I’ve been driving a gen 1 leaf for several years. If you want to slow/ stop adoption, low range vehicles and the experience that comes with them is precisely how to do so. Its a real problem. I get and hear your arguments, but they fall flat when pushed against the lived experience. In fact, even your suggestions here make me think you don’t own an EV or have to any experience with driving one, so I’ll share my experience.

First off, you can not count on getting a charge away from the home. Between broken chargers, removed chargers, the system not working, the chargers being occupied, or there just not being one any where close to where you need to go, you simply can not rely on getting a charge away from where you park and know you can absolutely get one (even if its a trickle charge). You can argue that we need a more robust charging network, but that’s a separate issue from their unreliability or even existence. The on the ground situation is that you have to treat charging outside of where you know you can get it as a nice to have, not a need to have, or you will find yourself stuck. I’ve been there too many times waiting in line at the charging station for two hours so I can then charge for 30 minutes to an hour to get all the way home. That’s three hours of my day gone because my car doesn’t have enough range. I simply can-not afford that. If that happens to me once in a month, another 50 dollars on my car payment for a car with a larger battery is a non-issue.

Second, some times you need to make more than two trips in a day, which is about all 100 miles in range is good for. These times are less common but you should keep a driving journal. I bet you do 150+ miles in a day at least once a month. The US is an extremely spread out place. If I wanted to go to Home Depot or similar big box, the average drive time for me over the last 3 places I’ve lived is 35 minutes, one way. We all know its impossible to get everything you need in one trip to the homeless despot, so if I need to double back because I forgot a widget, I’m now properly fucked and need to charge. Saturday is now gone and my home repair project is pushed into Sunday. Thanks e-waste equivalent EV. Added to this is the issue of weight and drag. I get probably 30% better range when I’m driving alone. If I start adding weight, my power consumption increases dramatically. 100 miles of range will quickly turn turn into 50 miles of range if I’ve got bags of soil, or lumber, or strawbales, or any number of other things I regularly need to pick up from a home goods or farm store. Four fat friends want to hop in the whip and go for a drive? Good luck.

Third, rain or other inclimate weather. When you start paying attention to EV performance, its straight up shocking what a headwind or even a light rain on the road can do to your range. I really never considered how sticky water is until I needed to become battery conscious. Where this becomes a real issue is if you’ve planned your trip to be all good in hollywood based on decent weather, and for the first half of you trip you are fine. But then weather comes in and you don’t have the range to finish your trip because a storm moved through. I’ve also heard cold weather impacts capacity, although i can’t speak to that directly.

And heres the crux of it. One bad experience is all it takes to turn someone off for life. Lower capacity batteries lead directly to these bad experiences, and having now owned and lived on an EV for years, I would never in my wildest dreams consider buying one with less than 200 miles of range, with 240 being a pretty firm lower bound for me that I might negotiate on in exceptional cases. A vehicle with that little range is more environmentally damaging than a heavier, more expensive EV because its basically E-waste as soon as you’ve rolled off the lot. An EV with 240 range is a vehicle you’ll own, love, and enjoy for life. An EV with less than 100 miles in range? You’ve turned some one off from EV’s forever.

I want to point out also that embedded in your sentiment is a judgement of how things “should be”, in that you say Amercians “have been fooled”. Which is fine. Maybe things should be that way. But appreciate that things are where they are, and the context of only having to drive to the grocery store and back or only to work is simply not true. People do use their cars, alot. American infrastructure is built around it. Maybe things should be another way, but they are the way they are, and 100 miles of range is simply going to reduce/ prevent EV adoption.