Yes, I've had conversations with ice owners and the misconceptions are enormous in their minds.
Practically speaking¹, normal people could buy a tesla and drive it like a gas car, except with a full tank of gas every morning. They could still drive across the state once a month to grandma's and they could supercharge if range got low.
This is due to a couple things that were not in place for early EVs.
- teslas have a lot of range/battery compared to early EVs
- superchargers are in many locations, have plentiful charging spots, and are reliable
- teslas have a good UI to navigate and charge
[1] 99% of the time. If you're an apartment dweller in the artic circle with a supercharger 2000 miles away, please scroll onwards.
Tesla with lowest range has 430km, highest range 650. Let's average it to 500km.
The average American driver drives 60km per day. In other words you need to charge less than every 8 days.
You can charge to 80% in about 20-30 minutes.
In other words if you find yourself near a charge (easy) for 20-30 minutes a week (easy), then on average there is no range issue.
You're either in a rural area in a single-family home with home charging, or in low-density urban area with single family home charging, or in a dense urban area with lots of public charging. Very few sit outside these three categories that don't enable them home charging or 20-30 minutes a week public charging.
And that's only going one direction. The number of fastchargers 10x'd in ten years, the range of the model S grew by 50% in the last 15 years, the charging speeds roughly tripled. Sufficient charging infrastructure seems like a solved problem, resolving it is a matter of a mere operational roll-out everywhere rather than a political/technical/economical challenge, a matter of when, not if, and a matter of increasingly smaller pockets of the country that are yet to be fully connected. (whether it's 1% or some other small percentage, range shouldn't be a driving factor for tesla sales anymore).
Practically speaking¹, normal people could buy a tesla and drive it like a gas car, except with a full tank of gas every morning. They could still drive across the state once a month to grandma's and they could supercharge if range got low.
This is due to a couple things that were not in place for early EVs.
- teslas have a lot of range/battery compared to early EVs
- superchargers are in many locations, have plentiful charging spots, and are reliable
- teslas have a good UI to navigate and charge
[1] 99% of the time. If you're an apartment dweller in the artic circle with a supercharger 2000 miles away, please scroll onwards.