“Range anxiety” — the worry that your EV will run out juice before you get to where you’re going — is a term that has been bandied about a lot recently… almost annoyingly so. From a common sense standpoint, it seems only logical that range anxiety is a real phenomenon. But since we have so few EVs on the roads right now, the fact of the matter is that range anxiety is, at this point, a made up concept based on what we can logically expect.
And it’s this expectation that is spurring a huge amount of both private and public investment in nationwide charging networks for EVs — the assumption being that the only way EVs will ever become mass-accepted is to eliminate range anxiety.
But will those public charging stations that we’re dumping money into go unused because we have an expectation for a phenomenon that turns out to not really be an issue?