I'm a fairly early adopter of EVs, and my family's current collection includes 2 BEVs, 1 PHEV, and 1 ICE.

Road tripping more than about 250 miles in an EV with today's class of 18650-like cells doesn't give me the experience that dino juice does, which is what I want. So when I'm going out of town, I'm either in the PHEV or the ICE car.

For example, a couple of weeks ago I headed out from Seattle to Walla Walla for the weekend. This is a 275-mile trip through the Cascade mountain range with speeds close to 80mph for most of the drive. BEVs that can do that without stopping tend to cost between 3-5 times the cost of either my PHEV or ICE.

If I were to take my $25k (current value) BEV from 2019 I'd need to stop at least once, likely in Yakima, to roll the dice with the Electrify America stations in the Walmart parking lot. When I get there I can expect that several of the stalls will be ICEd because nobody in Yakima gives a flying fsck about anyone else, especially jackwads in their fancy weird EVs passing through town on their way to anywhere-but-Yakima. There's no practical enforcement of the "Pretty please only let people in EVs use these stalls" signs.

There's a better-than-not chance that at least one of the chargers will be broken. Depending on when I get there -- say, late afternoon at the end of Memorial Day weekend -- I will find that there is a line of BEVs waiting to charge. And by "line" I mean people arriving and parking in whatever haphazard way they can somewhere near the chargers and then maybe following some vague resemblance of "first in first out" queuing as stalls open up. Maybe they will form an actual line snaking through the parking lot blocking regular parking spots. I don't know, but for me at least being in a crowd of people trying to get a charge will at least be awkward and stressful.

When I finally get into the stall to charge I will need make sure I have cell phone reception so I can activate the charger, unless maybe I got lucky and found a charger that actually works with a credit card. Then hopefully the charger will successfully handshake with my EV from 2019, start charging, and keep charging without faulting out. It takes about 45 minutes to get enough charge to make it to my destination. Depending on how long it takes to wait for a stall to open up and then get enough charge, my 4-hour trip has turned into what's likely to be a 6-hour trip each way, making a total of 8 hours on the road look more like 12 hours. It will cost about as much as it would have cost to use gasoline instead.

So that's what needs fixing. The charger capacity we have now wouldn't be horrible if (1) "charging EVs only" rules were swiftly and regularly enforced, (2) the chargers that did exist were reliable, and (3) my $25k EV were capable of charging 10% to 90% in about 15 minutes.

Bonus points if I can walk up to a teller, hand them cash, and then charge without my car reporting its identity or anything like that. Because, you know, people should be able to travel without having their comings and goings tracked by data brokers. But I'm just one of those old-school privacy freaks who thinks where I'm going and when isn't anyone's business but my own, I guess.

We're getting there, gradually. Very, very gradually. I am frankly very disappointed in how things have turned out since I bought my BEV 5 years ago. I'll continue driving in around town because it's so convenient to have the proverbial "full tank" pulling out of my garage every morning. I simply don't care about any rapid charging infrastructure any more. I can and will just drive my gas car when doing road trips for the foreseeable future.