Comment by SoftTalker
4 hours ago
I think a big part of this in the US is that the country is just very big, and between cites are very large rural areas. Yes, for a lot of people their daily commute and errands are well covered by an EV. But there is the occasional 400-500 mile trip, it's just not that uncommon for many people to do that at least a few times a year. And if they don't want to own a second car for long trips, they rule out an EV because charging infrastructure still isn't adequate in many areas.
You might counter that by saying "rent an ICE car for those trips" and that's certainly possible but, renting a car outside of a major airport is such a miserable experience that many people don't want to deal with it. It only takes once or twice turning up to find that "we don't have the car you reserved" and being offered some unsuitable alternate (or simply no car at all) for people to sour on that idea.
What's wild to me is that people are so committed to not stopping when road tripping that the thought of two 15 minutes stops in a 6.5 hour drive is not worth giving up weekly trips to gas stations for that year.
It's not the stopping. It's finding a fast charging point that doesn't require a substantial detour off the route. That has improved, so it's less and less a valid reason. But there are still places where you might go a few hours between convenient commercial chargers. Now, does that impact the vast majority of drivers? Probably not, and the situation is improving. But people hear things like that and they decide to stay in their comfort zone.