Comment by PaulRobinson

You’re making the mistake of average use cases.

Your first idea requires new, expensive infrastructure that will need maintenance due to mechanical parts. Given charging points are regularly broken at the moment, I don’t have high hopes. But even if we overcame that: it’s impractical in almost every major city in the World, because you’d have to drastically alter existing spaces, such as filling stations.

This might work in your context, and many others. It might even work for the “average” use case. But for 75% of the developed World (where the EV market is the fastest growing), I’m not convinced.

And the electric cargo bike argument - or bikes in general - work great for the “average” journey, but not many people actually take that journey.

My most frequent drive is 200+ miles in normally wet or cold weather. My next most frequent is 15+ miles in baking hot Summer sunshine in a heavily congested city where I need aircon. Neither would be pleasant on a bike - electric or not.

And I think that’s the point of this discussion: engineering for averages is a terrible idea, and most EVs don’t work for most journey profiles for most of the World’s drivers today, compared to ICE