When 95% Isn’t Good Enough

Edward Niedermeyer (no known relation to Douglas) isn’t wrong.

Compared to the herculean task of building supply chains to sustain a broad domestic E.V. market, tackling this problem from the demand side almost seems easy. Proving that E.V.s can road trip may have been an important psychological hurdle for the technology to tackle, but it remains more psychological than real: the average American motorist drives about 40 miles per day and 95 percent of our car trips are 30 miles or shorter.

Whether it averages out at 95% or not is disputable, but irrelevant. Unless you’re a delivery person or taxi driver, the fact is that 50 miles per day will more than suffice to cover the  ordinary daily travel needs of most Americans. Problem solved?

We haven’t so much overcome this psychological hurdle as thrown big batteries at it, which is having a paradoxical (if predictable) effect of actually entrenching it. Despite dramatic growth in median E.V. range, to 234 miles in 2021 from 90 miles in 2015, consumer demand for range is always one step ahead. Three hundred miles might have been a desirable figure for potential E.V. buyers in 2019, but come 2021 it was 341 miles, according to findings from Cox Automotive. We could cater endlessly to this desire for more range without ever satiating it: More is always more, but more is also never enough.

This is a great argument, and one that will fail every single time to change any mind not already on board. The problem isn’t whether the ordinary options are close enough to cover our ordinary needs, but whether it’s sufficient to keep us dry on a rainy day. There are two kinds of outliers, those which will we know are possible but are unlikely to ever happen to us or anyone we know.

Getting struck by lightning falls into this category. If someone sold a “don’t get struck by lightning rod” that only cost $29.99, you still wouldn’t buy it, and even if you did, you wouldn’t carry it around with you at all times because the likelihood of needing it is so minuscule that pretty much any ordinary person is willing to take the risk. Sure, it could happen, but I’m not losing sleep over it.

But need a car that can drive whenever and as far as I need it to drive? For 95% of the time, we don’t, but for 5% of the time, we will, or at least might. It’s almost a certainty that at some point, we will need something different than that uncharged paperweight in the street. And that’s why the argument fails. Saying that a 5% need is an outlier isn’t wrong, but a 5% need is still almost a certainty and few of us, in an emergency that we’re certain will happen want to be caught short, unable to help ourselves or our families. Of course, we can always buy two cars, one for every day use and one for those days when we have an outlier need to drive farther, but there’s a bit of a financial problem with that easy solution.

For some American households that may mean owning a single plug-in hybrid. For others that may mean a 150-mile E.V. for weekday miles and a hybrid truck for weekend projects and outdoor activities. Still other households might be able to serve their mobility needs with a mix of e-bikes, public transit and an occasional rental car. ‌All‌ of these options ‌are better at delivering short- and medium-term fleet electrification in an era of battery scarcity than simply waiting for batteries to become cheap enough for every American to own a 300-plus- mile E.V.

Those combinations will likely cover the majority of needs of New York Times readers, though, they won’t work for the majority of Americans for a variety of reasons, both odd and banal. But it’s the fact that this guy smugly tells us how to completely change our lives to suit his EV prioritization long before they’re ready for prime time with a great many tech and feasibility issues far from resolved which can be somewhat overcome if we just sacrifice our world so he can have his that makes his method of argumentation such a failure. All he wants is your money and fantasy logistics, and your life can be misery so he can feel like a savior. Does that do it for you? Do you feel a sudden itch to rush out and buy a Tesla?

If your purpose is to persuade others to agree with you, and they already have a vested interest in not agreeing with you because they are doing things their way already and, frankly, are good enough with it, Most of us have, more or less, established ways by which our transportation needs are met. Assuming that we recognize climate change as very real problem, we are not antagonistic toward EVs, even if we’re not entirely sold that they will save the planet from global warming as opposed to the many other, far more important changes that need to happen. But I digest.

Not only will it be necessary to persuade us that our existing problem is so serious that our undergoing myriad change is justified and meaningful, but that we won’t be asked to shoulder unfair burden and that the change asked of us won’t result in almost certain catastrophe. The discussion doesn’t start from a neutral position, where we can just as easily go one way or the other, but from a position where we have an entire national infrastructure, and a whole lot of investment, in gas-powered cars. You have to convince us to break from that.

My wild speculation is that tech will advance, batteries will improve, prices will normalize and we will adapt to EVs over time as the norm when and if they provide us with an alternative that may not be better than, but won’t be worse than, what we have now. Until EVs are what we need them to be, no argument is going to get people to forget that their 5% need of a better vehicle than an EV is going to happen and they will not be left stranded by the roadside.