Wow, I get tired of the EV versus ICE debate. How dare I say that both have advantages and disadvantages, and it’s treasonous that I see benefits and limitations to both. I recently answered a question about why we won’t be at 90% EVs by 2035. That’s always someone making those predictions who wants something from you, either money, your vote, or both.

Keep in mind, that’s only 11 years away! In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a downward lag in EVs before we’d see an increase. Consumers are not dumb when it comes to the second most important purchase in their lives. They think through the issues very carefully. We know this because of the thousands of automotive reviews, magazines, reports, etc. They don’t buy on a whim in most cases. In fact, I strongly believe more car buyers would be happy if they did, but that’s a different subject.

Not surprisingly, in the comments, the ones who were most rabid about converting to EVs were people who obviously, from reading, didn’t own an EV and had no experience with the benefits and limitations of charging. One said that just one charger could serve eight apartments. Of course, this mentally challenged individual didn’t at all think about who was going to get up in the middle of the night to either plug in or unplug their car, or for that matter, be convenient to everyone who goes to and from work at the same time. It was just flat-out ignorant about how EV charging works.

I’ll say two things as I’ve said as long as I’ve had this website:

TECHNOLOGY ALWAYS FLOWS IN THE DIRECTION OF CONVENIENCE.

Put differently:

Convenience is to technology what slope is to water. It’s the direction everything flows!

You can find me saying it in the first few blog posts back in 2015. Test that rule on any technology. Technologies die all the time because they stopped being convenient. See a lot of boom boxes lately? How about portable media? When’s the last time you used your CD player?

EVs alone won’t give Tesla a bright future. It’s EVs combined with FSD! So let’s set that aside for the moment.

If you have a home and an EV charger, it’s the more convenient of the two. If you have to daily drive more than 150-170 miles a day, EVs are not the most convenient choice because now you need to sit and charge somewhere and hope for the right charger. At that point, ICE has the advantage as it’s way faster to gas up and go home.

If you have to wait or hunt for a charger anywhere, EVs are not convenient; they are annoying. There are lots of videos out there with people waiting in long lines to charge up. That is not convenient, and ICE wins. Get over it. Yell at me all you want, but this is a matter of consumer physics and changing the laws won’t help.

Making matters worse, Tesla is opening up their chargers to other brands. That’s all great and stuff, but the cables are too short and on the wrong side in many cases, so either the cables get longer or everyone is going to need an adapter and hope that works. Tesla owners are mad because these non-Teslas, to use the same station, have to take two spaces to get the charger in the right corner of the car.

I looked on Amazon, and nobody makes an extension cable to solve the problem just yet. I’ll need one because the iX I drive has the plug on the opposite corner of the car. So much for that. Imagine if you had to get an extension hose to get gas. This is where ICE beats EVs in the convenience game.

It’s pointless to tell me about the chargers coming or the laws. If gas prices drop a lot, EVs will have a tough go of it. Again, that’s consumer physics. I see no real-world indicators that EVs are going to dominate in eleven years. I just don’t see that trend.