I don’t have an EV and will not purchase one anytime soon. I would be interested in purchasing an extended range hybrid. I’ve had this discussion with many of my friends and most are not ready to purchase an EV but like myself are interested in a plug-in hybrid. A 100 range allow for all my local driving to be electric and I could still do my long range driving without adding the additional time for charging. I do drives of 9 - 13 hours at least 8-10 times a year and some years more often. Those drives are already long enough. I don’t want to add the additional time charging takes. Over that long of a drive the time adds up.
I think the real problem is that the car industry is refusing to make affordable vehicles and a big part of that is size. Americans might want huge vehicles but they can't all afford them. Chinese manufacturers, alone, are pursuing the affordable EV market, the same way that Chinese manufacturers, alone, are pursing the affordable drone market.
It's not the size of the car per se, but the vast amount of technology and features crammed into the car that drives up the cost. An old VW bus could fit a lot of people, but was still produced cheaply compared to production costs today. That old bus had no self-driving, no power windows, no lane assist, no anti-lock brakes, no automatic transmission, no infotainement center, no air suspension, no automatic seat adjustments or backup camera, no soundproofing, no heads up display, no A/C, it didn't beep when something was in your blind spots, it had no crumple zones or other safety features. I'm not even sure if it had a catalytic converter. Just think of the huge number of electrical computer modules and the hundreds of miles of wiring, the millions of lines of software code. And those computers need to work in the Arizona heat when you park your car in the sun, even though you might fry a consumer grade laptop if you left it in the same car.
That's why smaller cars aren't that much cheaper. They are still crammed with all these features.
The BLS measures inflation which requires making the much maligned hedonic adjustments, which is basically saying things like "the new widget holds twice as much memory" or "this car also has an airbag". For automobiles, they look at production costs, and when you take production costs into account, cars aren't that much more expensive in real terms today. We just cram so many features into them now.
What do you mean? America has 2 offerings from Chevy, and now the Slate truck as well. Japan has the Nissan Leaf. Korea and Germany produce a few cheap EVs too. None of these vehicles are large and all of them are focused on being cheap for the mass market. The PRC's offerings rely on favorable currency positioning and extremely apathetic labor conditions (leading to better cost-efficiency). It's not an industrialist's miracle.
Not all the advantages though, hybrids need oil changes, transmission fluid changes, water pump, spark plugs, timing belts, etc. all the maintenance burden of an ICE that EVs do not carry.
I’d rather have an ev with a diesel generator in the pickup bed as my “range extender” than a vehicle with constant maintenance needs.
I can dream of hooking up a generator on a trailer…
I also dream of getting a used Nissan Leaf because most of my trips are to and from town 20 minutes away and we already had gas cars that can take longer trips. If my son wasn’t bringing home old cars I might be able to make the space for it but right now I can’t.
They're no longer a best of both worlds, good overall range, not as bad for the environment.
They're now worst of both worlds, bad electric range, bad for the enviroment.
Anyone considering an EV isn't going to want to compromise on those two things as much as they used to.