Quote Originally Posted by Jer View Post
2. See my other posts about this topic exactly. My wife and I take regular road trips all over the country in the summer months. This is a direct result of having Teslas as we rarely did it prior to owning them and certainly didn't do it for fun. This is a continually improving metric so between ranges going up and charge rates going up along with rapidly expanding Supercharger network this has become a pretty minimal difference unless you are the type of person who pulls a horse trailer, drives 2,000 miles in a single day and pisses in bottles versus stopping.
Let's not exaggerate. I've told you before that I regularly drive back from Tucson in a single day. Doing that via EV would turn the return into a 2-day trip. I take regular rest stops but I don't want to pend 45 minutes or more charging/fueling up.

I got an EV (not a Tesla) as a loaner one holiday weekend last summer (recent enough for you?). Thought this was great until the meter got down below 50 miles and I looked around for a place to recharge. I got to a public Type 3 charger and -- after waiting for 2 other people to get their hour charge in -- spent an hour getting the battery back up to about 1/3 capacity. It cost me about 25% more than 16 gallons of premium gas for less than half the mileage I could have got in the fun car. That decided me right then and there that I'm taking an EV -- even as a loaner -- until there is much wider availability of quicker charging or I'm in a house with its own Type 2 charger. Putting a Type 2 in my house would be relatively inexpensive but I have no need for one unless or until I decide to get an EV.

I'd certainly be more amenable to an EV if I were living back in Hawaii but of course there's no such thing as a long road trip there and there are environmental concerns there that aren't applicable here.

As far as point 1 goes, the fact of the matter is that you lose significant battery capacity in cold temperatures. That loss is far more than "slightly" decreased range -- the decrease may or may not be relevant depending on your driving during that period but you are really understating the effect. Similarly, you're overstating impact of preheating the car for 2-3 minutes by opening your app versus preheating a ICE car for a little bit longer (and not taking into account the relative effect on the vehicle's range after preheating). Again, if your driving pattern is short distances between recharges then the effect on the vehicle's range is irrelevant. If you have to worry about refilling an empty tank in the winter (I typically don't let the tank get that low in winter) versus recharging the battery at home every night, it's actually a plus for the EV but the driving pattern really matters.

In summary, I would say "not practical" is based on individual situation and NOT a misperception for most as you claim.