One data point from the Daily Dirt Digger: 40% of UK drivers can’t charge at home.
And I would not like to guess how many can’t charge at work either – probably close to 99%.
Public charging cost here is close to burning diesel, but a diesel will give you 2x to 3x the range, a decent heater and aircon, and you can “charge” it anywhere without having to drink a sh1tty coffee at a motorway service station for 30 mins while watching the McD eating clients chucking their containers out of the window as they drive out 
Peter wrote:
without having to drink a sh1tty coffee at a motorway service station for 30 mins
Haven’t you heard? Breaking your journey and having coffee or a meal at a motorway service station is now a really fun thing to do, really relaxing. Slow down, what’s the hurry?
The other important thing to note is that petrol stations, dotted everywhere and so easy and convenient that everyone just fills up whenever without really thinking about it, are now a really unpleasant experience and a massive blight on society. They’re something that everyone cannot wait to remove from their lives!
Peter wrote:
EVs are bought mostly for virtue signalling / belief in saving the world cheap driving (in a little EV, charged at home, you save a lot versus petrol) interesting performance aspects
I know no EV car owner who bought it for the first reason – that’s at best nonsense and at worst amusing propaganda of people who never used an electic car in the first place.
I personally bought it for the second’ish reason, I got a dirt cheap leasing. But the main and by far the most important reason – that didn’t even make it into your list – was that it simply fits my requirements.
The last item is actually quite scary, because accelerating makes no sound, so you don’t look – or rather don’t sound – like a yob when overtaking someone. That lowers the threshold to use it’s power, so I run it in eco mode all the time for that reason alone.
Pal of mine owns a small electric car, just for driving to and from work. He charges at the local Aldi and Lidl outlets, which allow 1 hr of free charging while people shop. In all the time I go there, I’ve only twice or trice see people charge there, so availability is fairly high. He sais, he is getting some 30-40 km range per charge out of it. Given that he lives about 10 km from his work, so far, he claims not to have paid one cent for charging…. From what I’ve seen his car is parked outside mostly. If he needed to, he could also charge at work, as there are (paid) chargers in our parkhouse. No idea what range that thing has, but as all it ever drives is about 20 km per day plus the occasional shopping trip, I suppose it works for him.
For this kind of stuff EV’s work. And I do come across loads of people who have them and are raving. They don’t complain about anything, just love the experience.
Me, I am too old a fart to change. Hopefully they will sell fuel still while I am alive and hopefully my car will continue to run fine until a time the government pulls my license because of old age. I don’t need a car which calls home without telling me, which could in theory call the police on me if I do something wrong, a car which in truth is owned by one of the more nutty guys on this planet and who does with it what he wants, e.t.c. Nope. Not for me.
It’s actually amusing and depressing at the same time to read opinions on EV’s by people who have obviously never owned (or leased) one.
Sure, if you need to drive 500 km a day with no opportunity to recharge then EV’s are not (currently) for you, but only a very small minority of people use their cars in that way. Indeed the average car is used for a very short time (an hour or less) each day and there is no way you can run down an EV battery in that time.
Airborne_Again wrote:
Sure, if you need to drive 500 km a day with no opportunity to recharge then EV’s are not (currently) for you, but only a very small minority of people use their cars in that way.
Really? A very small minority? Wow.
I think almost everybody does that periodically and almost everybody buys a car to cover their use case over the life of the car, not their use case on most days. That’s why the roads are filled with with cars carrying one person, with between 2 and 6 seats.
As usual the average is somewhere in between
there is no way you can run down an EV battery in that time.
You definitely can if you don’t charge it, because you can’t And that is true for something like half the population. But which half? Obviously, countryside people can charge at home – unless they bought a little house in a little street in a little village and have nowhere to park it where they can connect it up.
The old saying about how to be the most popular of your friends comes to mind: own a pickup truck and let them borrow it a few times a year. In the minds of some that is going to be equally the case someday for people who own a normal full capability gasoline car.
Airborne_Again wrote:
It’s actually amusing and depressing at the same time to read opinions on EV’s by people who have obviously never owned (or leased) one.
My opinion does not count in this. I have never owned a new car in my life and I never will. My max budget for a car never was higher than 10k CHF, so I am in my 4th car since 18 and my “newest” car hat 68k km when I bought it.
However, apart from the fact that I will never be able to afford a Tesla or similar, I will never ever own a car which has a built in sim card and datalink to the manufacturer or worse to the authorities. Period. As all the electric offerings feature such big brother devices, and so do most of the petrol cars now, I will stick to my pre-2000 car and if it should become necessary, try to find another one of the same vintage, e.g. without any electronic spies on board.
Silvaire wrote:
A very small minority? Wow.
Don’t mix up Europe with the US. In the US, I am well aware that commutes of several hours are rather the rule than the exception. This does not exist here, and if it does, it is usually done by public transport which is inexistent in the US outside major cities. Totally different way of life.
@Mooney_Driver, I’m not mixing-up anything, and I’m not talking about daily commutes. My daily commute is 8 miles.
I’m talking about the more enjoyable part of life, the world as a whole, and the worldwide trends and statistics for light vehicle sales. The latter is what drives the light vehicle market, which is becoming less regional as time goes on.
I’m not talking specifically in a limited sense about your little corner of the world, in which BTW I travel on the roads myself about 4000-6000 km per year over about 3 to 4 weeks combined. I agree that in doing that over decades I have seen more of Europe than most Europeans but I don’t necessarily see that constraint as beneficial for them, or anybody.
On the other hand I am reminded of a friend who likes to ride his motorcycle (almost) non-stop from Sicily to his home in Cordenons, and of the hundreds of other long distance travelers I’ve met in my own travels worldwide.
