What is Holding US EV Adoption Back

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
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Agree or disagree?

https://insideevs.com/news/769491/rivian-ceo-ev-choices-tesla/

Rivian founder and CEO R.J. Scaringe says that largely boils down to a lack of great cars.

“If you want to buy an electric vehicle for under $50,000 today, I would say in the United States there are well under five great choices,” Scaringe said during a wide-ranging interview on InsideEVs’ Plugged-In Podcast that airs Friday morning. “Until you start to have a number of choices, we’re not going to see the market really expanding.”

He called out the Tesla Model Y and Model 3—which together make up around half of America’s electric market—as two good options, but he stopped short of naming others.

Scaringe argues that the auto industry doesn’t have an EV problem—it has a product problem. The success of the Model Y proves it, he said.

“Not in every case, but in a large number of cases, I would say the product’s not that good. It’s not that desirable,” he said. “So you could say it’s that people don’t want to buy electric, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think the reality is they don’t want to buy marginal, okay-ish, electric cars.”

To be sure, broader concerns around EV range and public charging infrastructure are also keeping plenty of Americans from taking the plunge. But scant options—or no options—that fit a customer’s needs are indeed big barriers to adoption. The limited field has narrowed EV sales to people who like what’s out there or are willing to compromise to go electric.

[https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gUbdXampx1w]

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The two are not mutually exclusive.

DB2

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I’ve always thought that these concerns are bunk. It’s mostly scare tactics used by people for various reasons that have nothing to do with auto selection.

The reason it is bunk is because today, mostly driving ICE vehicles, people are willing to drive to a gas station every week to fill up. That’s drive 5-10 minutes to station, fill up for 5 minutes, and drive back home for 5-10 minutes. Every. Single. Week. And even if you fill up on the way home from work, you still have to drive to the “other” intersection, take a left to get to the lower priced station, fill up, and then drive out, during rush hour, make a U-turn so you can face the direction of home, and drive home. Still an added 8-15 minutes total. Again, every single week.

Now that all my cars are electric, I drive to work/errands/shopping/appointments, and then I drive home. I pull the car into the driveway, and I plug it in. Takes about 5 seconds to plug it in. And presto, every morning the “tank” is “full” and ready for the next drive. Once or twice a year we go an a road trip, so every 250 miles we stop … to use the bathroom, to stretch our legs, to let the dog poop, to get a snack, to drink something, to eat lunch/dinner, to buy coffee, etc … and we plug the car in to charge while we are doing that stuff. And that only happens for perhaps two weeks out of the year, and it’s only for 15 minutes or so each time. And it’s max 5 or 6 times per road trip.

So with the old-fashioned ICE vehicles - let’s say 12 minutes a week filling up, 52 * 12 = 624 minutes a year total.

And with the modern EVs - let’s say 5 seconds a day for 50 weeks, plus 15 minutes times 10 times for the two weeks of road trips, 30 minutes + 150 minutes (on road trips) = 180 minutes a year total. And this is not even taking into account that for most of those 180 minutes on road trips, you are doing something else necessary at the same time anyway.

And if you can’t have an EV charger at home or at work, don’t get an EV, but someday you will have chargers there, and then you should/will get an EV.

I really hate using this phrase because it’s been so overused in recent years, but “fueling” an EV is truly a paradigm shift when compared with fueling an ICE vehicle.

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I certainly don’t drive as much as I used to (*although at the end of the year it still turns out to be around 12,000 mi!) and I “fill up” about one a week, occasionally twice in my garage. And it costs me anywhere between $9 and $12 a fill, assuming I use the utility, which I don’t usually. (I have a very small solar set up with some batteries) so it’s essentially free (as long as I don’t count the cost of the panels: about $2,000 and the batteries, another $4,000 - about 10% the cost of the car.)

Those “extra” accoutrements equate to about 2 years of “gas”, after which they’re free, as is the sun. There are rare, but real times when the solar hasn’t produced/stored enough juice and I have to use the grid, I think that’s happened 3, maybe 4 times in two years. Otherwise, my maintenance is “rotating the tires and filling the washer fluid” and that 5 seconds of “plugging in.”

Yes, I have traveled eight states on long trips and paid “regular price” for juice on the highway (~equivalent to gasoline) but otherwise, it’s hassle free, pretty expense free, and free free.

I can’t imagine buying another ICE car, same as I can’t imagine buying a black & white TV. The new world is better in almost every conceivable way.

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I think this, though, is the core of “range anxiety.”

Let me share my experience. I live about a mile from my office. There’s no reason that I couldn’t use an EV for my day-to-day. I’ve strongly considered it. But I wouldn’t get one, because I have no way to be certain of a convenient charge.

I have on-street parking, and no legal way to run a power cord from my house to the street across a public sidewalk. My office building has two EV parking spots, but they’re always full - no certainty about being able to get a hold of one.

I occasionally have to make longer trips to other places for work or recreation - and again, unless I can be certain of having charging at the destination I would face the same problems. For personal travel, I mostly stay at Airbnb’s - which typically do not have charging. For work, my destinations are usually government or client offices that are not likely to have available charging spots. Etc. And since most of my longer trips are for work or travelling with children, stopping for an extra 15-20 minutes to charge isn’t very attractive - but the worst part is the risk that it might be longer if I have to wait for a charger, or drive to get to a charger, or drive to a charger and find that it’s broken or occupied and have to do both.

Filling up at a gas station might take five minutes every week and a half, but I always know that it’s only five minutes - there’s no chance it might end up taking half an hour.

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Sounds like a lot of your anxiety might be addressed by one of the apps for finding chargers.

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Not really. The issue isn’t about being able to locate chargers. Any more than it’s a burden to find where a gas station is.

Rather, it’s that I don’t want to deal with the possibility of being forced into a half hour delay to charge at some point, on a day where that’s not feasible for me. What Mark described above works great if you nearly always charge at home every time you pull into the driveway. Where it breaks down is when events intervene - you forget to plug in because it’s raining or you have groceries or a kid who has to be let into the house right away to hit the bathroom, and then you wake up the next morning to a car with only modest range left in the ‘tank.’

Or for folks like me, who can’t charge at home and can nearly never charge at work. I would have to be super conscientious about keeping that ‘tank’ topped off at third-party chargers in order to avoid an issue. And I don’t want to have to worry about that.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked down at the dash in the morning and only just then realized I was down to a quarter tank or so. That’s never a problem if you have an ICE car - that’s about 100 miles of “range” in my particular car, and it’s super fast to fill the tank if needs must. But if you lose track of your charging in an EV and you look down to see you’ve only got a quarter ‘tank,’ about 60 miles, then that can present more of an issue. Especially if you’ve got a schedule of dropping kids to school, hitting some meetings out of the office, making it back for a phone conference, and just don’t have the space in your day to stop for 20 minutes to refuel.

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I still think your perspective might change if you knew where chargers actually were, especially if the app told you how busy they were. I know that it used to be that the closest Tesla charger was 5 or so miles away, but a few years ago they put in a bank less than a mile away … at a grocery store.

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Nope. Again, it’s not about where the chargers are. I live relatively near downtown Miami, so there are quite a few public chargers that I know of just by driving around - and I’m sure ten seconds on an app would reveal more. Rather, it’s that I don’t want the possibility of facing an unanticipated lengthy delay in my day if events (or even my own lack of attention) have led me into a situation where I start the morning without enough charge to get through the day. With an ICE, that’s no more than a few minutes delay - easy enough to fill in without being late to anything. With an EV, it could really cause a problem for me.

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Doubtful. My wife has an EV but would NOT have one if we did not have at home charging. If she had to “fill it up” just like at a gas station, she would never drive one. She could not care less how convenient a 3rd party charger might be. She wanted to be done being dependent on putting fuel/energy in her car when it is cold outside.

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Sounds like am argument against ICE …

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Both can be and are true. It was an argument against ICE, and an argument against EV if you cannot charge at home. In other words, the status quo (ICE) is not improved by switching to EV if you cannot charge at home.

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Like so many things in life, I think it is a matter of your personal situation. For my wife, no problem, short trips here and there, home every night, no problem, very feasible. For me, not uncommon to drive a couple hundred miles a day through midwestern rural areas visiting customers, staying wherever is convenient, coupled with the uncertainty of range in winter living in the north….sorry, no interest. And this is not a philosophical issue for me as I am involved in the industry and I know the technical issues better than the average person. The technology is just isn’t there yet for me, but I do think it will eventually get there.

Personally I do think there is a lot to what the Rivian guy said. The design of the EV vehicles in China is really pretty amazing. Farley from Ford has said the same thing in a WSJ interview. The design and the features need to be there in order to overcome the fear or discomfort of change for people to embrace the adoption. Unfortunately IMHO most US/EU OEMs have some catching up to do.

T

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Not just in the US. Slow growth in the UK.

Fully electric cars made up 26.4% of all new car sales in November, up from 25.1% a year ago…

However, the proportion of EV sales still falls short of the 28% annual target. Carmakers who fail to meet this level risk fines.

DB2