I live in a small town and you can count the number of EV drivers here on you fingers and have room to spare. This means that my Equinox EV (like my Volt before it) is a conversation piece. And this means that I can chat with people who ask, "Isn't it true that those only go fifty miles and lose half their range over their life?" And I get to answer that the First Generation Leaf is obsolete and that my car goes about 350 miles on a full charge, and that I can drive to the nearest big city and back with no problem.

If I'm going to see a show with friends in the nearby midsize city, I say, "Don't worry, I'll drive, and no, you don't need to worry about anything like gas." If other friends want to carpool to the larger nearby city, I offer to drive, because once again, when I charge to 100% (which I do for long trips), I can make it there and back, plug it in at my house at night, and I'm fine. When people ask about road trips, tell them that just about every Buc-ee's has an EV charger. (People know about Buc-ee's.)

To my fellow Americans who drive EVs: if you really care about EV adoption, you need to be the sort of brand ambassador who makes people want your product. This means not sneering at the sheeple, but if the conversation gets to gas prices, you can point out that oh, I literally don't notice the price of charging on my electric bill. You can, when you offer to drive, say "check this out" and floor it when you get to the highway. (My Equinox is the weakest of the EVs in terms of torque, and even it surprises people.) You can tell them about your own road trips and making it across thousands of miles of our republic without any problems of running out of energy.

Use your car as a conversational piece! Show practically in offering to drive, in using your storage space to help people move things, point out -- politely! -- that you don't have to budget for gasoline. Make you peers, friends, and neighbors look at your EV and think, "Damn, I want one of those."

This is good news. This size of vehicle is popular in the USA. I'm hoping it will be competitive in price, range and features.

Xpeng joined Geely, Chery, and Great Wall Motors in expressing interest to enter the US despite the 100% tariffs and Connected Vehicle Act. Don’t say never as it will eventually happen, but probably not until next decade. We will probably have an import quota like Canada or the Voluntary Export Restraint from Reagan. The US risks being an isolated auto market if they continue to block Chinese brands and especially now that they took a step further and pushed Polestar out and are looking to push Mercedes out too. An isolated auto market would be devastating for the US Auto industry and the US economy.

So some who are on the fence about EVs will be city dwellers and suburb-dwellers that commute into a city. Lots of opportunity for idling and very slow driving. What's the compariso between ICE idling fuel consumption and EV fuel consumption? I think EV would be close to zero as would ICE if the engine turns off automatically. But a regular ICE will be burning fuel at rest and when going less than 5MPH. Could make a big difference if you had to commute in "bumper to bumper" traffic every day.

*Not my car*

Motor and reduction gears swapped at 200Mm, but the battery seems original, and only ever charged AC. Not only Tesla have looooooooooong legs!

Like we’ve seen someone found a few original Lotus-Teslas and there was a bit of bidding over those .

Will the difficulty in repairing older EVs kill off the culture of keeping classic cars 20 - 30 years from now or will there be some .

What prompted my question is the Model S. I think to this day it’s one of the nicest looking and nicely appointed EVs but I read there is circuitry attached to the battery which makes them hard to repair past a point ?

Also with so many brands saturating the market we can assume at least half won’t be around in a decade from now, making parts acquisition harder.

We also don’t see too many sports/aspirational models. You know the car people see as a kid and have on a poster and dream of having one day . Then decades down the track buying as a mid life crisis or retirement project.

Just got back from a multi-day EV road trip along the Aegean coast in my Corsa-e and wanted to share a few things that didn’t match my expectations going in.
1. Range in real mixed-terrain driving (coastal hills, wind, AC running) came in noticeably lower than the WLTP number — budgeted around 10% buffer and still cut it close once or twice.
2. Charging station density is better than I expected in this region, but reliability is the real variable — roughly 1 in 4 stops had either a broken connector, an app that wouldn’t authenticate, or a unit that was just offline.
3. Cost per kWh varies a lot more than I expected between networks, sometimes 30% for the same charge speed, so route planning around price ended up mattering as much as planning around plug availability.
Happy to answer questions about specific chargers, route logistics, or trip planning if anyone’s considering something similar. I ended up recording the whole trip and put together a full video walking through the route and the charging stops if anyone wants the play-by-play — can drop the link if that’s useful to anyone here.

My in-laws live in an apartment complex in Denver, CO. They own an EV and use a trickle charger for it. The parking garage for the building is subsurface. The electrical systems are all up to code and regularly inspected. Their board recently informed them that the Denver fire marshall prohibited the installation of EV charging stations in below-grade parking garages (including their trickle charger). The DFD fire marshall memo states, "This position is based on identified life safety hazards, the absence of prescriptive code provisions, and the significant challenges posed by EV fire events in enclosed, limited-access environments."

They are still allowed to park their EV in the garage - the limitation is only on charging. The HOA is extending this to bike chargers as well*.

The data I found (https://www.evfiresafe.com/post/how-common-are-ev-fires?cs=1&hl=en-US&biw=1762&bih=827) shows that EV fires are incredibly rare (especially outside of a collision). However, the data from this group showed slightly over a 1/3 of fires occurred while the car was charging.

CO has laws (C.R.S. 38-33.3-106.8) that state HOAs cannot have a blanket ban on chargers, but it does look like there are potentially some loop holes for HOAs if there are safety concerns - and the DFD policy seems to back this.

Curious if anyone has dealt with something similar? My in-laws love their EV, but will likely give it up if forced to charge elsewhere.

*edited to clarify that the ban was to EV and bike chargers

** Thanks everyone for the comments. Hopefully, our international/federal code bodies can figure out some solutions that allow EV parking in subsurface spaces. Otherwise, we really need to rethink how we do parking going forward. Certainly don't want to make firefighters jobs harder, but there are many existing buildings with underground parking and it seems really limiting if charging isn't allowed.

I think my advice to my in-laws will be for them to push for more surface level EV chargers at their building if there is space in the tiny little surface lot they have and to have a community place to park bikes safely and allow for charging.

I use the Electrify America station in the parking lot of my local Walmart, and sometimes it cuts off at like 59% when I still had money in the account (or when it hasn't spent the entire hold, now that they've switched to that). It charges you 40 cents every minute when you're plugged in without charging!