I think that we're thinking about EVs all wrong. There is this expectation that an EV is basically a car that runs on electricity instead of gasoline. Home char

I think that we're thinking about EVs all wrong. There is this expectation that an EV is basically a car that runs on electricity instead of gasoline. Home charging is a nice feature, but if you stray from home, you have to figure out where to charge, and how long you can spend charging there. Tesla has built a BMW-level car, in terms of styling, features, and comfort. There are competitors, increasingly from traditional carmakers, but they are all building the same style of car: the look and feel of a gasoline-powered car that runs on electricity. Of course, given America's (insane) attachment to pickup trucks, those are getting the electric treatment too. But it's the same idea: take the gasoline powered vehicle, and design an EV to mirror it, to be as familiar as possible. But think about how PCs replaced minicomputers and mainframes. These little joke computers that IBM and CDC and DEC and HP and Burroughs and Data General did not take seriously finally killed those companies (except for IBM, and HP bears no resemblance to what it used to be). The PCs didn't become replacements for minis and mainframes, they provided a completely different model of computing that eventually won out thanks to rapid hardware improvements, software improvements made possible by rapidly improving hardware, and importantly, a new generation of computer users, who were not brainwashed into the old way of thinking about computing. I look at electric bikes as being the analog of the PC. I doubt that many car manufacturers look at these things as competition. But they are. If you are young, you need to travel ten miles to work, you are crushed by student debt, and you have some concern about climate issues, an electric bike is awfully appealing. Yes, the weather needs to cooperate, but it's a pretty small step from the electric bikes we have now, to slightly more protected machines that work in inclement weather. What about longer drives? EVs (i.e., Tesla and their ilk) aren't so great there either. Range anxiety is real, recharging takes way more than 5 minutes (even with level 3 chargers), and good like finding one on your random road trip. You have to plan it in advance. Completing the analogy: gasoline cars are like mainframes, and EVs as they currently exist are analogous to minicomputers. They will cease to exist in 20 years. They'll be displaced on the low end by electric bikes, and they cannot compete on the high end (long trips) with gasoline-powered cars.