You don’t have to be stupid to buy into the EV claims.

America is steadily switching to electricity for its driving fuel. But the early days of EV ownership are filled with bugs and small frustrations. Even the aspects of the experience that promise to be easy aren’t always easy at first.

When J.D. Power analysts studied the experience of using public EV chargers, they found drivers frustrated with defective chargers and balky payment apps. More than 20% of public charging attempts last year ended in failure, analysts found.

But that’s OK because public charging is rare, right? The promise of electric cars includes an easy, cheap refuel at home every night while you sleep.

That’s not working out well yet, either.

But it helps.

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— catranchdream (@catranchdream) February 16, 2023

Business Insider;

Axios reporter Joann Muller said her husband took the electric car on a 1,500 mile road trip — she joined him part-way through — to see if the US is truly ready for mass EV adoption. While electric cars are becoming more prevalent, charging infrastructure isn’t quite what it should be, Muller wrote.

“We were constantly thinking about where to charge next,” Muller wrote of her experience during the trip. “It occupied our minds more than where to eat or spend the night.”

They stopped 12 times to recharge the car, which has an estimated battery range of 274 miles, over the course of the 1,500 mile, four-day journey, and that charging times were between 20 to 55 minutes.[…]

Muller said her husband drove the car alone from Detroit to Washington DC, where they met up to head to Florida. During his solo portion of the trip, he said he was so “anxious” about the drain cold temperatures would have on the battery that he didn’t use the cabin heat, choosing instead to rely on the heated steering wheel and seats.

… Ford shares are sliding after the carmaker announced that it has paused production and shipments of its electric F-150 Lightning pickup due to a potential battery issue.

We tried to warn them.

Here’s how much electricity prices have surged in parts of New England this winter: For some drivers of electric vehicles and hybrid cars, it’s now more expensive to charge up than to fill up.

Power rates across the region have jumped an average of 30% since last summer, while gasoline prices have receded well below their peak in June of 2022. Web engineer Matt Cain, who lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, said he ran a price comparison when his electricity bill shot up in January and found that his overall costs for utilities had climbed a whopping 50%.

“We have a Prius Prime that we normally drive around town, and we drive most of it on electricity. It’s now 50% more expensive than fueling it with gas,” he told CBS MoneyWatch.

Click the nice pic.

Yes, it’s true.

As I watch my family strike out on foot across the fields into driving rain and gathering darkness, my wife holding each child’s hand, our new year plans in ruins, while I do what I can to make our dead car safe before abandoning it a mile short of home, full of luggage on a country lane, it occurs to me not for the first time that if we are going to save the planet we will have to find another way. Because electric cars are not the answer.

Yes, it’s the Jaguar again. My doomed bloody £65,000 iPace that has done nothing but fail at everything it was supposed to do for more than two years now, completely dead this time, its lifeless corpse blocking the single-track road.\

I can’t even roll it to a safer spot because it can’t be put in neutral.

And this isn’t a car, it’s a laptop on wheels.