when most drivers do on average less than 100 a day I would struggle to see why car makers would develop anything with such range.
Because outside of EV bubbles there is less desire amongst the general public for the idea that you charge your car up every single day. You don't need to want to do 500 miles in a single day for long range to be something that would convert you to EV. It's more flexible and if we want the general public to embrace EV properly we need to make every effort to ensure that it replicates as many of the considerable benefits to an ICE car as possible. One of these is that if you drive 200 miles to a meeting and back, get home late and forget to charge your car you're not late for work the next morning or that if you drive to the airport for a holiday and pay for the long stay parking because you don't have £600000 to park in short stay you don't arrive at 1am on the Ryanair from Spain and find you don't have enough battery left from the drive up to just drive home.
We've all woken up and realised we forgot to charge the phone.
My partner isn't really a car person. She likes her Mini and Mini's in general but not much beyond that. I've been trying to persuade her that an electric Mini would be an excellent replacement for her Cooper but at the moment she cannot see past the range - 90% of her driving is under 10 miles but she (well, when things are normal) likes to visit her Mum who lives 200 miles away. Her Mum has no car charging point and even though I point out that the services she always stops at for at least a 20 minute cup of tea on the way up and back has charging points she says she worries they'll be full. Some of this is irrational - but this irrational thought process is present in vast swathes of the motoring public and will hamper adoption. People who think EV's are amazing because they do 0-60 in 2 seconds and have no company car tax can argue about how you can just fast charge or how you don't need range as much as they want but they won't get through to many people doing that.
Long range gives convenience, comfort of thought and adds practicality. If an electric car can reliably do over 500 miles on a single charge suddenly you've almost fixed entirely the lack of home charging problem once quicker charging becomes more widespread.
The problem with a petrol or diesel engine is that for the end user its absolutely ideal. It's flexible, it takes 120 seconds to fully fuel, you can go up to 800 miles on a tank, the fuel itself is inexpensive for what you get and it's widespread. The majority of EV benefits are external to the end user. This is what is going to make the push difficult and why they need to ban petrol cars to do it - objectively, for most people, EV's are a gimmick and a petrol car is just more useful.
The more I think about this the more I think we're heading the wrong way. To fix the emissions problem I think enticing widespread adoption of PHEV vehicles - with mandatory zero emission zones in urban areas - would have been a better strategy. Nobody loses the practicality they crave from ICE but everyone gains zero emission running in town centres where people sitting in a queue in a diesel is a genuine problem.
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