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Originally Posted by Alfisti
The charging issue is real, this is the last hurdle.
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It is very real. However, I would suggest that the issue can and will be addressed not just by technological advances, but also turnover in buying population.
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Until you can charge in like 5 minutes, range anxiety will mean EV's remain a niche.
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For you, me, and many others who own ICE vehicles today, that's largely true.
But for younger folks and upcoming generations, things can change. I personally don't like the idea of changing my driving habits, and indeed the way I schedule activity and live my life away from my home, to accommodate an appreciably longer charge time for an EV vs. the refueling time for a fossil fuel powered vehicle. Newer drivers, however, won't necessarily have the same expectations.
This means that charge times needn't necessarily reach parity with today's refueling times for growth in uptake to increase sharply. And that means that estimating EV sales volume potential based purely on the expected rate at which technology will progress - eventually allowing for a five minute charge - will perhaps yield significantly inaccurate forecasts.
That type of judgmental misstep is just one reason - and there are more - why folks cry foul at all the shift in expenditures today where charging the car still takes on the order of hours, not minutes, and where that time is not set to be reduced drastically, at least on a large scale "soon".
There exists successful products and business ventures that faced plenty of skepticism up front due to flawed reasoning similar to what I describe above. It is those who start with the proper models at the outset so they can see the cultural shift before it happens and take the risks based on that data that stand to benefit, and also who help shape the future.