This, exactly.
Your other comments about range vs efficiency vs acceleration are issues that I think will be sorted out by the market. Some users will want lots of range, others will want maximum efficiency, others will want the excitement of acceleration. Some of that simply depends on where you live. If you are in densely populated SoCal then range might not be a big deal since there are chargers everywhere but if you live in Eastern Montana range would probably be your #1 concern because there might only be half a dozen public chargers within a 500 mile radius.
Agreed. I think a lot of the initial push for acceleration (driven by Tesla) was due to two things. First, in order to get car buyers excited about BEVs, they needed a differentiating factor. Instant torque and near-supercar acceleration is absolutely that. Second, Elon Musk is an overgrown man-child, and so he wants fast 0-60 numbers.
I think the rest of the market, as it matures, has gotten to the point where acceleration is good, but it doesn't HAVE to be a sub-4.0 0-60 time to excite a buyer. Most buyers don't need that and aren't willing to pay extra for it. You can have the advantages of EV (instant low-end torque, merging power, passing power, etc) but don't need blistering rates.
Same thing with range. The big concern for many people was range anxiety. I think for a lot of people worried about that, they opted for PHEV. But for those who could charge at home, I think many of them realized they'd go months between needing to fill that gas tank, and started to realize that 200-300 miles of BEV range was MORE than enough for use. So IMHO all this talk about Samsung and the "600 mile range" battery doesn't mean that BEV makers are going to start making vehicles with 600 miles of range. It's too expensive, and most people don't need it.
The people who live out in Eastern Montana who need 600 miles of range, or people like utee who regularly tow large loads, are outliers. Maybe a BEV won't work for those people. But they're a small portion of the population, which over decades in the US has increasingly urbanized anyway. So while I don't think their needs should be ignored, it's also not necessarily something that I think will meaningfully brake EV adoption for the masses.
By the time an EV has this battery I suspect chargers will be a lot more available.
This presumes the battery has no "issues".
I agree. Chargers will continue to be built and installed.
I should point out that I'm thinking of a future where the $/kWh of battery tech drops enough that BEV is equivalent or cheaper than a comparable ICEV. I don't expect this to happen soon. If the first commercialized solid state batteries don't really hit the market until 2027, and are a highly expensive niche product, one can't expect a BEV price crossover by 2030. Maybe not even 2035.
If I think about this purely as a wild assed guess (WAG), I could see a crossover point between 2035-2040. That said, as prices narrow and as charging infrastructure becomes more robust nationwide, I expect adoption to be slowly increasing between now and then. I don't think that it's so much of a "tipping point" that everyone will hold off until 2038 and then suddenly switch.
I think as we see now, people who are more affluent, can charge at home, and who can have one BEV for a multi-car family while the other is an ICEV, are already starting to adopt it. People who live in single family homes (detached or attached) I think are ~70% of the US population based on the numbers I quoted a few weeks back? So that's already a huge addressable market.
