That comment is a bad take to be sure, but it isn’t really about eliminating every vehicle in existence. We’d still need individual vehicles to serve for delivery and emergency services, as well as a bunch of other stuff.

The main thought is just that it’s a bit silly to have half the population driving a two tonne vehicle to the grocery store. There’s already communities where golf carts are used instead of cars.

The whole concept of ripping out every road and installing solar tramways is just as much a nonsensical extreme not worth taking seriously as ‘what do I do if I order a computer and I work from home’. I get your use of the example though, it is the equivalent counterpoint.

I just had this discussion in another thread. Slow charging isn’t great but most people don’t drive 50+ miles every single day. I found on Tesla’s site they say a standard household outlet gets you 2-3 miles per hour of range. That’s 30 miles or so in the time most people are home overnight.

A 240v connection apparently charges 10x quicker for people that wanted more assurance, but either way, most of time you’d be leaving topped up or close to it. This seems more of an issue for people living in apartment buildings without access to home charging at all.

I wrote elsewhere about the infrastructure problem, but I’ll sum up a couple things. There’s around 200,000 gas stations in the United States. If there were an equivalent number of chargers around, having a small battery would be fine. Eventually this will be the case, but you highlight an important factor: closed ecosystems. All these chargers should work for any make of EV car.

As it stands with now, the need for a subscription or specific car or unique payment method is ludicrous. All these chargers should be required to have card readers the same way you can pay at the pump in a gas station. Beyond this, they’d all need to adopt the same charging method so people don’t need a bunch of adapters in their trunk.

That said, there could be regulations established to require newly built housing, apartment buildings included, to have electric vehicle charging infrastructure - and more than just a few plugs. Grants could be made available for retrofitting existing buildings. If these things came to fruition, we wouldn’t need two hundred thousand charging stations all over the place. It’s not out of the question to install an overnight charging spot for every person that has an electric car - it just costs money.

Basically every argument I’ve seen against low range electric cars is founded in a charging infrastructure problem. Going to a bigger battery in a larger vehicle has significant and more costly ramifications on other infrastructure. It’s better to aim for smaller, lighter vehicles with infrastructure in mind.

That obviously isn’t their position. They don’t own the building they live in nor the business they work for.

The used market is different for EVs than a combustion vehicle. I looked for a BMW i3 a while back and was only finding them halfway across the continent. Maybe that’s because people keep them for longer? Not sure that market has developed enough to know one way or another.

I understand what you mean about the average person getting it, and while that is important, I think the primary issue is the limited selection of small EVs on the market. As you point out, if foreign vehicles could be acquired without the steep cost, more people would drive them. As it stands, domestic automakers don’t want to make anything but twenty foot long SUVs because of the huge profit margins on them.

As far as ebikes go, I am definitely on that boat. Don’t have one myself - call me a traditionalist - but I wish more people would consider them. I agree that in higher temperatures, or humidity which I find worse, it’s uncomfortable. Though the benefit of (maybe idealistically) not having a car payment and associated insurance go a long way to making that discomfort palatable.

Personally, I’ve got a trailer for my bike that I’ve been using to ride 10-15 minutes to the grocery stores and do errands. A time or two I have even gotten some lumber with it from the hardware store. I thought about a specific cargo bike a while back but decided not to have an entire bicycle for that sort of thing. The trailer is smaller anyway.

The safety factor of riding opposed to driving is the most important factor in my mind. It’s dangerous to ride along the side of a multi lane road. Paint doesn’t stop drivers from crossing into a ‘bike lane’. Even a curb or those plastic bollards are insufficient in my mind. I ride nearly primarily on trails or the type of streets that are small enough not to have any painted lines. For busier routes I use the sidewalk or even the boulevard if there is one.

The more people getting on the ebike wagon could cause better riding options to be developed in the area. That’s political though. Even if it doesn’t, it’s one more person taking a trip not in a car, making it a tiny bit safer.

Only one side of the street too.

There’s an historic section of a nearby town which is popular for tourists. Thousands of people a day just walking around all over the place, going shop to shop and whatnot. The whole place has street parking on both sides, a centre turn lane, and 50km/h signage that gets ignored at every opportunity.

Used to be a tram line ran through the town that connected to the neighbouring cities, but oh no, must make room for the private automobile. Luckily some years ago they started charging for parking, and since Covid-19 a dozen spots were given to restaurants and the like for additional outdoor seating.

Such a shock when it turned out a few parking spaces could generate more revenue for businesses when you put people on them instead of cars.

Don’t get me wrong, obviously people like yourself make these long ish trips regularly and you’d benefit either from more range or better infrastructure. If, like gas stations, there were two hundred thousand charging stations sprinkled through the country, less range in the car would be less of a concern.

I know someone from my college days that hung a 100’ cord out her third story window to plug in her little EV. Nissan Leaf or something of that class. Worked like a charm for puttering around town.

I’m sure the data isn’t perfect, but as far as the averages go, it’s accurate for my driving patterns. Those trips you’re taking nearly double your yearly mileage, so that would certainly change your average. Without them though, you wouldn’t be too far off based on what you’ve described. I’m fortunate that I live near a train line for my regular trips out of town. Not an option for the vast majority unfortunately.

Another option a couple I know took was a hybrid. Most of the time they don’t use the engine, but when they go see family or what have you, they’ve got the range they need without having to find a charger. Pretty convenient if you ask me.

Eventually we’ll have charging stations all over, or maybe light rail, and going hundreds of miles in a day without a thought to battery depletion, but I doubt I’ll be around to see it.

A 300 Mi charge would mean if you can’t charge daily, you would be able to go a couple of days without having to do so.

Given most trips are less than 3 miles, if you had a 300 mile range vehicle, that’s about three months of average driving, not a couple of days. My point was that people don’t go on long drives the vast majority of time and don’t more than fifty or so miles of range.

I’ll use Tesla as the example here only because it’s the prominent electric car brand. Directly from them:

A 120 volt outlet will supply 2 to 3 miles of range per hour of charge. If you charge overnight and drive less than 30 to 40 miles per day, this option should meet your typical charging needs.

They go one to say you can get a 10x improvement on the miles per hour when charging from a 240v outlet. Even accounting for installation of a new outlet to the garage or side of the house, this would be far cheaper than buying a vehicle with hundreds of miles of range and using a supercharger every other week.

Looks more like the US government’s fault by allowing export of American jobs to a foreign power. But if you call Mystery Incorporated, you might be shocked to see corporate benefactors under the government’s mask.

People largely don’t vote. The informed voters are an even smaller slice of the pie chart. Even so, it seems most politicians can be bought for shockingly cheap.

Money would have to get out of politics, voting in any election big or small would need a paid holiday, voting itself would have to move off the first passed the post system, etcetera. There’s so many steps to be taken in order to get out from under the corporate boot it’s hard to keep track of them.

When the entire economic and political landscape has been turned into a casino, it’s a steep climb to beat the house at its own game.

Sodium could easily replace lithium in EV applications if people would acknowledge that only 2% of trips are more than 50 miles. Though it’s probably moreso the auto industry’s fault that people have this assumption they need to prepare for a three hundred mile journey on a moments notice.

If manufacturers were putting out cars that had four figure price tags with double digit ranges, they would become the best selling vehicles within a decade and no one would care if it was sodium, lithium, or sawdust. Of course, there is less profit to be made from smaller vehicles and so the corporations won’t bother.

Without knowing any examples of the vehicles that are for sale everywhere except, roughly, half the world, I can’t really say much them. What I can say is that compared to the monstrous subsidies the oil and gas industry recieve, it does seem like those tariffs could be done away with. At least on the face of it, perhaps the issue is more intricate than that but I’m sure you grasp my meaning.

When 52% of all trips made are less than 3 miles and less than 2% are over fifty miles, I don’t think battery swapping is something any individual needs on a regular basis.

I could get on board if manufacturers were making $10,000 sub 50 mile vehicles that were compatible with a swap station so you could switch to a larger battery for the weekend. This would have to be a standard adopted by all however, and even before that, they’d have to make small cars. Which they won’t, because we all know they are too busy making trucks and SUVs.

I think that last bit is more of a ‘what you make of it’ situation, regardless of how smart or dumb a phone is.

Unfortunately the manufacturers want the data and advertising revenue, and they’d only be persuaded to offer an alternative if they made the same amount of money.

If each sale of a $900 smart phone gives them $100 of ad revenue over a couple years, I’d bet my bottom dollar they would charge $200 for the ‘dumb’ version.