> On a per mile basis it was cheap

Just to make this concrete: I keep spreadsheets for all my vehicles, and I enter every single fuel up. My family's CRV costs $0.161/mile to drive.

I bought a VW ID.4 in January, and I also track its recharges. That car costs $0.030/mile. I don't know yet about maintenance, but just for the daily driving, gas costs 5.36x that of an EV. What would be a $45 fill-up of gas is an $8.40 electric bill.

On a per-mile basis, depreciation is a real killer.

I just (like an hour ago) sold the car that I’ve been driving for the past 12 years. I paid $11k in cash for it, and sold it for $3k. Unless you do a lot of driving, it’s tough for an EV to make up that kind of difference based on cheaper fuel.

The story was the other way around a few years ago. It’ll swing back and forth as they are in and out of fashion.

I sold my model 3 for approximately what I bought it for. My net cost per mile, including electricity and maintenance, was a joke.

The "Hype" (not sure why we're using scare-quotes here; as if somehow EVs are the only thing that aren't subject to the Gartner Hype Cycle) surrounding EVs include some of the following:

- Range is vastly overstated, especially in adverse weather conditions (like cold, snow, or even heat) As an example, in spring, when conditions are perfect (70 degree weather, not too sunny, not too cloudy), my Tesla Model Y LR that is supposed to get 330 miles from a 100% charge gets ... 250. That's not even close to accurate. In winter or in adverse weather conditions it can drop down to as much as 180. That's close to a 50% drop.

- Taking an EV on a long trip is not a simple prospect; and even now in 2025 Tesla still hasn't made it convenient to put in a destination and get there. Somehow the tesla navigation assumes (and up until this latest software update you had to do it yourself) that somehow when you get to where you're going a charger will be within x% of you, for whatever percentage of "x" is when you arrive at your destination. Until the latest update, we had to trick the Tesla by making our destination a round trip affair, to get it to give us a super-charger that would hopefully be close to where we're going, so it wasn't a matter of getting to our destination and manually figuring out where the nearest supercharger is. (We use it for Hockey, so we are frequently driving up the East Coast from the DC Area).

- To keep on the Super Charger issues, it is common to arrive and find undocumented issues with Superchargers (their latest updates also seem to have tried to deal with that problem, though it's not 100% fixed), or entire Supercharger stations literally being out of service but not documented on their side.

- Outside of First party charging; the thirdparty charging, like through Chargepoint et. al. is even worse. As an owner of a Tesla, it's more likely that any third-party charger I try to use will have a problem where my car doesn't actually charge. It's super annoying and at a recent visit to Hershey Park PA, I didn't find out until I came back two hours later that no charging had occurred. I don't blame Tesla for this (though it'd be nice to have a push notification warning me after 5 minutes that nothing is charging), but this is a larger EV Problem. - Overall, taking an EV somewhere still means planning your trip carefully to ensure your destination has charging, how you're getting there has charging, and a back-up plan in case that charging doesn't work.

- Like recently, my spouse took our Tesla to Massuchusetts to pick up our daughter from Soccer camp; and to where we were going there was literally a route that was backed up for 4 hours, and another route that had no superchargers for about 100 miles. So we could either deal with the fact that she was in traffic for four extra hours, or we could deal with the fact that no first-party chargers were in the other route and hope the third-party chargers were up to snuff.

- Wear and tear on the car tires. I got 30,000 miles out of my tires and the tire technician said that was pretty good. They regularly deal with Teslas and other EVs that eat through tires much more quickly than the tires are rated for (and these are Tesla approved tires) due to the weight of the vehicle and the braking dynamics.

- Supply chain for repairs. There's lots of collision centers in the Washington DC area. There are lots of vehicles hanging out, waiting for parts. By far the most vehicles that stay out there the longest (both from my conversations with folks that work at the collision centers and my own eyeballs, I pass two every day) say that EVs, especially Teslas, have a much longer lead time than non-EV vehicles for parts, and that there are not as many OEMs for those parts. So that means if you get in a wreck with a Tesla, you can be waiting weeks or months when someone else might only wait a week or two for a part. As the supply chains improve for EVs that will get better, but that's still a concern for now, and a reason why you can't go "all EV" if you do any serious driving (like we do).

- Charging is not yet as easy as finding a Gas station and taking five minutes to pump gas. It's 15-30 minutes at a Supercharger depending on what you're charging to. Luckily most of the super chargers I used have good amenities close by, but some don't. Some are random mall parking lots with nothing nearby.

These are things the hype cycle doesn't tell you about and you don't realize until you've actually owned an EV and tried to make it your day-to-day vehicle. It's wonderful for short commutes to work; but there are real drawbacks, especially using it for long distance trips or trips that include winter weather.

I would counter your charging anecdote almost entirely with my anecdote. I have never had to worry about arriving at a destination without enough to make it to another supercharger, that worked great in 2022 when I got my model 3 and works great today. I have never had so much as a single issue with a supercharger not working or being out of service and not saying it on the car screen. I don't have any rebuttals for your other points: winter range stinks, and tires wear faster than gas equivalents. EVs really need a battery innovation to add another 100 estimated miles to really push them into the mainstream imo. If we can get to the 450ish range that would help a lot.

The range thing is weird, because it’s simultaneously too little for your use case, and too much for mine. What I want is a shorter-range (like 200 km/125 miles would be perfect, it gives enough buffer by being about double the max range I’d ever need in practice) that saves on upfront cost and weight by having a smaller battery that can be my household’s secondary city car. But as-is, there’s no EV that’s cheap enough to justify buying as a cheap, low-range city car.

So instead of my household having one EV and one gas car, we’ve got two gas cars.

Leaf? At least around me used ones are super cheap, although it looks like the new generation might change things up a bit

I dunno, like it might be the best option if I was set on an EV, but it feels like it has a bigger battery than necessary rather than just having a smaller battery, including a heat pump on the base trim, and not air-cooling the battery. (And chademo is pretty unappealing, and lack of AWD is a downer.)

All-in-all, it feels like a lot of compromises compared to our current second car. (A 2019 Impreza hatch.)

> These are things the hype cycle doesn't tell you about and you don't realize until you've actually owned an EV and tried to make it your day-to-day vehicle.

I could point by point argue my experience, which has a lot of differences to your experience, but those are just our anecdotes.

Where I fundamentally disagree with you is that this is still the hype. I think everyone in the world knows these things at this point and talks about them. We are the point where the “hype” is anti-hype with the points you raised.

I don’t own an EV right now because it doesn’t fit my use case, but I actually think the “hype” has swung too far back the other direction.