One thing I notice a lot these days is that it’s popular for Facebook pages to post an image attacking EVs as engagement bait. It works quite well; the comments are inevitably filled with people who have never driven an EV, but absolutely hate them, and will confidently tell you all the reasons why they’re terrible.
A few of those complaints even have some validity. So as someone who’s been driving an EV for over half a year, here are the three biggest concerns with electric vehicles.
Out of Home Charging
We’ve been driving gas vehicles for a long time, and we have the infrastructure to prove it; it’s not unusual to see two gas stations at a single intersection. EV charging infrastructure has a long way to go to catch up (even more so with certain politicians trying to slow it down).
Ideally, you’d be doing level 2 charging someplace you plan to be for multiple hours (home or work) or level 3 charging someplace you’ll be for 20-40 minutes (grabbing lunch), so the only extra time spent is simply plugging and unplugging the vehicle around doing what you were going to do anyway. This has generally been the case for me; I’ve had my car for coming up on nine months and I’ve charged it away from home twice (once at a library and once at a grocery store).
But what happens when you’re driving farther from home than you can comfortably go on one charge? With a gas vehicle, you can just assume there will be a place to fuel up, and if you’re near a decent-sized city you can even assume it’ll be open late. Driving an EV means more planning ahead (and making sure you have the right apps to pay for charging), and potentially extra time spent. While that time is more than made up for in time savings from regular at-home charging, it can still be a minor inconvenience.
Range anxiety is a thing; as an EV driver, I’m definitely a lot more aware of how much range I have left than I was in a gas vehicle, where I wouldn’t pay any attention to it until I hit a quarter of a tank (at which point I’d pull over at the next gas station). Until the infrastructure catches up, preferably with improvements in fast charging speeds, this is the largest drawback of EVs.
Heat
With a gas vehicle most of the energy in gasoline is wasted as heat, with only a small fraction of it actually moving the vehicle, which is why EVs are so much more efficient.
That said, in the winter we actually want that heat! As anyone who uses space heaters knows, electric heat is expensive. While EVs work quite well in cold weather, keeping the cabin warm eats up battery. Additionally, cold batteries don’t charge well, which can again require planning; you don’t want to head to a supercharger first thing in the morning in winter and be stuck waiting around for the battery to warm up!
I have my car set to come to my desired temperature 15-20 minutes before I leave for work. This morning, with ten degree temperatures, that ate up 2% of the battery before I even got in the car (which was nice and warm).
There are certainly workarounds (you don’t actually have to preheat the car, and the heated seats work so well that nobody actually puts them on full) but it does mean a loss of efficiency. I calculated recently that compared to a gasoline car getting 30 miles per gallon at $3/gallon, in the winter I may only have a 40% fuel savings, and I have to deal with the loss of range.
Battery Life
To read the comments section, you’d think that EVs need to be thrown away every few years, because the battery will fail and replacing it will cost more than the car is worth.
Well, bad news here: the batteries are expensive. I’ve seen estimates of up to $18k to replace an EV battery.
However, there are two very important considerations:
- Those prices are coming down all the time, with more research and mass production. The last estimate I saw was that in 2026, EV batteries will cost half what they did in 2023.
- Every EV battery (at least in the United States) has, at minimum, an eight-year, 100k mile warranty.
This means that if you buy a new EV today, by the time the battery is out of warranty, the cost of replacing it will likely be on par with many repairs that come up on gasoline vehicles (and which, from my experience, also tend to hit at about that age).
If I had an older EV that was at or close to the end of the warranty, this would definitely be something to think about. It’s one reason I didn’t seriously consider getting a decade-old Model S when I was looking for a vehicle: a $10k EV really isn’t worth replacing the battery in at this point.
But for a new vehicle? I don’t think it’s worth spending much time worrying about.
Overall Impressions
Given those disadvantages, do I still think EVs are worth it? Absolutely, and in fact we just sold our ICE vehicles and bought another one. There’s definitely some work to do before EVs are superior to ICE vehicles in every respect, but for total cost of ownership and the day to day driving experience, they’re already there.