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I would say that the main problem with EVs right now isn't that they're large. You can get an electric Smart or Twizy and those aren't much more than driver's s

I would say that the main problem with EVs right now isn't that they're large. You can get an electric Smart or Twizy and those aren't much more than driver's seats on wheels. And don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good: plenty of people who have full-size cars now would switch to something like one of those to save money once it was cheap enough... ...if not for the actual practical problem, which is that for a lot of people living in dense urban areas, there's no way to keep an EV charged up. Street parking and surface lots don't have chargers, old parking garages and almost all new parking garage construction doesn't have chargers, apartment buildings or shared houses with official or ad-hoc parking don't have chargers. I have that problem myself: I'd probably have replaced my car with an EV already if only I actually had somewhere to plug it in.

neutronicus 6y ago
The parent comment is saying that all cars, even ones that are small for cars, are unacceptably large. The implication of their conclusion is that they even think the same of bicycles and electric scooters, which, after all, still take space to park. However I agree with the rest of your comment. My wife and I looked into plug-in hybrids (all the tax credit, none of the range anxiety) but there's no place to charge it so we just got a regular hybrid.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Eh, smaller electric cars don't help in practice because various regulations require buildings to come with a parking space of a certain size. Nobody is out there building smaller parking spaces for smaller cars. Indeed, Bay Area city Sunnyvale infamously outlawed "compact" parking spaces. Electric bicycles by contrast take up the same space as any other bicycle.