of recidivism. It certainly slows down the market penetration of EVs.
DB2
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Actually, you should be a member of a charging company. Once you do that, if you need some charge, pull into a high speed charger. I can fully charge in 40 minutes or less. If I’m in a hurry and only need a few extra miles, I can get less. It does about 80 miles in 10 minutes.
I signed up for two companies. Don’t use them much, but when we have done road trips, we used them. A little different to some people. But I signed up with Costco, which is where I fuel up our Jeep.
Sure, there will be some situations that won’t work. I maintain it’s far fewer than people imagine.
Yeah - if you happen to be near one of those high speed chargers and it’s available. Which, sure, some folks will. But they’re not yet as thick on the ground or as convenient as gas stations are, on average.
People in the US just simply drive more than in other countries. Double what they do in Europe or China. We drive more per day, we have longer trip lengths, and we take more chained trips. Which means we are vastly more likely to need to put fuel into the car on any given day, even for run-of-the mill driving. To say nothing of our greater use of cars for intercity trips. Which means we need bigger tanks - and since we are more likely to get caught in a situation where the fuel in our tank isn’t enough for that day’s driving needs, slow refueling is more of a problem for us.
A law was enacted to protect dealers from producers. Now a law is needed to protect producers from dealers. 
The Captain
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I totally get this, but I had an EV for 10 years and this never happened to me. It was actually the opposite. I’d check the charge when I was getting home and I’d charge if needed. So I never had the experience of needing to be somewhere, but having to stop off at the gas station first. I realize that wasn’t your wife’s experience, but I found never having to stop for gas to be delightful.
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Would take my wife longer to drive to a charging station than it would to simply plug in and wait an hour from home.
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Bravo, which there was more than a thumbs up for your post. Agree, and the worst part is while they try to go up market and highest profit I end up trying to find used pickups for under $30,000. I live on acreage and just got sawmill access for building more parts of this house. I use a pick up for pick up things…and I have LITERALLY learned that the Ram 2500 is no longer a pick up for sense of work. It was over $70k after the snow plow upgrade, the better suspension(?), and tow package…then it LITERALY just spun it’s tires on a flat part of my drive in winter. (AND AND…that was also with 4*4 turned on.) It sucked at…towing, driving over mountains, running any software in the system, shifting, etc.
It was literally just the shell of a truck for over $70k. Luckily it was my first ever try at a lease and I broke it as soon as I could afford it to move to a used Chevy Colorado that was old enough to still act like a truck. This is insane what they are trying to foist on us.
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Like what? Sitting so high up you can lord it over everyone else on the road and you can act like you deserve all the space you are taking up? There is literally no other reason for some of the giant, factory lifted, with huge sheets of metal trucks and SUV’s on the road. When I was growing up the giant vehicle was a Bronco and every other family got away with a station wagon. I would LOVE one of the older station wagons as my daily and as my Costco car. The prices of those were within the budget of most families and they didn’t have to take out 6-8 YEAR loans.
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OMG…LOL! The number of people in my life that have driven around on E and only figured it out when they stalled. I actually learned that lesson (more than) a few times in my life. Imaging being out of gas, as a college student, on the side of the road, waiting for SOMEONE/ANYONE to pick you up to get to a gas station. (I luckily got AAA as a gift from parents some time in college, but you still have to just sit there for an hour until they show up.)
How are you even saying that range anxiety doesn’t exist in ICE vehicles?? I know 20 somethings now that have to decide on gas money or food money. Charging an EV at home is MUCH cheaper that any Iran war gasoline. This is not an argument I accept anymore.
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Higher sight lines are certainly part of it - if you’re higher up, you can see better. Bigger cars bring more interior cabin space, which is more comfortable and feels roomier. It also gives you more space for storing stuff. And, of course, for seating more passengers more comfortably if that arises. Bigger cars feel safer - and are safer for the occupants, though less safe for others, than sedans.
The sedan has been losing relevance to the car market for years. I had Google make me a chart:
Global Market Share Comparison (2005 vs. 2015 vs. 2025)
The remaining market percentage not captured below belongs to other light vehicle categories, such as pickup trucks and light commercial vans.
Vehicle Category 2005 Share 2015 Share 2025 Share Passenger Cars (Sedans, Hatchbacks, Wagons) 68.8% 56.0% 32.0% SUVs & Crossovers 11.0% 24.0% 55.0%
Again, those are global numbers, not just US numbers. Two-thirds of light vehicles were passenger cars back in 2005; today, it’s less than a third. The numbers are even more striking in the US, of course. But this is where the auto market is going.
Detroit isn’t being foolish by moving away from sedans. They’re skating to where the puck is going, not where it’s been (to borrow a phrase).
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Back in the 1990s, GM came up with the first mass production electric vehicle to help meet California emission requirements called the EV1.
The started with pretty much a clean sheet of paper and had nifty features like an aluminum chassis and composite panels. Using good old fashioned lead acid batteries, it got decent range, and later versions got over 100 miles on a charge.
They were only produced in small numbers, but people loved them for all the usual reasons. But in 2001 there was a new regime in Washington that favored hydrogen vehicles, and so the incentives for EVs didn’t line up anymore, and GM killed it.
But I wonder what would have happened if GM had kept working on it? They probably would have gotten pretty good at it. Maybe GM would have been the first high-volume, high margin EV maker instead of Tesla.
But they didn’t and they weren’t.
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Exactly! That’s my point. Lots of people - arguably most people - aren’t really great about making sure they’re paying attention to how much fuel is in the tank. Which is a relatively easy problem to solve when the fuel light comes on in an ICE car (find the nearest gas station and fuel up in a minute or two), but a much more intrusive problem in an EV (find the nearest fast-charging station and take ten minutes or so).
It exists whether you accept it or not. People are reluctant to buy EV’s in the US because our lower gas prices make it harder to recoup the higher upfront cost (yes, even with “Iran war gasoline” gas is still half the price of Europe’s). And the cost is high because we want/need a bigger “tank” on the car to accommodate our higher levels of driving and longer trip length so we can minimize unexpected low-fuel situations that take too long to refill with an EV. And even then, because our trip lengths are bigger, a low fuel situation is far more likely to fall short of a day’s travel in the US than in other countries.
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Ur changing the goal posts in your reply here. First, I can confidently say that the fuel light does not work for many many people. So there is STILL the problem of running out. I said that people still run out on ICE cars, regularly and you said but you just drive to nearest station…HOW? Range anxiety is a term made up for EV’s, but I know that people missing the fill up timing impacts ICE as well as EV. So this whole thing is a mute point.
This was not part of my response, so now this is a new topic and I agree that we do not have european gas prices and we also give bajillions of $ back to gas companies so this would take us WAY off down another rabbit hole. But again, not what I was talking about.
Disagreeing with the premise here. Larger gas tanks have always been on trucks. Those have existed ever since hauling stuff needed more fuel. This is not a new thing. Have people become used to it? Yes, but that is neither here nor there. The Prius I rented once had a what, 5 gallon tank? So not sure where you are going with the idea that a bigger gas tank is the reason…there are now EV’s with MUCH more battery, and milage than any Tesla. So companies just put in more batteries, exactly the same as just put in a bigger tank. This argument doesn’t stand the sniff test fo rme.
It’s not a moot point. People rarely run out of gas, but they more frequently end up running low on gas. That’s more of a problem in the context of an EV, which takes a lot more time to fill than an ICE car. Our exchange is taking place in the context of a larger conversation, where folks have criticizing Detroit for not more wholeheartedly embracing EV’s. I’m laying out the argument that this is actually not that dumb a move, because of structural factors in the US that make EV’s far less of a good fit than in other countries. One of those structural factors is that we drive more: more miles per day, more trips, longer trips.
That affects EV uptake and does so in two different respects. First, longer trip length makes it more likely that starting a day (or a trip) with low fuel will become a problem. It’s manageable if you don’t have to refuel right then, but problematic if you have to refuel before you can start your trip - because the refueling time is so much longer. So the EV itself causes some friction, if you don’t take steps to avoid the situation.
And secondly, it means you need a bigger tank to reduce the frequency of low fuel situations, which gets us to this:
Because it’s not exactly the same as putting in a bigger gas tanks. Gas tanks are cheap. The delta between an 8-gallon tank and a 13-gallon tank is minimal. But batteries are really expensive, and indeed perhaps the most expensive part of an EV. Increasing the range of an EV dramatically increases the cost of that EV in a way that’s fundamentally different than an ICE. It also can materially increase the weight of the car in a way that adding a few extra gallons of tank capacity does not.
Giving EV’s more range dramatically increases the cost. In Europe, where driving distances are smaller and range needs are lower, the average battery size of EV’s is closer to 70 kwh, compared to about 90 kwh in the US. An EV that matches the driver’s needs in Europe will cost less than the EV that matches drivers’ needs in the US because we drive more than they do - and that need for a larger tank inhibits EV uptake here.
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Damn it, I misspelled mute/moot…gah. Ok you win.
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Ok, I lied, going to respond anyway. The battery size is an upfront cost, the filling a larger gas tank is a life long cost. Would love to see when those equal out. Just because putting in the larger tank costs the company just a bit…filling that tank weekly because now your habits have changed will cost much more than what the company paid.