Comment by stackghost

I say this as someone who will be buying an EV as his next vehicle:

EV proponents have a strong propensity to gloss over the very real drawbacks of battery-only vehicles:

- Towing anything outside of charging infrastructure/away from the highway rest stops is not feasible because of the range reduction, which in USA/Canada is a major reason to buy an SUV/pickup. Why buy an electric vehicle that can't tow your boat to the lake where there's no charger?

- Mileage goes down in the summer and way down in the winter, because the battery packs need to be cooled/warmed.

- Mileage evaporates slowly, even when the vehicle is "off", making these vehicles fundamentally unsuitable for, again, going pretty much anywhere you can't plug it in. When I was a teen we used to take week-long canoe trips into Algonquin Park. Imagine trying to get the kids home from camping on Sunday afternoon, you're an hour's drive away from the nearest city but oops the battery pack is dead because it's been self-discharging and cooling itself the whole time you've been camping. No thanks.

- Venturing far away from the charging infrastructure (camping, rural road tripping, jobsites/camp) is risky. If you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, you can get a ride into town, fill up a jerrycan with gas, and then extricate your vehicle. If your battery-only EV runs out of charge in the middle of nowhere, you are completely fucked.

EVs are great, and when my 2013 TDI finally quits I will likely purchase an EV, but they're just fundamentally unsuitable for some use cases.