So, where is all this EV stuff headed?
Ultimately, I see a lot of parallels to my own industry (data storage). There are a lot of technical advantages of a fully electric powertrain relative to internal combustion. Instant torque being one of them, for a different (improved?) driving experience. No tailpipe emissions causing local air pollution in densely-populated areas. Less mechanical complexity without needing a very complicated transmission to make it smooth and improve fuel efficiency like in an ICEV. More design freedom in the way that you can move mass (batteries) around that can lower the vehicle CoG and actually make it handle better. Reduced maintenance costs. Regenerative braking which is a range extender but also saves wear and tear on brakes. If you can charge at home, you may go months and months between "fueling" outside your own home--something that I think is an unheralded benefit.
The problem(s) at this point are largely economic--battery capacity and cost is such that to have robust range, the only people who can realistically drive BEVs are people who are at the "luxury" end of the automotive spectrum.
This is the same thing I saw in the storage industry. There are a lot of technical advantages for SSDs in the compute space--i.e. in your desktop, laptop, hosting your operating system and applications. Performance, power consumption, resistance to mechanical damage, and variety of form factor are a handful of those. But early in the transition, the cost of SSDs were simply too high. The only people who really could use them were gamers (who will spend crazy money for performance), and power users who typically use their PC to drive their business. People who were compiling code, doing video editing, or anything else where the storage was the bottleneck of their PC and slowed down their productivity absolutely were the first to make the switch.
What eventually happened in the storage industry is that the cost came down enough that for "enough" capacity, SSDs could be on par with HDD or close enough that the benefits outweighed the cost savings. Ultimately an HDD is going to have a "floor cost", because there are certain aspects of the BOM that are simply non-negotiable. The industry kept pushing up capacity at that "floor cost" beyond what most people needed, while the SSD industry had a MUCH lower "floor cost" so they could reduce price by sacrificing capacity. If the lowest capacity HDD available at floor cost is 1TB, and the SSD industry can make a 256GB SSD for a lower cost than a 1TB HDD, the only people who still buy that HDD are those with "capacity anxiety"--but in our increasingly cloud-driven world where a lot of people don't need more than 100-150GB of local storage, people learned that they didn't actually need all that capacity. And now the industry has progressed to the point where 1TB SSDs are almost at parity with 1TB HDDs, and the HDD is basically not used anywhere for primary storage in the PC space.
I think eventually we'll see that as the direction the BEV industry goes. Right now it's expensive and premium, and so people are looking for reasons NOT to buy one because they can't realistically afford it anyway. But pricing are dropping. It won't be too long before a 300 mi range BEV is at or better price parity with an ICEV. Once we hit that point, people will start asking why they want a smelly, loud, slow ICEV that they have to drive to the gas station once every week or two to fill up?
I also think that we'll start seeing more variety in the market. If you have a multi-family vehicle, and you can save a HUGE chunk of money to have a small 100 mi range "commuter car" just for going to work and back and various errands, but then you have your 300+ mi range car for when you need it, a new market might appear for those small reduced-range vehicles. Just as eventually we invented a market for Chromebooks, stripped-down PCs that didn't need much storage at all but were "good enough" for daily use when what most people need is essentially a thin client. My wife and I could easily get by with one 100 mi range vehicle and one "high range" vehicle. The number of times per month that we need >100 mi range in a day can probably be counted on one hand, and it's likely not going to require all the fingers. Especially if there are robust easily accessible public charging option--if we wanted to drive to LA for some reason (~60 mi) and could add back 30-40 mi of range while parked and doing whatever we're doing, a 100 mi range vehicle would easily cover the round trip.
Does that mean ICEV will go away entirely? No, I don't think so. The truth is that there are some workloads where high uptime and low refueling time make it difficult to impossible for BEV to compete, and range/weight needs would make batteries cost prohibitive. (Note: we see the same in the SSD/HDD industry; SSDs dominate personal compute but HDDs absolutely dominate data center storage, a quickly growing demand driver.)
But ultimately it's going to come down to battery prices. They're coming down, but they're not there yet.
I do think that for most consumers, by the time we get to 2035 a BEV won't just make technological sense, it'll make economic sense.
