Thinking about "how much users value x" based on the CURRENT PARADIGM is a constraint to progress, and doesn't help predict very much at all. Consumer habits change.
Exactly.
If you are going on a long trip, renting or renting plus flying is likely best. If you are traveling 1200 miles, do you really want to drive for 20 hours solid? I've done it and it mostly sucks.
This is the big problem pro-BEV people are missing. If your goal is to reach 100% green transportation, batteries will never get you there.
When you pose every problem as an absolute, it's impossible to come up with a solution for anything.
I'm not one to make perfect be the enemy of good. If 99% of driving is EV and 1% is ICE then we have a much smaller problem to deal with.
Not long ago, people predicted EVs would never get to the point they are now. The picture will be entirely different in 10 more years. By the time we've replaced the first 90% of ICE vehicles, the solutions to the last 10% will become more obvious than they are now.
When I need a 4x4, I rent one.
The bottom line: electrics are quickly overcoming the 1000Km/charge barrier, in the next 10 years it will probably become the norm. That's a charge level that can last you a full day in almost any conceivable usage mode, so it can cover 99% of real world tasks.
Sure, there will still be very specialized tasks where 2 hours of downtime per day is unacceptable, or some fresh produce delivery route that requires 36 hours non stop driving by a shift of truckers. But that would be negligible in the grand scheme of things.
Can you elaborate on why you’d consider trucking to be a negligible edge case? What I could find online shows it’s over 40% of commercial miles and over 60% of transport for delivered goods.
How much do you weigh the inconvenience of being 10 minutes late for an appointment because you had to make an unplanned fuel stop?
How much do you value 100s of unneeded fuel stops interrupting your life?
Fortunately, it's not necessarily an either/ or. You can buy an EV for 99% of driving and just rent an ICE car when you need to road-trip.
The vast majority of journeys and days overnight charging of a tesla style car is fine. The average driver
1) Spends 55 minutes a day behind the wheel
2) Drives 29 miles a day
https://solarjourneyusa.com/EVdistanceAnalysis7.php
"93% of all vehicle-days show a total distance below 100 miles. It is important to note that only vehicle-days are included where the cars were used that day"
A car with a 300 mile range covers almost all drivers for almost all uses.
So you're down to whether the downsides of owning and operating a gas-fueled car outweighs the downsides of an electric car (having to hire a gas one for occasional long trips)
As more and more people move to electric, there are fewer and fewer customers for gas stations, reducing the number around, and reducing the utility of a gas car even more. The costs of repair become higher, and the cost of the car in the first place will increase as economies of scale tip the other way.
Depends on charging options. If you can charge overnight at home or at the office, then yes. If your only option is spending a long time at a charging station away from home / office, an EV suddenly requires planning.
Thankfully there's more and more public chargers in or near residential areas around here.
Okay, has this been done by anyone? Something that shows current limitations of the infrastructure and projected mitigation of those?
The average American round trip commute is under 40 miles. Longer commutes can be accommodated with financial incentives and legal requirements for employers to provider EV chargers on prem (with pass through billing for the power, or providing it for free). Anything beyond that (high daily mileage outliers) are served by long range EVs and Fast DC charge networks.
This isn't a good comparison at all. You're looking at the set of people who looked at the operational requirements for EVs and said "yes, this works for my needs" and then looking at how those needs are met. What you would really want to do is compare the operational requirements for EVs and the general usage of motor vehicles to see what proportion of the general usage of motor vehicles can be replaced by EVs and their operational requirements.
EDIT: Even further, you would really want to know about the value of different modes of usage as well. So, for example, it is possible that users value edge case usage (such as very long trips) much, much higher than they do day-to-day usage and so still you could meet 90% of general motor vehicle usage with EVs at the same convenience but if the remaining 10% was far more valuable to end users and the inconvenience too high, it might still not be reasonable.