Passenger vehicle EVs are already *better* than ICE vehicles for everything but trips (and some EVs are already only slightly less convenient than an ICE for long trips).
If your funding is unlimited and you live in an area with plenty of chargers, OK. Otherwise... eh. They're a good around town beater, but they're not great for an awful lot of use cases. A 200 mile range EV is $50k, and, annoyingly,
not everyone has $7500/yr of federal tax liability to offset. This drives me up the f-cking wall when people talk about new EV pricing. I make good money, and I sure don't pay $7500/yr in federal taxes. I know people who live very comfortably and pay remarkably little in federal taxes (a few kids tends to do that). And I've had to growl at a few car salespeople who have insisted that the $7500 tax credit can be subtracted from the price of
every new EV. No, you can't just generally assume that. It's simply not true outside places like CA where $100k is poverty wages.
require fewer dedicated refueling stops (charge at home/at work almost all the time)
True... maybe? Not everyone's work has EV charging. If you're in the tech industry, and are willing to deal with 40 year old men acting like toddlers over EV charging, sure, you can probably charge at work, but the entire rest of the country isn't there yet.
Yes, you can charge every night at home, but depending on your charging infrastructure (which some people don't have - I guess, if you live in an apartment, you don't count as a real person?), it's not always true. A 12 hour charging window, on home 120V/16A, gets you around 20kWh, which is 60 miles - useful enough, and you can certainly make it work, but without dedicated higher speed charging infrastructure...
And public charging infrastructure does not meaningfully exist for large parts of the country. I
cannot rely on any public charging infrastructure for us - it simply doesn't exist, and if it does, it's either out of service, or impossible to find.
easy to start each day with 100% of your range
If you drop a grand or two on 240V charging, and have the panel/transformer to feed it, yes. Otherwise, see previous comments about limited charging. I can't charge a big EV out here daily - I simply don't have the amps to do so.
Oh, and that "100% of range" is about 50% of rated range in the winter, if you live somewhere cold.
are cheaper to fuel/can be fueled for 0 marginal cost in many scenarios.
Cheaper? Certainly. Zero marginal cost? Where on earth do you live that power is... oh, right, tech industry? Free EV chargers for employees? In the rest of the world, we all pay for power. Now, I won't argue about cost - it is almost always cheaper to run an EV, assuming nothing goes wrong, than to buy gas. And it's a more stable cost as well. But it's not free.
At 3 mi/kWh, and $0.12/kWh power, our Volt runs $0.04/mi in energy costs. A 55mpg Prius at $3.50 gas is $0.063/mi in energy costs. It takes a good while to recover the difference there...
are cheaper/more convenient to maintain (other than battery) because they have very few moving parts.
In theory, yes. In reality, at least some of the EVs out there are hellishly expensive to maintain. A friend of mine with a Model X (which serves mostly as an excuse for him to sit at the Service Center) has
tire costs that exceed the fuel costs on a reasonably efficient gas car. Not counting power or anything else. He was looking at replacement tires at 10k miles, which is absurd for anything short of something like a modded Supra. Or a modern EV.
are higher performance than ICE vehicles, even with lower "specs" due to instant/flat torque curves
From 0-40, sure. They tend to fall off a cliff in acceleration beyond that, though it's certainly more useful around town. I do wish some came with better mappings on the throttle, though - on a lot of them, in the normal mode, you literally have to floor it to get it to move in a hurry, because the throttle curves are tuned for efficiency out of the box. If you're buying $120k cars, sure, they're quick, but most $120k cars are pretty quick.
can be made safer than ICE vehicles (due to fundamental differences in design requirements)
O... kay? There's not a huge difference between an overbuilt expensive EV and an overbuilt expensive gas car, in terms of safety results.
As far as long trips, with the right infrastructure...
Which doesn't exist unless you own a Tesla in the US...
even a current EV only requires a bit of extra planning to be perfectly fine for all but the most extreme trips. For example, a 500 mile trip would be 8-9 hours of driving and only require about 45 minutes of charge time (probably in more than one stop) assuming a 250m range.
Assuming the chargers work. And your payment authentication works. And they're not clogged up (as happens with Tesla stations regularly, during high travel weekends). And that you've got impossibly fast charging stations. And that you trust the DC fast charging infrastructure. And have a car with DC fast charging. And the car is cool enough to charge quickly, or warm enough to charge quickly (since either end restricts charge rate).
Bit more complex than a gas station, really.
Construction Cost & perception are the only issues preventing wide scale adoption of EV. Cost, of course, being the biggest factor. Unfortunately, the perception issues will always exist, because people don't like change.
And
infrastructure. Not everyone lives in Seattle or California, and doesn't care to leave those areas!
Look, I get the benefits. I own a Volt - so, based on many people's standards, a horrid gas guzzler that's the worst of all possible worlds (presumably somehow worse than my 12mpg truck that rarely gets driven). It's about the only way we can actually have a useful EV-ish vehicle out here, because there
is no infrastructure. I literally cannot charge in town. I'm paying out of pocket ($900) to put a 240V/50A outlet on a building I find myself at regularly, so I can charge in town a bit more often. But that will
never pay for the installation cost, nor will a 240V charger at home ever be anything but a money sink. Doesn't mean I'm not doing it, but I don't pretend it's anything but stupid from a financial perspective.
If we bought a used Leaf, we'd have to keep the gas car around for longer trips, or would put enough extra miles on the truck to negate any benefits of the EV. If we bought a long range EV, the cost is so staggeringly high that it would have never been worth it, by any metric one cared about (for the cost of a high end Tesla, you can buy about 4 man-lifetimes of carbon offsets, if you care about that sort of thing).
They have their uses, but I'd greatly appreciate it if proponents would quit flat out lying about them. It doesn't help your cause, and when people find out you've sold them a line of utter crap, it doesn't exactly help EVs.
