Electric cars do not make sense to own if you are not also owning a garage where you can charge them overnight. Also, if you are unwilling to add 1+ hour(s) to your travel time on longer distances.
As for long distances, I haven't found that to be a big issue. Of course, I have a Tesla which has a very good charging network - and that's the point. For any brand other than Tesla, you're probably right. It amazes me that the legacy car companies each of which are multiples of Tesla's size don't seem to be able to come up with a solution that doesn't involve getting taxpayers involved.
If every gas station supported CCS it would be less of an issue, but usually you need to find a station nearby and wait for 20-40 minutes if it's CCS or 6-8 hours if it's level 2.
It's not as bad as it sounds, or I'm lying to myself, but having the 90 minute planned stops makes a cross country trip seem a lot closer ... even though it's doing the opposite.
Of course, people who live in car-only suburbs need not apply.
When you a dressed right it ain't bad
Of course higher density parts of the US also don't really match up with the infrastructure that exists in Netherlands, but it's not unreasonable to expect the infrastructure in a given area to scale with the number of people in that area.
When I think about how I would do a long trip in an EV, I envision getting a full charge, because first, that's what I currently do with gasoline, and second, I want as much range as possible to account for unplanned detours and/or other unexpected issues.
A critical component is the trip computer that knows about upcoming construction and charger status. On our first trip the Sault Ste Marie charger was down, and Sault Ste Marie <-> WaWa is the longest stretch between chargers because of a huge provincial park. But the car warned us about it and told us to make sure we were above 90% at Blind River.
I checked your route with abetterrouteplanner.com using two different Enyaq models. One with 50kW charging and one with 100kW+. Here are the travel times:
- Enyaq iV 50 (50kW charging): 33 hours
- Enyaq iV 80 (100kW charging): 26 hours
- Google Maps (w/o charging time): 22,5 hours
I think you just had the wrong car model for this kind of trip.
Additionally it was during December, so cold weather reduced range even more, therefore your estimation would be correct but for summer time.
I think your car model isn't very appropriate for long distance travels, as most EVs. But there are some EVs out there that definitely can do it, especially all Teslas.
You can buy the car and rent the battery. Each time you need to "recharge", you change it.
This is something that governments could solve. Commission a decent swappable battery form-factor and offer tax rebates & incentives to both buyers of compatible vehicles (thus incentivizes manufacturers to make those vehicles) as well as gas stations to adopt the system.
It doesn't have to be perfect performance-wise, if battery swaps take 5 minutes and every gas station supports it, it'll still be good even if the effective range of such battery is half of a custom proprietary one's.
There are 1.88 vehicles per household in the US so it seems like many American households could have one of those vehicles be an EV while the other is gasoline for longer trips if they need that functionality so badly.
The range anxiety thing is so overblown, too. Driving 300 miles at 60mph average is 5 full hours of driving. That’s so much.
If you assume that EVs are barely doing 200 miles of real condition range that’s still over 3 hours of driving before you need to stop at all.
And then if you are going much longer than 500 miles it starts to make more sense to fly in the US. For a family of four you can’t make a trip from Ohio to Orlando make financial sense in a car, like, at all. The airfare is too low and the car travel time is too high.