Or just more range. If you have 350 miles of range and it drops to 300 in the winter that’s not noticeable for 99% of drivers.
We have a 220 mile Nissan Leaf that drops to 180-200 in the winter. We also live in Cincinnati which is a metro area about 75 miles in diameter at the widest span. Most drives are 10-30 miles. The range drop doesn’t matter unless you are doing a road trip.
Recharge time does matter more but any drop there due to slower chemistry is somewhat offset by less thermal down-ramping since everything is cold.
What we need most of all is more fast chargers between cities. There are enough in California and several other coastal states but nowhere near enough between cities in the US interior.
For some reason they put a bunch of DC chargers in the city and none between which is the inverse of what you really need. Is there a grid capacity problem in small midwestern towns or did they just get the priority wrong?
> For some reason they put a bunch of DC chargers in the city and none between which is the inverse of what you really need. Is there a grid capacity problem in small midwestern towns or did they just get the priority wrong?
Likely ROI--Return on Investment. You can predict quite well the usage of chargers in cities from other charger installations. In between, not so much. On my latest trip between San Diego and Austin, the fast-charging stops were almost completely empty. This is in constrast to the summer, for example, where most of the fast charging was completely full and not a small amount were broken.
People have forgotten that gas stations at every convenience store is a relatively new thing in the US (starting about the mid 80s). Prior to that, part of the advantage of the Turnpikes and major interstates were regular gasoline station placements. And that happened because the governments subsidized them.
The ironic part is that "gas stations everywhere" has been absolutely terrible for groundwater--contamination is now ubiquitous. Paying gas stations to dig up old tanks and replace them with electric chargers would be a big environmental win.
We seem to stumble on new chemistries that get to production every few decades so cross your fingers