Here is the fundamental disconnect. You start every day with a full "tank" when you have an EV. You keep assuming you only fill when needed. That is ICE mentality.
With an EV; your only concern is how often you in a single day exceed the range of the vehicle.
Tim
I’m not following where we are in disagreement
For a phone everybody thinks charging at home is great and having to (theoretically) travel somewhere regularly to recharge it would be a burden.
For a car people think that charging at home is a burden, but going to wait in line at Costco for 30 mins to refill the car is great.
Point taken.
I've been watching this debate on this thread, and it seems to center around the range difference.
I co-founded and run three related companies in the USA and Canada in the alternate fuels business; compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquified natural gas (LNG).
Currently we don't have anything to do with vehicles of any sort on public roads (see closing paragraph below). But one of our partners in the USA is also a long time manufacturer of automated CNG dispensers and builds/operates CNG filling stations for commercial customers, and another one of my partners used to work for the world's largest manufacturer of composite carbon fiber CNG commercial vehicle cylinders.
The current EV range limitations parallel the CNG alternate fuel world. The energy density compared to gasoline or diesel limits the range of a CNG vehicle. Adding more fuel capacity requires more high pressure tanks, which takes up more space and uses up payload, so there's always a compromise. Similar to adding more batteries and weight to gain range for an EV.
The most successful applications of range limited alternate fuel CNG or LNG vehicles are "return-to-base" installations. Package delivery, waste hauling, school buses, transit fleets, taxi operations...anywhere the vehicle is starting and ending up at the same place each day, and working a predictable route or confined to a regional radius within the vehicle's range before needing to be refilled. At the end of the shift, or day, the vehicle ends up back at the depot yard, gets a fill hose plugged into it and automatically refilled for the next shift.
Seems to me the no-brainer EV applications are rather similar - a predictable home-work-home commute circuit, or a series of daily tasks within the confines of one's home-centered urban radius, return to base at the end of the day and plug in to automatically "refill it for the next shift". And I have to believe that type of use is the core of the current EV purchasing cohort, because it makes so much sense (as long as one can overcome the current purchase premium).
The transcontinental Supercharger network is more marketing (the Tesla equivalent of the Cirrus parachute - it's there if you need it?) than meeting an actual urgent real world demand for owners to drive across the country. They can do it, but how many really will.
Coming back to vehicles, our LNG business has been actively involved in testing this alternate fuel for mine haul trucks. These trucks use enormous amounts of diesel fuel. But because they work on a predictable circuit, in a non-public and confined area, they are at the forefront of truly autonomous vehicle technology. This was a simpler problem to solve at a mine than the infinitely more complex one Tesla is trying to do on public roads with its Autopilot. Rio Tinto has been operating fully autonomous trucks at one of its Australian mines for a decade, and they have a remarkable
zero accident rate. These trucks are enormously expensive, run continuously around the clock at the mine site and spend less than 10 minutes idle every 12 hours being refueled with diesel. The cost of having the truck idle is material, and that's been one of the challenges with the LNG refueling equipment engineering - to minimize refueling time while hitting the exact fuel spec into the vehicle tank. However, just one of the advantages of the LNG conversion is the downtime for oil and filter changes is lengthened considerably.
