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Originally Posted by Irace86.2.0
Like I said, there is a huge gap between the US (2%) and Norway (54%) that can not be explained by the differences in our driving patterns, which are similar for the vast majority of Americans.
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I think a lot of it comes down to perception vs. reality. The reality might be that the daily drives of most Americans could generally be met by the range of EV's. But the perception of many people may be different. Many people just don't want to be constrained by the range limitations or exhorbitant charge times of EVs, regardless of how often they might actually face them.
I admittedly fall into this camp. Things are certainly different during the pandemic, when I rarely drive at all and when I do, an EV would certainly suffice for the occasional 2 mile drive to do curbside pickup of food. But I'm definitely not going to spend the non-trivial money for a BEV as an additional car for that sporadic use (besides, the 30 miles a month I now drive, about a gallon, isn't putting out enough pollution to measure in the grand scheme of things).
Pre-pandemic (and hopefully, if we live through it, post pandemic) we would make drives exceeding the range of most BEVs about once a week. It's also the paucity of charging stations, and charge times, that hold me back.
One of my friends in the neighborhood bought a Nissan Leaf a couple of years ago (at the behest/brow-beating/nagging of his wife). Pre-pandemic, they took the car on a day trip of 150 miles each way. What would have been a total 7 hour day in a gas engine car (3 hours each way + 1 hour for the business they had to attend to) turned into a 22 hour long nightmare worthy of a book or major motion picture.
In the dead of a New England winter, they discovered first-hand, and the hard way, that the advertised range of the Leaf did not match the real world. Their voyage from hell required a total of 7 (seven) stops for recharging, with the multiple complicating factors of reduced range in cold weather, broken chargers, slower than anticipated charging, charging stations that wouldn't accept their credit cards etc., lines at charging stations, being cut off after an hour at several charging stations, and other problems. They made it there and back, but needing 22 hours to make a trip that would have reliably taken 7 hours in an IC car isn't viable (he since sold the Leaf and bought a Toyota Yaris).
The network of charging stations might be adequate in California, but it certainly is limited in most of the rest of the country.
Compared with Europe, public and mass transit are also much less developed here. When I used to live in Portland Oregon, the city planners and elected leaders were vehemently anti-car, and espoused strategies to make driving more difficult in Portland (reducing available parking spaces, etc.) to 'force' people to take mass transit. Yet, their own data (at the time) showed that less than 20% of the jobs in Portland could be reached by their employees using mass transit. What were the other 80% supposed to do? Bicycling is not for everyone, especially when long distances are involved, and in the perpetually rainy climate of the Pacific Northwest.