This post is for anyone considering buying an EV but is reluctant due to range anxiety. I was one of those people until a month ago. Even though I knew that just about all my drives were 10 miles or less, I still had difficulty with the idea of not having a quick and convenient means of charging the car. The stories of broken public chargers had me imagining myself and my family stranded on the side of the highway (in the rain) waiting for a flatbed to haul us home. But then I discovered the cure for this anxiety: we bought an EV (in the picture, being charged at home by Mr. Bones).

I’m not going to get into how unbelievable EVs are to drive (let’s just say that as a form of transportation, an EV is to a gas car like a gas car is to a horse). But what cured my range anxiety were two things. First, I was right: we would never need to use a public charger, even with an EV that has a relatively limited range (220 miles). We are able to drive all week and only need to charge the car once a week, which we do overnight at home.

The second part of the cure is that the car worries about range for us. When we use the car’s map to guide us to a destination, it will tell us what the battery level will be when we arrive and when we return. In addition, the car will alert us when the battery gets down to 20% and will display a map of all the nearby chargers that are operating and not occupied. While we’ve never needed to use a public charger, it’s great that the car can direct us to one if needed.

Since we bought an EV, I no longer ever think about whether the car has enough energy to get us to where we want to go. And that old problem of hopping into the gas car, needing to go somewhere, and realizing that we have to stop at a gas station on the way because the tank is almost empty is for us, like gas cars (and horses), a thing of the past. If you are considering an EV but are paralyzed by anxiety over the range, the cure is simple: just get the EV.

Please note: as stated in the opening, this post is for people considering getting an EV. Please read the following before leaving a comment:

1. The problem of the environmental destruction caused by cobalt mining is not specific to EVs; all lithium ion batteries use cobalt, so if you have a phone, computer, etc., your products are part of the problem.

2. Child labor is a problem in many supply chains, from phones to coffee to clothing, even in American meat processing. Don’t try to pin it on EVs.

3. Electric vehicles are far more efficient than gas-powered cars; 85-90% of the power in an EV battery goes into forward motion, while only 25% of the energy of gas goes into forward motion, with the rest wasted as heat.

4. While lithium-ion fires are harder to put out, according to DOT figures from 2022, gas cars are 61 times more likely to catch fire than an EV. So if you are not worried about your gas car catching fire, I am 61 times less worried about my EV catching fire. And battery technologies are advancing all the time. The difficulty of extinguishing battery fires will soon be a problem of the past.

5. While the particulate pollution of EVs from tire wear is higher than similar-sized gas cars due to their higher weight, the tire wear is actually similar to that of large SUVs, which far outnumber EVs. Tire manufacturers are working on harder compounds for EVs to address this problem, and the overall negative environmental impact of gas cars is still far higher than EVs.

6. If you declare that you are a “gasser for life,” good for you, however, you will simply be reminding us of those people who, when the world transitioned from another inefficient 19th century technology, the incandescent bulb, to LEDs, declared that they would never switch and began hoarding light bulbs. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, “crazy is as crazy does.”