The used market is different for EVs than a combustion vehicle. I looked for a BMW i3 a while back and was only finding them halfway across the continent. Maybe that’s because people keep them for longer? Not sure that market has developed enough to know one way or another.

I understand what you mean about the average person getting it, and while that is important, I think the primary issue is the limited selection of small EVs on the market. As you point out, if foreign vehicles could be acquired without the steep cost, more people would drive them. As it stands, domestic automakers don’t want to make anything but twenty foot long SUVs because of the huge profit margins on them.

As far as ebikes go, I am definitely on that boat. Don’t have one myself - call me a traditionalist - but I wish more people would consider them. I agree that in higher temperatures, or humidity which I find worse, it’s uncomfortable. Though the benefit of (maybe idealistically) not having a car payment and associated insurance go a long way to making that discomfort palatable.

Personally, I’ve got a trailer for my bike that I’ve been using to ride 10-15 minutes to the grocery stores and do errands. A time or two I have even gotten some lumber with it from the hardware store. I thought about a specific cargo bike a while back but decided not to have an entire bicycle for that sort of thing. The trailer is smaller anyway.

The safety factor of riding opposed to driving is the most important factor in my mind. It’s dangerous to ride along the side of a multi lane road. Paint doesn’t stop drivers from crossing into a ‘bike lane’. Even a curb or those plastic bollards are insufficient in my mind. I ride nearly primarily on trails or the type of streets that are small enough not to have any painted lines. For busier routes I use the sidewalk or even the boulevard if there is one.

The more people getting on the ebike wagon could cause better riding options to be developed in the area. That’s political though. Even if it doesn’t, it’s one more person taking a trip not in a car, making it a tiny bit safer.

Don’t get me wrong, obviously people like yourself make these long ish trips regularly and you’d benefit either from more range or better infrastructure. If, like gas stations, there were two hundred thousand charging stations sprinkled through the country, less range in the car would be less of a concern.

I know someone from my college days that hung a 100’ cord out her third story window to plug in her little EV. Nissan Leaf or something of that class. Worked like a charm for puttering around town.

I’m sure the data isn’t perfect, but as far as the averages go, it’s accurate for my driving patterns. Those trips you’re taking nearly double your yearly mileage, so that would certainly change your average. Without them though, you wouldn’t be too far off based on what you’ve described. I’m fortunate that I live near a train line for my regular trips out of town. Not an option for the vast majority unfortunately.

Another option a couple I know took was a hybrid. Most of the time they don’t use the engine, but when they go see family or what have you, they’ve got the range they need without having to find a charger. Pretty convenient if you ask me.

Eventually we’ll have charging stations all over, or maybe light rail, and going hundreds of miles in a day without a thought to battery depletion, but I doubt I’ll be around to see it.

A 300 Mi charge would mean if you can’t charge daily, you would be able to go a couple of days without having to do so.

Given most trips are less than 3 miles, if you had a 300 mile range vehicle, that’s about three months of average driving, not a couple of days. My point was that people don’t go on long drives the vast majority of time and don’t more than fifty or so miles of range.

I’ll use Tesla as the example here only because it’s the prominent electric car brand. Directly from them:

A 120 volt outlet will supply 2 to 3 miles of range per hour of charge. If you charge overnight and drive less than 30 to 40 miles per day, this option should meet your typical charging needs.

They go one to say you can get a 10x improvement on the miles per hour when charging from a 240v outlet. Even accounting for installation of a new outlet to the garage or side of the house, this would be far cheaper than buying a vehicle with hundreds of miles of range and using a supercharger every other week.

Sodium could easily replace lithium in EV applications if people would acknowledge that only 2% of trips are more than 50 miles. Though it’s probably moreso the auto industry’s fault that people have this assumption they need to prepare for a three hundred mile journey on a moments notice.

If manufacturers were putting out cars that had four figure price tags with double digit ranges, they would become the best selling vehicles within a decade and no one would care if it was sodium, lithium, or sawdust. Of course, there is less profit to be made from smaller vehicles and so the corporations won’t bother.

I see what you mean. People use their devices at different levels. That may not be the best way to put it.

My meaning is that a portion of the users will be the type to spend a couple hours digging through each setting on a new device to set it to their needs. Another group will use the device with minimal initial adjustments, and tweak things as they find things they don’t like. Then there’s a third group that will almost never open a preferences panel and just use a device by its factory settings, likely to never consider potential improvements to their user experience.

From what you’ve said, I imagine your in that second group. I myself am in the first one I described; I look at the options of any hardware I purchase or software I download before I actually begin to use it.

Unfortunately - in the context of this post - the number of people in that third group I imagine outnumber us by multiple orders of magnitude, and therefore companies with shareholders to appease will always manufacture devices with as much bloat and advertising and invasive data mining as they can be paid to put in.

I think that last bit is more of a ‘what you make of it’ situation, regardless of how smart or dumb a phone is.

Unfortunately the manufacturers want the data and advertising revenue, and they’d only be persuaded to offer an alternative if they made the same amount of money.

If each sale of a $900 smart phone gives them $100 of ad revenue over a couple years, I’d bet my bottom dollar they would charge $200 for the ‘dumb’ version.