Electric vehicles: positives and negatives

I've been holding back any comments because I haven't actually driven an EV of any kind, though the wife bought a 2010 Prius used back when her Corolla was totalled by "a guy on a cell phone driving a truck" some time ago. That same Prius is currently being driven by my daughter. She learned to drive in it, so it's the only vehicle she actually sees as "a car". Everything else in our garage is outside her realm of expertise.

The Prius is an okay little car, but I really don't like how underpowered and fragile it feels, even though it too is still going strong at something over 100K miles. The wife now has a new (2017) Corolla, and I'm still driving the fuel-injected V6 Maxima she bought back in 2000 (17 mpg city, 26 mpg (I wish) highway) that refused to take me to Pickle Gulch last year (ignition problems). Wife can't really drive the Maxima anymore because of all her years driving Corollas and the Prius. As a result, she tends to press on the throttle a tad too hard for the Maxima's fuel-injected 3.0L V6, and the results are plum frightenin'. She always drove faster than me, but now I wouldn't even consider getting in the passenger seat when she's driving anything more powerful than a 4 cylinder compact.

You're used to a Focus, so a smaller car wouldn't be that big a deal. There is a set of expectations you bring to a short wheelbase, underpowered car that make you assume that you're going to get acceleration equivalent to a startled turtle and a ride that jiggles and shakes and shimmies. (The Maxima, in comparison, even with 100K+ miles on it,  is like you aren't even connected to those jiggling wheels and acceleration that is both noisy and exhilarating, but at the price of exorbitant fuel usage.) You already know all this, I'm sure.

So the only "expertise" I really bring to this discussion is a hybrid, short rides in someone else's EV and ridiculous 2nd/3rd/4th/<greater>-hand information from weird "electric vehicle" websites that I hooked into because I made the mistake of expressing interest in a Tesla article on InsideEV or electrek on Google News, which works just like Amazon. Click once; get scads of links to more of the same. Both of those particular websites cited above run a lot of videos - most of which are on high-end, "sexy" electrics like Tesla, the Jaguar I-PACE or Porsche Taycan - all of which are pretty much out of the budget of people like myself (closer to $100K than $50K). They do, however, do a number of articles (usually with video) which compare the features and specs of a lot of EVs, including low-end cars like the Chevy Bolt (price: ~$30K-$40K, range: 200-250 miles) or Nissan Leaf (price: $45K+, range: a miserable ~80 miles). I have watched far too many of these, and especially those which pit a Tesla against a Ferrari, Shelby Cobra, Lamborghini or other "supercar" (Spoiler: Tesla always wins the drag race. EVs have an unbelievable amount of low-end torgue which ICEs can't come close to matching.)

I was casually acquainted with the Chevy Bolt when a friend bought one a few years ago. Even then, he raved about how "peppy" it was, and how long he could drive it without "refuel". It boasted a relatively low initial cost and pretty good range.

There's a lot of activity in this area: I have recently watched (I know I'm pathetic) videos on a car called the Polestar 2 that Volvo is readying for market (iffy - it's a Tesla style EV with the appointments and body of a Volvo, so too heavy), a "startup" German company with expertise in quiet battery charging engines, Obrist HyperDrive prototype, which consists of a (prototype with strong possibility of being "vaporware") Tesla Model 3 with 2/3s of the battery pack removed and replaced with a small power generator, which gives a (very unofficial) 900+ mile range for Europe, which doesn't yet have the charging network Tesla has set up here. The car, if ever realized, would be a "super Prius" with the performance and size of a Tesla, but without the huge battery pack and the Prius' extra ICE drive train. (The engine here only charges the battery pack, never actually driving the wheels, so it's termed a "serial drive" vs. the "parallel drive" of a hybrid designed like the Prius.)

I am personally impressed with how far EVs have come. I was looking at what it'd take, for example, to drive a Tesla to Pickle Gulch only a few months ago (I know: I spend way too much time daydreaming.) and found that there are now Tesla Superchargers virtually everywhere along interregionals and in larger cities, though there are still a dearth of them "in the sticks" and along secondary routes. Austin has 25-30 of them, and there are many in smaller towns along interregional routes. In Colorado, for instance, along my "wish route", there are Supercharger stations in enough places "off-interregional" (Salida, for instance) now that just about any reasonable route that included a few large cities and interregional highways would give you enough recharging locations to make the journey. But, sadly, you'd still have to route through Lubbock to make it.