Cars

The holiday season is fast approaching, and with it, all manner of uncomfortable conversations with relatives who think they know a lot about a lot but are in fact just walking examples of Dunning-Kruger in action. Not going home is always an option—there’s no reason you should spend your free time with people you can’t stand, after all. But if you are headed home and are not looking forward to having to converse with your uncle or parent over heaped plates of turkey and potatoes, we put together some talking points to debunk their more nonsensical claims about electric vehicles.

Charging an EV takes too long

The No. 1 complaint from people with no experience with driving or living with an electric car, cited as a reason for why they will never get an EV, is that it takes too long to recharge them. On the one hand, this attitude is understandable. For more than a century, humans have become accustomed to vehicles that can be refueled in minutes, using very energy-dense liquids that can be pumped into a fuel tank at a rate of up to 10 gallons per minute.

By contrast, batteries are not at all fast to recharge, particularly if you plug into an AC charger. Even the fastest fast-charging EVs connected to a fast DC fast charger will still need between 18–20 minutes to go from 10 to 80 percent state of charge, and that, apparently, is more time than some curmudgeons are prepared to wait as they drive from coast to coast as fast as they possibly can.

The thing is, an EV is a paradigm shift compared to a gasoline-powered car. Yes, refueling for that gas car is quick, but it’s also inconvenient, particularly if you live somewhere where all the gas stations keep closing down.

Instead of weekly trips to the gas station—or perhaps more often in some cases—EV owners plug their cars in each night and wake up each morning with a full battery.

I can’t charge it at home

The second-most common reason that people won’t buy an EV is actually a pretty good reason. If you cannot reliably charge your car at home or at work—and I mean reliably—you don’t really have any business buying a plug-in vehicle yet. Yes, you could just treat your nearest fast charger location like a gas station and drive there once or twice a week, but using fast chargers is very expensive compared to plugging in at home, and repeated fast charging is not particularly great for batteries. DC fast charging is for road trips, when you don’t have enough range in your car to get to your destination. But for most daily driving, that just isn’t the case.

But don’t worry, there are plenty of efficient parallel hybrids you can pick from that will serve your needs.

An EV is too expensive

Unfortunately, the promised reduction in the cost of lithium-ion batteries to a point where an electric powertrain is at price parity with a gasoline powertrain has still not arrived. This means that EVs are still more expensive than their fossil-fueled equivalents. But gasoline cars don’t qualify for the IRS clean vehicle tax credit, and in their eagerness to sell EVs, many car manufacturers are offering incentives to customers who don’t qualify for the credit.

Beyond incentives, while it seems like every new EV that gets released costs $80,000 or more, that simply isn’t true. There are at least 11 different EV models to choose from for less than $40,000, and 17 that cost less than the average price of a new car in 2024 ($47,000).

What’s more, 75 percent of American car buyers buy used cars. Why should that be any different for EVs? In fact, used EVs can be a real bargain. They depreciate more than internal combustion engine vehicles thanks in part to the aforementioned tax credit, and there’s now a used EV tax credit of up to $4,000 for buyers that qualify. We’re even expecting quite a glut of EVs to arrive on the used market in a year or so as leases start to expire.

What happens when it rains or snows or I have to evacuate a hurricane?

The problem of inclement weather and EVs is another commonly heard talking point from naysayers and FUD-spreaders. First off, charging an EV in the rain or snow is no less safe than refueling a gas car in the rain. And while you will lose some range in very cold weather, guess what? So does every other car and truck on the road, it’s just that those drivers don’t keep track of that stuff very closely.

The potential need to evacuate an area due to extreme weather like a hurricane also causes plenty of concern among the EV-naive. And again, this is a misplaced concern. If there’s extreme weather on the way, make sure to charge your car fully beforehand, just like you’d make sure to fill up your gas tank. Yes, if the power fails, the chargers won’t work anymore, but neither will any of the gas station gas pumps, which also run on electricity. And as long as there’s electricity the chargers will still work—those gas stations will need regular deliveries of fresh gasoline to serve new customers.

Finally, if you’re stuck in slow-moving or even stationary traffic, you are far better off doing that in an EV than a gas-powered vehicle. An EV powertrain uses no energy when it’s not moving, unlike a gas engine, which needs to burn 0.5-1 gallon an hour as it idles its engine. And driving slowly in an EV is very efficient, especially as you regenerate so much energy in stop-start driving.

I need 600 miles of uninterrupted range

There isn’t really a good rebuttal for this one, other than telling the person to go and buy a diesel if they’re truly serious about having to drive uninterrupted for such long distances. If they admit it’s really only 500 miles, suggest they look at a Lucid Air.

They’re bad for the environment

This is another area where EVs have an undeserved bad rap, based mostly on outdated facts. EVs are simply much more efficient than an equivalent ICE vehicle. For example, a Ford F-150 Lightning can travel 300 miles on the equivalent of three gallons of gasoline. An F-150 hybrid, which gets 24 mpg on the highway, would need 12.5 gallons of gasoline to go the same distance.

Even if that electricity comes from coal-fired power stations, the EV is still cleaner than all but the very most efficient hybrid cars, and most of the US grid has moved away from coal. In fact, the average EV driven in the US emits the same amount of carbon dioxide as a car that achieves 91 mpg. And as electrical generation increases the percentage of renewables, the knock-on effect is that every car that’s charged from the grid gets cleaner as well.

Now, it is true that it requires more energy to make an EV than an ICE vehicle, but the EV will use so much less energy once it’s built and being driven that it only takes a few years—as little as two, in some cases—before the EV’s lifetime carbon footprint is smaller than the gas-powered car.

We don’t have enough electricity

Another common concern is that there simply isn’t the spare capacity in the national grid to charge all the EVs that would have to be charged if EV adoption continues to grow. This worry is ill-founded. Studies have shown there is no need for extra power generation while EVs remain below 20 percent of the national fleet, and we’re quite far from reaching that benchmark. Meanwhile, renewable energy gets more plentiful and cheaper every year, and solutions like microgrids and batteries will only become more common.

Plus, as we just covered, EVs are extremely efficient compared to cars that burn fossil fuels. While we may need between 15–27 TWh of electricity by 2050 just to charge EVs, that’s about half a percent of current capacity.