Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Often the voters that push for more spending are the people who pay little taxes, while the voters who oppose more spending are the people who pay lots of taxes.

But hey, when did a voter ever dislike paying for something with OPM?
Well, I do think that the way most Europeans live is a lot more localized and with smaller distances to be traveled on a daily basis.

But at the same time, most American life is pretty damn localized and there aren't long distances to be traveled on a daily basis. 80% of the US population live in urban areas (which I assume includes suburban and possibly even exurban).

But usually the issue is that a car is a very major purchase, and we tend to make those purchases partially on "what do I do 95% of the time?" but also "what do I need to be CAPABLE of doing the other 5% of the time?"

I think for most potential EV purchasers, they are scared an EV won't work for that 10%. Whether that's a road trip, or whether that's towing, or whether that's range anxiety in the coldest 2 weeks of winter.

It's why a lot of multi-car EV families have one BEV and one ICEV. The BEV is great for around-town stuff, and maybe could even be the majority of the family's miles driven. But they like to keep the ICEV (whether it's a truck, or used for road trips, etc) for the times when the BEV might be inconvenient.

In our family, EVs hadn't been mature enough yet when my wife got her RX350, but with our current lifestyle, a BEV makes perfect sense for her. She does the majority of her driving to/from work and running errands and would basically never have any problem with range. With home charging she'd never have to visit a gas station again. And then with me having the Ford Flex (and the Jeep), we'd have an ICEV with plenty of seating that could handle any time we need to take the kids somewhere, or any time we need to road trip. Since I primarily WFH with limited days in the office, our total familial gas consumption would DRASTICALLY drop if she was driving a BEV. When it comes time to replace her RX, it might be with an RZ. Granted that's probably 5+ years from now.

Who has all the raw materials for these batteries?

My limited understanding is that the US has an untapped reserve, but we're not going to go find it. Is this true?

Charging rate (as we discussed early in this thread) is non-linear, with charging being faster when the batteries have less charge and slowing as you approach 100%. We think in terms of gas tanks where there'd never be a reason to stop before it's "full", but that won't be the paradigm IMHO when road tripping with an EV.

Charging rate is also dependent on the type of charger. A Level 2 charger (that you might put in your garage for overnight charging) is WAY too slow for road trip use. But a 250 kW or 350 kW (current max) charger will add charge MUCH faster.

What I think that Tesla has shown is that with planned charging and Superchargers, you might go from 10% to 80% in 20-30 minutes which is plenty to get you a few hundred miles of range. A few hundred miles gets you to the next charging station where you may want to get out and take care of food and/or bio breaks anyway.

But even a 20-minute stop to charge, requires changing a paradigm for many users-- and that's something they're unwilling to do.

There are many use cases of course, but for me the "fast stops" on my roadtrips are exactly the 5 minutes it takes to gas-n-go.  The "long stops" on my trip are the 30 minutes it takes to gas up the car, cycle the kids through the bathroom, grab some food to eat in the car, and hit the accelerator.  In no circumstances do my "long stops" on a family roadtrip, involve dining in a leisurely way that would take 45 minutes or more.

Not every trip we take is a long-haul roadtrip, of course.  If we're only going somewhere 2-3 hours away, I consider that a Sunday drive, and stopping off for a leisurely lunch would not only enable time to charge, but also enjoy spending time at a (hopefully) pleasant destination point.  In those cases, an EV would fit the needs.