No car ever made is a 100% solution, and many people do own multiple cars already.

Most people with two cars actually drive both cars every weekday. If one of them is gasoline, then you're replacing half of their gasoline consumption instead of all of it.

What those people will not do is buy two electric cars plus a gasoline car for their 1% needs. Many people also would rather not hassle with rentals on a regular basis.

But in fairness, it'd be great progress just to get to the point where most two-car families choose electric for one of them, and by the time that happens, batteries will probably be a lot better anyway.

Yeah, I think EV adoption will stall out for a long time at around 50%. Families will have one EV and one gas vehicle. That covers all their needs; two EVs won't. And the gas-burner will get used just as much, since both parents need a vehicle.

The idea that people will rent vehicles for those longer trips is a bit untethered from reality.

By your reasoning they only need the rental 1 percent of the time. A lot of people use Uber more than that.

My own car is only a 20 percent solution. The rest is walking, biking, and public transit.

Uber is very convenient. Going down to the Enterprise office and filling out paperwork to take a drive out of state, not so much.

Obviously I'm not actually claiming any particular percentage, since that varies by person.

I'm surprised nobody does a product that's an EV lease plus some prepaid credit every month for a rental service, so for the one day a month you need a conventional petrol car, it's already budgeted for.

Hell, you could generalize it to small petrol cars too. I suspect most of us "overbuy" larger and more capable vehicles for the one day a month we need something bigger than a Mirage.

This is 100% false and hasn't been true for a long time.

A Tesla can easily take a road trip the same as any ICE vehicle. I've personally driven one across the country. Supercharging along the way now takes the same amount of time as any normal stop for gas.

EVs are already better than a 100% solution because electricity is far cheaper than gas and you can fill up at home.

Maybe a Tesla can make a trip in the same time as an ICE, but only if you normally stop frequently. I'm a "drive straight thru" kind of person, and road trips in my Telsa frustrate me.

A few times a year, I make a ~950mi drive in my 2017 MX 100D (~295mi rated, ~220 maybe at 75 mph). In an ICE car its 13.5 hours of driving, and about 4.5 hours of charging. I frequently find myself wishing I owned an ICE car when I'm on the trip. Especially when the weather is cold, and I'm debating the range impact of turning the heat on vs 12 more hours of not being able to feel my toes. Or when the supercharger is busy and it ends up taking 2x as long to get from 5% to 45% because I'm sharing... or the anxiety of trying to make it one more charger to be able to save time by charging 2% -> 55% rather than 12% -> 65% (to avoid charging past the taper..)

I'm hoping the new models coming with 500 or 600 miles of range improve this. I'd probably only need to charge 3 times.

You need to develop a relationship with a car rental agency. And maybe an airline or rail carrier. You are putting a lot of miles on your car, reducing its value unnecessarily.

That seems unlikely to work out in their favor, if for no other reason than that car rentals turn a profit on top of depreciation and a ton of other overhead, and the cheapest rental cars are only a few times less expensive new than their Tesla.

As a ballpark estimate, each such trip would cost at least $50 after taxes and fees for a budget car rental (ignoring gas vs supercharging or any other fees that would be incurred in both situations, assuming there aren't one-way fees, etc). After 100 such trips you'd have paid $50k in rental fees, vs simply having a Tesla with an extra 100k miles. Resale value is a nonlinear function of a lot of variables, but linearizing a few portions of the parameter space for the current market an extra 100k miles would only devalue the car by at most $16k (less if they intended to hold on to it for a few extra years instead of selling it immediately while the mileage depreciation matters the most).

What they said was "a few times a year". Rounding up, that would be 25 years. In a few years, there will be plenty of electric rental cars and charger stations, and the batteries will be much better.

Right now, the most expensive wear in a Tesla is battery cycles.

The point wasn't that it works out in their favor if they make a ton of trips but not if they make a smaller number. Those figures were approximately a best-case cost for the rental and worst-case cost for mileage-induced depreciation at any point in the depreciation parameter space. If they only added 10k miles then they'd incur $5k or more in rental fees and $1.7k or less in mileage-induced depreciation by the above math.

I did misplace a zero though for what it's worth. A budget rental would only cost $500 or so over 10k miles, not $5k, if they're making the entire trip in a single day and returning it to the same place they picked it up. If that's the case the budget rental would probably be worth it financially (unless they were planning to hold the Tesla for awhile so that it hits a more favorable point in the depreciation curve), and if not then the extra rental fees are likely such that especially counting gas vs supercharging it's approximately a wash one way or the other.

I’ve owned three Teslas and I can tell you that road tripping isn’t at all as convenient in a Tesla as an ICE.

I agree, though I'd concede that we enjoy taking the Tesla on road trips because our kids are young. Stopping at the McDonalds next to the supercharger for a restroom break, sometimes lunch, or a romp in the play area for half an hour works really well for us. If our definition of roadtripping was drive-pee-drive-pee-drive-pee-drive with no real rest stops, it would definitely be faster to take our pickup (the only gas vehicle we have left).

I can tell you quite definitively that a tesla with the maximum range possible will still not be able to get you to and from a great deal of small cities and camp grounds in the US, especially if you live outside California.

If you can afford a Tesla, renting a car for 1 week a year isn't a big burden.

Yet another reason EVs aren't the dominant market yet.

Likely the single biggest reason.

I'd suspect the fact that not everyone has a convenient place to plug in overnight would be a pretty major factor. A good percentage of city dwellers in particular park their cars on the street, away from their home.