I would like to buy an electric car but I will not because;

I don’t have a garage.

I live in a very wintery climate and don’t trust the battery to take it/don’t want to heat a battery

The closest chargers are at least 50 km away in other towns

My house has 60 amp service (upgrading that is on the todo list, but it’s a long list)

I don’t trust the battery to last longer than the life of the lease

Most of those fears aren’t completely valid anymore.

You can park it outside.

winter gets you less mileage but not the end of the world, some of the fastest growing EV markets are cold countries.

You might be surprised, a lot of grocery stores and even workplaces have some basic charging capabilities. Plus you can charge at home.

If you have an electric dryer you can charge your car overnight, just don’t do both together.

Batteries will outlast any lease, if you’re looking to get 10-15 years out of a car that would be understandable, but if you’re leasing it won’t be a problem.

Why is everybody so erect for EVs? They save you gas and some maintenance, but that’s about it. They increase tire wear for sure, and weigh a heck of a lot more which wears the roads down quicker (roads wear with the cube of weight). They use less gasoline at the expanse of the poor third-world countries which front the environmental cost of mining and battery production, not to mention their archaic worker’s rights.

In 20 years, we’ll realize that EVs were probably about as bad as gasoline vehicles–what we should be focusing on is public transportation and updated city design to reduce our need to travel in the first place.

Sure, a split of electric and gasoline vehicles is beneficial, but they’re not the environmental panacea they’re being pushed as. So please keep the whole picture in mind when you’re telling people to suffer and sacrifice to give up a cheap, convenient gasoline vehicle.

They save you gas and some maintenance, but that’s about it

I’ll cop to that. My sole motivation for going EV was to minimize the potential maintenance burden in the long term. In my experience, the internal combustion engine was the single largest maintenance cost, for both money and time, that wasn’t a wear part (e.g. wipers, tires). I’m taking a bet here, but the sheer number of moving parts and subsystems in an ICE vs an EV is staggering. There’s just less to break down on an EV, and until that’s the standard, it’s a convenience I’m willing to pay for.

This sums it up pretty well. Battery powered EVs are still a luxury item both financially AND in terms of lifestyle. Most people don’t have the finances or the ability to accommodate one, and I think the people who own them forget that as they spout tone deaf positivity about the virtues of owning an electric vehicle. But tbh, I am not even sure what maintenance you’re talking about that’s such a big deal. You’ve still got tires, brakes, suspension, and steering components to worry about. All that’s missing over the typical <100k mile life of a vehicle are fluid changes every now and then. My understanding is that if you own a Honda, you can do basically nothing but oil changes and tire/brake maintenance and the car will still last forever lol.

What a dumb regressive take. Just because you can point out some problems with the solution doesn’t mean it’s not in the right direction.

Lithium is plentiful on earth. Yes we can’t extract it cleanly now, but you know how we get better at that? Higher demand!

Electric cars and batteries are expensive, you know how we fix that? More production so we can leverage economies of scale. More production so that more research investment becomes profitable.

Electric cars can’t yet cover all the use cases that ICE can do. That’s not actually a problem at all. If we can cover even 75% of all transportation emissions that’s a big step.

People having a “hard on for EVs” and paying a little more for a luxury product is exactly what we need to get to the next phase on EVs and to start phasing out ICE for general public transportation. I don’t know why it makes you upset, but you can’t pretend this isn’t part of the solution. You’d have to be blind not to think electric transportation is part of the green future that’s going to reduce global warming and keep the earth livable. Sure EVs aren’t enough now, but EVs will be and passenger ICE vehicles are NEVER going to be enough EVER.

I’m with you except for the “all we need is more production” point. That’s like the city planner who says all we need to solve traffic is one more lane, one more overpass. We are not going to manufacture ourselves out of the climate crisis.