If an EV were significantly cheaper than an ICE, then maybe it would be worth the extra hassle and expense of figuring out an alternative for an occasional long trip. But EVs are often more expensive, especially compared to a used ICE. So the benefits, at an individual level, often don't outweigh the downsides, even if it is only relevant occasionally.

Used cars, sure, but you're often either paying for someone else's problem or losing out on modern safety features.

For new cars, especially with the tax credit (which most americans qualify for), EVs are cheaper. That's not even factoring in maintenance costs over 5 years nor savings from charging at home (of course not everyone can charge at home).

The point is EVs cost more (sticker price) than gas cars and have less utility.

I'd consider an EV for my daily commute if I could buy a new one for $10K. I think that's a reasonable price for a small car that has maybe a 100 mile range.

But automakers are offering $50K cars and above that don't fully replace gas cars. No thanks.

> (sticker price)

The sticker price is just the "obvious" price you see when it comes to owning a vehicle. But everything else still matters, routine maintenance and gas alike. Ignoring it only sets yourself up for being surprised when those bills come due.

> I'd consider an EV for my daily commute if I could buy a new one for $10K.

I'd consider an ICE vehicle if I could buy a new one for $10K. Have a suggestion?

We are still pretty close to this even with inflation, cheapest is around $16k sticker from a quick search. I remember not too long ago Hyundai was giving cars for sub 10k new.

My in-laws bought two new—yes, new—ICE cars (some Chevy model, I think) for under $10k, total, not each, 12ish years ago. Car prices have gone totally bananas since then. I hate whatever’s happening with that.

Big car inflation.

People who like to stand out buy big cars. Big cars make people in small cars feel unsafe. So people replace their small cars with big cars. So, people in big cars buy bigger cars.....and so on.

So now every car has to have more 'safety'. Maybe if the car hitting me wasn't 5000lbs, at chest level and didn't accelerate like a bullet..... I wouldn't need more 'safety'. So now every one has bigger, "safer" and more expensive cars....... all while American road deaths keep growing with no limits in sight.

One day I will see a Ford-150 bed used for pickup truck tasks. Today is not that day.

No, it's the fact Cash for Clunkers ruined the used car economy. I've always driven used cars. A 2007 VW Jetta. A 2008 Mazda Protege, a 2002 Oldsmobile (until 2018). From 2018 to 2023 a 2007 Toyota Prius. 2023 a 2013 RAV4.

I looked at EVERY used car in a 100 mile radius on every platform you can think of and the 2013 RAV4 with 105,000 miles at 15k hit the dealer lot the night before I purchased (they had multiple calls for that vehicle while I was filling out paperwork). Its because all the old people sold off there late 90's and 2000's cars that there STILL are no used cars anymore that aren't absolute junk (155k mileage plus junk selling for 15k - 20k). This lets dealerships sell new cars & trucks for way, way too much. If Cash for Clunkers never happened, used cars would be the competition for new cars like the Toyota Camry which are uncomfortable, basic vehicles but which set the pricing floor for the other manufacturers vehicle lines. No competition so set it at a high price point marketing it as new even though the rest of it is junk and then you can charge a premium on oyher vehicle options. (Hate the Canry but I love Toyota vehicles don't get me wrong).

All us poor people who just want a to work and back vehicle & who would buy off craigslist from private sellers don't have a market anymore and have to go dealerships. Pickups are overpriced I'll agree, and are faux status symbols, but the used market itself reaked havoc on trucks too.

You’re telling me a dealership somewhere in the USA was selling a brand new ICE for ~$5k a mere twelve years ago?

Iirc the cheapest new car in the US market then was the Versa. And it was not $5k.

Yeah, that’s what they did.

Maybe it was closer to 2010? Wouldn’t have been earlier.

Dealerships do sell under sticker with some regularity. Or they used to, LOL.

[edit] after some googling, I think they were two-door base-model (very base) Chevy Aveos. But I could have that wrong.

That’s crazy. I always knew you could hassle but didn’t realize you could get that much off!

To be fair, I don’t think they’d have gotten a single one for $5k or less, and only got that price by buying the pair, and I think the new model years were about to arrive or just had. But they were new cars!

The cheapest Chevy from 2010 I can find is the 2010 Aveo LS at $11,965. My only guess is that it was some 2010 model that had been sitting for 10+ months and they needed to get them off the lot.

Even with this, a new Aveo for $12k in 2010 would now be ~$17k with inflation. New cars today seem to be around $17k and that includes the Versa and the Mirage. Of course wages haven't risen with inflation but that's another can of worms.

> I'd consider an ICE vehicle if I could buy a new one for $10K. Have a suggestion?

No, but any ICE vehicle will not have the limitations of an EV. I was saying I might accept those if it were cheap enough.

In China, you can find new ICEs and EVs for less than $10k, not exactly road legal in the states, but they exist.

There's a steady supply of used vehicles which you can expect another 100K-200K miles out of (i.e. the lifespan of a set of EV batteries). My two vehicles are both 8+ years with more than 100K miles (one approaching 200K) and neither requires significant maintenance outside the standard replacement of fluids and filters each year - the total amount I spend on them is less than a single car payment on a Model 3 or Mach-E, perhaps three payments if you count gas.

12,000 miles / 25mpg * $5/gallon = $2400

Maintenance is, at a very high estimate, $1000 per year, and that's paying a shop for everything - far less if I did it myself

Payments on a 5 year loan at 6% for a $40K EV (such as the Tesla 3) is $773/month or 9276/yr

On my local Craigslist I can find my vehicle, one year older but significantly lower mileage (85K) for $18000. I can find my vehicle but with more miles (222K) for $4000 (admittedly that sounds low and I have suspicions) or my vehicle with slightly higher mileage (115K) but in a higher trim for $11K.

You'll forgive me for continuing to drive my car or for buying an exact replacement rather than rushing to buy an EV.

>Ignoring it only sets yourself up for being surprised when those bills come due.

It seems like it's you who's ignoring upcoming bills, by ignoring data:

https://repairpal.com/tesla

https://repairpal.com/honda

Model 3 was 30K for the longest time after tax credits and Model Y not too much more. Citing a price of 50K is a massive strawman.

It was less than 30k with tax credits and discounts last month. It is a great deal at that price.

> and have less utility

My SO managed to run out of gas twice since she hated filling up on the way home, and forgot to check on the way out.

To her, the utility of being able to charge our BEV at home is immense.

So because she ignored both the beep and the reserve light turning on you spend quite a bit extra up front. More than once!

I'm willing to bet she isn't that dumb.

I will admit that I ran a car out of gas once in the last 40 years: driving to Flagstaff AZ in a Prius there aren't many gas stations and I ignored the reserve light and the beep because I thought I could make it. Nope! 5 miles short. Maybe the 3000' grade I had to climb just before had some influence. However... never again. OTOH, that Prius that ran out of gas traveled several thousand miles over the years at over 90mph across the West, getting ~40mpg which works out to ~400 mile range. That right there is the entire argument, done.

To be fair, the car she had at the time did not beep on low gas.

That said, most of the utility comes from not having to spend time stopping by a gas station to fill up. Just park in the garage and spend about 10 seconds plugging in the car, and it's filled up in the morning ready to go.

This is really underrated by people who haven't experienced it.

The flip side of this point is for non-trivial distances the people in the ICE vehicles with 400+ mile ranges mostly invariant to speed only now begin to realize how amazingly convenient it is to only have to stop for < 10 minutes every 5-6 hours or so.

Do people who think the only use of a vehicle is the home-work-supplies circuit? Don't you ever take a weekend off and go out of town? You really want to deal with the whole rental car scenario when you're supposed to be off? Or, oh well, I'm just gonna commit to spending a good chunk of my time on this vacation sitting around twiddling my thumbs at a charging station. I got an acquaintance who drove a decaying Tesla with <200 mile range from Atlanta to NYC and back and then bragged to me "it wasn't that bad". Yeah, I was polite.

Lotsa magical thinking going on here. And I haven't even pointed out that in vast swathes of the country the rental car option isn't even remotely convenient.

Honestly, it just depends. Atlanta to NYC would be a 2 day for me. Even in the gas car, I'd only do ~650-700 before a stop.

In an EV, that's ~11 hours on day 1, charge up at the hotel, and do one 15 minute stop on day 2. Before I had an EV, I'd do the same thing, just with ~10 hours on day 1 and my stop on day 2 might be at a different place.

But this is traveling for leisure with family. It might be different if I were really desperate to get there fast. I'd never rent a gas car to save the couple of hours, but also arrive much more tired.

Yeah, I made a spreadsheet about this, and (at California gas prices) my Tesla breaks even with most ICE cars surprisingly quickly (just gas costs, add in maintenance and it’s even better)

The thing about EVs is that they are new so I'm not sure how to calculate maintenance cost reliably. I'm thinking about after 8-10 years. Some ICEs can reliably run "forever" if well maintained, like some Toyota ones.

They’re not _that_ new anymore: the original Model S was sold in 2012. So, while they’re still young compared to ICE cars, we still have at least a decade of data on them.

I do agree, though, that there’s some novelty risk but (a) my numbers only include gas (and I’m not factoring my solar savings in at all because I ran the numbers before I installed solar) and (b) I’m spending quite a bit every year to maintain my Odyssey and basically $0 to maintain my Model 3 (only exception is I’ve changed the tires once, but I’ve gone through a couple sets of van tires in the same time period for a similar total expenditure). I think that I’d come out ahead even if I had to replace the battery (or sold the car when this is needed). Also, the depreciation on my Tesla over the last four years is much more in my favor than the van’s depreciation in the same time.

And those old Model S cars have had high battery replacement rates, often at relatively low mileage.

The 3 and Y seem to be doing better, as well as S/X after 2016, but those are still fairly new.

Although, there’s a question of under warranty vs. out of warranty replacement here: replacing the battery under warranty doesn’t really add to the TCO; also, I assume the battery packs across the Tesla models are similar enough that newer cars incorporate the learnings from older models.

Would you mind sharing this (if it doesn't contain any personal info).

The formula is pretty straightforward, the sheet itself is a bit of a mess. Take the price you pay for each car; take your number of miles driven a year; use the mpg and kWh/mi to calculate the operational cost of each for a year (I think I used a conservative value of like 180 kWh/mi for my 3). Then multiply by the number of years owned and add the purchase price.

Let me guess: you are low-balling your Tesla maintenance costs, because you haven't yet had an issue. Well, guess what, when you do, dealing with it will be expensive.

RepairPal says the average annual cost to maintain a Model 3 is twice that of a Honda Civic.

I’m not counting maintenance for either vehicle, though: and, over the expected ownership time, I save enough with electricity for the Tesla to pay for a $16k battery pack replacement (and, over the four years I’ve owned the tesla, I’ve probably spent like $2000 on Tesla maintenance and $6k on maintaining the Odyssey, so I think I’ll save enough on regular maintenance to break even when I have to replace the battery)

I’d be curious to see your numbers. Based on my electrical costs of about $0.35/kwh and 87 gas holding steady below $5 for nearly a year, 1000 miles driven in my real-world 45 mpg Camry hybrid costs about $110 while the same in Tesla Model Y costs about $95. Tesla however is $10k to $15k more.

The only maintenance my Camry will need for the next decade or so that does not exist in Tesla is regular fluid changes which amortize to about $200 per year

Ps in SF Bay Area and don’t qualify for tax incentives

I agree. In the SF Bay Area, especially in PG&E’s regions where average KWh is $0.40, a hybrid makes more economical sense and it isn’t even close.

The math is skewed even further once you add the extra $500 you pay for CA annual registration for an EV vs. Hybrid (personal experience, Mach-E vs. Accord Hybrid).

Or you exploit the many many free level 2 chargers around the region. But anywhere else, a PHEV rocks.

> Based on my electrical costs of about $0.35/kwh

Definitely it's massively less compelling in areas with extremely high electricity costs. That's pretty much as expensive as electricity gets in North America, isn't it? I think it's significantly more compelling basically anywhere else. E.g. in Ontario where I live, if you're set up appropriately and charge between 11pm and 7am it's $0.028/kWh (CAD), i.e. less than 3 cents per kWh, or roughly 1/35th the price you're paying.

If I've done my math right, that's works out to be less than 2$ USD per 1000km? A difference of 108$/1000km is 1728$/year for the statistically average-driving Ontarian. Adds up pretty fast!

SF Bay Area is an outlier for electricity pricing, average US rate is less than half that according to: https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices... and off-peak rates are typically less than average where time of use metering is in effect (my off-peak rate is less than 1/3 of your rate). My family's EV costs about 1/4 to 1/3 as much per mile to fuel as our ICE (and I typically drive the EV with more spirit). For me, over 100k miles, I expect to save about $10k in fuel costs. I agree that the savings isn't as substantial to you because of your extremely high electric rates, but for many, a standard model 3 or y will offer lower TCO than a camry.

All of California is an outlier, but here we are with 10% of the US population.

I live in Ventura County and the cheapest my electricity gets is around 33 cents per kwh. During peak it's a whopping 60 cents per kwh.

I also assume that chart includes baseline credits and averages out the tiers - your first kwh is cheaper than your 600th kwh. Any brand new EV charging will be charged at your top rates and be more expensive than what those averages represents pretty much everywhere in the US.

> I live in Ventura County and the cheapest my electricity gets is around 33 cents per kwh

If you have an EV (or some other devices), you can qualify for the TOU-D-PRIME plan which gets you $0.23/kWh[1]; at this rate, for my car usage patterns, the Tesla Model 3 is a clear win over any car more than $25k or so. If you have solar, you can drive the prices even further down (I offset basically all of my 2022 bill, but 2023 was cloudier and rainier than typical and so I'm doing worse this year).

[1]: https://www.sce.com/residential/rates/Time-Of-Use-Residentia...

TOU-D-PRIME rate is a god-send compared DTO what PG&E gives its EV owners.

Here the EV time of use rate is 50-60 cents per kWh between 3pm and midnight and 34 cents the rest of the day.

Without spending another 10-20k on Solar, EV is a losing proposition at these rates.

In California of all places

Wow that blows. I'm on TOU-D-5-8PM because I work from home, and in a place that can have warm summer nights.

I stop work at 5pm so I can power down my computer before electricity gets expensive.

And 8pm works great for us because in summer it can be 70 degrees overnight, and the kids start going to bed at 8pm so I can cool down the house a bit without paying crazy prices for that.

I do a lot of thermostat trickery in the summer. During the day we set it to 76, from 4-5pm set it down to 72 (to avoid running in the expensive hours), then we raise it to 78 from 5-8pm, then we set it down to 74 at 8pm.

“For many” outside of California that is :)

I've been considering an EV, but this got me to look at the break even point for how much I actually drive (5,000 mi / year), my gas mileage (30 mpg), my offpeak power costs ($0.20 / kWh), and typical gas prices here ($4.50 / gal). It would take me about 20 years to save $25,000, which is about the difference between my current car and a Tesla. That said, I probably shouldn't consider a Tesla, since it occasionally snows pretty hard here in Northern Nevada and the Tesla's snow handling is not the best.

>"Used cars, sure, but you're often either paying for someone else's problem or losing out on modern safety features."

Even though I can afford it I've never bought new car. Call me lucky but I did not feel like I was paying for somebody else's problems either. All my cars worked fine for me. Some maintenance and repairs but nothing major / expensive. For example used Grand Caravan I paid $5K for on the auction cost me another $1K to put in proper order and then served me faithfully 10 years. Only got rid of it because the rust had taken the best of it.

>especially with the tax credit (which most americans qualify for), EVs are cheaper.

Yes, if other people have to contribute their money to the purchase of your new car, it's cheaper for you.

>That's not even factoring in maintenance costs over 5 years

Well, the data says that Teslas have some of the highest costs of ownership in the first five years.

> Well, the data says that Teslas have some of the highest costs of ownership in the first five years.

Links please? I know a lot of Tesla owners and they have all said differently.

I fly a couple times a year but don’t own a plane. (Of course, that would be impractical)

I think the issue is largely around having to adjust the mindset to plan in advance.

For the roadtrip scenario, it might be better to just rent a vehicle for a week. For transporting large or heavy items, renting a truck beats owning one.

Amusingly enough if you fly private plane it’s about twice a month before ownership becomes the optimal route, even less if you buy fractionally.

I’d love a cheap EV as a second/commuter car but nobody will give me one, and my crappy old Passat still works.

Maybe more people should own (short-range EV + private plane) instead of an ICE car :)

Renting a car for a week is close to a monthly car payment(less true today) - and the more frequently you have to do this- the less sense it makes. I've also found it increasingly difficult to book rental cars in advance that will actually meet my needs. it's a bit of a gamble to depend on that.

Mainstream rental car industry being a complete mess doesn't help - they don't bother to even promise you the make and the model, best they can do is "a sedan with 4 doors and automatic transmission." I have no idea why people don't care as if that's something normal.

There are services like Turo, where you know the exact car you're getting, but, sadly, they're far from universally available. And it's pricier, of course.

In their defense, they have a lot of consumer-friendly policies (free cancellation, the ability to add on days to your rental) that would make it difficult to promise particular makes.

That's fair, but I guess my problem is that they don't even seem to try.

All rental agencies surely know what fleet they have - typically it's as uniform as possible, to make the maintenance easier. Yet, it's not exactly unusual to see that a particular location has a fleet of entirely different make than they had listed on the website. Or, e.g. I know a place that doesn't have "compact" cars (or have so few of them I've never seen one on the lot), and just automatically "upgrades" everyone to "mid-size" - no clue why, they're a good (aka not scammy or too blatantly overpriced) company otherwise.

My only guess is that no one complains or cares about it.

The one I go to regularly (Enterprise, Chicago loop) often exchanges cars with other locations so they probably don't know what they'll have.

Unless I have very specific needs (like six seats or whatever), why would I care about specific make and model?

Uh... because they're very different?

Obviously, if all you care about is getting from point A to point B somehow then you're probably don't care much.

However, different cars have different characteristics, such as safety ratings (how likely you're to stay alive if you crash is important factor for some people), instrument clusters (my personal pet peeve - most cars have very poor UI/UX), rear window and mirror usefulness (in some you can get a clear view, in some you can barely see if someone's directly behind you or not), and all sorts of "luxuries" such as additional convex mirrors, backup camera or smartphone integration (CarPlay/Android Auto).

All those things - save for safety ratings - are quite subjective, so while some folks may just shrug and wonder how those matter, they make a lot of difference for others. The difference between a car that can drive and a car than you can drive pleasantly (or confidently) is probably significant.

Many of those are dependent also on trim level, not just make and model; which makes the original point moot, no?

But maybe I've also been spoiled by German car rental places — literally every single car I got here in the past ~5 years has had CarPlay, backup cameras, etc.

And I'd care about all of the above if I were to _buy_ a car, but for a week (or two) long trip, I genuinely can't imagine caring.

(Though, I guess, I am quite opinionated when it comes to picking my computers and phones, etc; and if I had to use a loaner Windows PC for a week I'd probably be mad too. I guess people can have that kind of preferences in cars?)j

Not to mention something I've been running into lately when renting cars: They will only rent to you if you are from out of state, and oftentimes you have to show them that you have a valid flight ticket. They don't like renting cars to people who live in the local area, and they're getting more and more strict on not doing it.

This is very strange. I rent cars routinely from a few blocks away and it's never been a problem. (I don't own a car and occasionally will take a day or weekend trip with a rental car...).

Where are you and what rental agency are you using? Is it at the airport?

I got refused a rental in the middle of Manhattan once because I wouldn't show them a return flight ticket (I actually did have one, but it's none of their business).

I charged the company back via my credit card provider, and have never even considered doing business with that company again.

What company?

That one was Hertz. I use Avis pretty much exclusively now. They're mostly "ok" but certain pickup locations (SFO for example) are notoriously terrible at actually having a car ready like they are supposed to.

The most recent one for me was in Chicago at Routes Car Rental, and yes it was near the airport. It has also happened to people in my group in New York and New Jersey.

That's not really a good analogy, unless you already own a short range plane that you use for your daily trips, and to accommodate your occasional long trips, you'd need to own a long-range plane that's actually cheaper than your short range plane, albeit with slightly higher operating expenses (and of course, greater emissions)

If gas were much more expensive, it'd be much easier to sell people on EV's, but since there's not a huge difference in operating expenses between an EV and ICE car, why wouldn't people stick with the ICE car to meet 100% of their needs instead of an EV that meets 90% of their needs?

If the USA had a robust charging network for all cars (not just Teslas), then it'd be a different matter but I've regularly encountered broken chargers (shown as operational in the app) as well as long lines for chargers (at 20-30 minutes per car, even a few cars waiting in front of you makes for a long wait).

I thought I'd have traded in our second car (a Hybrid, not a plug-in) for a BEV by now, but have run into enough charging difficulties on long trips to make me hold on to it. Renting an ICE car for long trips isn't really a good option since it's 30 minutes to the nearest car rental place and they have no parking, so it means my wife and I have to drive an hour to pick up the car and bring it back home and may the same trip after we get back from our trip.

A project in the back of my mind:

I walk the dog through a strip mall parking lot every day. There are some U-Haul rental vans that are always there. So pretty clearly, someone is doing daily rentals on a permanent basis. The prices are painted right on the vans: $19.95 / day plus mileage.

  (Or maybe they just bought the vans from U-Haul and never repainted them? Interesting question. But U-Haul has a box in the strip mall for dropping off your keys, so I suspect they *are* rentals.)

I was thinking of doing a comparison between actually buying or leasing a van vs. paying the daily rental fee. Could there be an economic inefficiency where it's cheaper to rent every day than buy? I'd need to know the year of the van, for one thing.

I have been doing this for 5 years. EV for daily commutes, rentals for hauling stuff for my landscaping hobby and ICE rentals for roadtrips. I must have rented close to 100 cars for those roadtrips. Ended up getting a large ICE wagon in the end:

- rentals for the roadtrips cost a lot (about 1.5-2k p/w for a SUV like an X5), and those cars are still poorly equipped. It ruins the fun of a roadtrip if the car audio sucks or the windshield is made of cheapest, thinnest glass. I never knew car companies sell premium vehicles with such low trims. Its a hassle too as the rental companies around where I live examine the car like they were buying it from me. One has to interact with various people and spend the time, and its not always an enjoyable experience, - rentals for hauling stuff are perfectly ok even for weekly use. I'd still love the luxury of owning a toyota proace full time, but there is less of a reason to own sth like this for me.

Van rentals are basically the cheapest vehicle to rent.

Another guy said the "purchase" theory is wrong, because U-Haul would have painted over the van.

It would be some effort to figure out why they're doing it, so I haven't done so.

Wait! I've got it: U-Haul is just parking their rental vans there instead of their own lot. So the vans are actually NOT rented at the moment?

Stay tuned.

I think that's it.

Today I saw a sign above the dropbox: "please park your returned trucks <in the lot>"

So I think what's happening is: U-Haul keeps the vans in the strip mall parking lot. (Do they have to pay the mall for that? Who knows?)

Possibly some of the mall tenants rent it occasionally, and this lets them get the van right at their place of business, instead of having to go somewhere and pick it up.

Maybe the keys are always left in the van! I could test that, but I don't want to get in trouble for car theft. Maybe U-Haul doesn't have to worry about someone stealing it, since they could have a locator device in it.

> Could there be an economic inefficiency where it's cheaper to rent every day than buy?

It's never going to be cheaper to rent daily than to buy. Renting daily has you paying the amortised purchase cost and a little extra for the costs of the rental provider (real-estate, offices, employees), and then a little more for the profit of the rental provider.

If the rental provider charges only what the amortised purchase cost is, they'll be out of business in a few days, if not hours.

Never let the facts get in the way of theory.

The fact is, they are doing it. You're right, there might be some good explanation, but just dismissing the fact is never a good look.

> The fact is, they are doing it. You're right, there might be some good explanation, but just dismissing the fact is never a good look.

I didn't make any statement about whether or not they are doing it, I pointed out that it costs more to do so. That's the fact in this case: the selling price of a non-loss-leader item can't be lower than the cost of providing it!

That there are people doing it is no indication that it is at all cost-effective to do. They may have some good reason for paying more (poor credit so cannot buy a vehicle, need the "daily" for only 3 months, it's a temporary solution while their own vehicle is being repaired, etc).

The fact is, it costs more to rent daily than to simply buy. The theory you have is that it must be more cost-effective to rent daily than to buy.

No, you're the one with a theory. I'm the one with an unexplained fact. Don't confused data points with theory.

> No, you're the one with a theory.

Are you seriously claiming that "U-Haul is running a profit" is just a theory?

> I'm the one with an unexplained fact.

The explanation is not going to be "It's cheaper to rent than to buy", if you're looking at periods that ownership generally runs for.

"It's unexplained" does not mean "It's cheaper".

Just stop arguing. You've lost. We're done here.

> Or maybe they just bought the vans from U-Haul and never repainted them?

I believe that when U-Haul (and other rental companies) sell their old vehicles, they remove or paint over the business-related markings first.

Most rental vehicles kind of suck unless you pay a fortune, which quickly eliminates any cost savings. And the rental agencies don't even allow for reserving a specific vehicle. In my experience at busy times you have to take whatever is left, which might not be suitable for a long road trip.

Renting is a pain. You need to get from home to the rental place. Hope that they have the vehicle you reserved and don't dump a smaller or massively larger one on you (which seems more typical). Then do your trip being extra careful not to avoid any vehicle damage at all (or else pay the high daily fee for full coverage). Then when you return it, you need to drive around to find a gas station to make sure it's full (or pay some inflated fee), then return it, and then find transportation back home (which can be a pain with a lot of luggage).

Sure it works if you're doing those trip once ever year or two. But if you do 1 or 2 road trips per year? Or more?

It's much more convenient just to have the vehicle in the first place. Plus you get the benfits of having it all the time.

So, my Tesla is about as convenient as my Honda Odyssey to drive from Los Angeles to Houston. And, since I need two cars anyways (because of a wife and kids), the Tesla is a great car to have for all the trips where I don’t need more than five seats.

Your 'edge case' seems to be practically weekly, so that's fine for you but not what I was talking about.

There have been a good number of articles recently about the increase of sales of hybrids. Some of them have probably been at the top of HN

If the edge cases are about missing charging infrastructure: this is not an inherent issue with EVs since the infrastructure for ICEs is simply way more developed. It will slowly become better as EVs become more prevalent.

It's a more difficult issue for very long range drives where an ICEs full range is required to get to the next gas station.