Sounds like EVs are absolute pains in the a55. The only reason ever buy one is if you live in a city with HOV lands and you can use your EV to bypass the traffic caused by the smelly middle class. Other than that dastardly reason there’s no reason to own an EV.
The good news is it’ll only cost you $70,000 for your trouble........what a bargain!
You can get a top of the line Toyota Tacoma TRD 4x4 for that......or less probably.
I respectfully disagree. I agree with your premise that EV's are good only in certain use cases (and not pickup chores, since this article is about Rivians). But we don't have HOV lanes where I live and my wife and I get good practical use from our EV. That's mainly because we drive a lot of miles (26K per year), enough for the gas savings to warrant the up front costs of purchase and charger install. That's not getting into if people have enough money to spend on some of the niceties like zippy acceleration and the convenience of charging at home (as opposed to ICE cars requiring me to stop at a gas station once or twice per week even for local driving before I switched to doing most of our driving in the EV).
Last but not least is my fear of the government forcing more control over our energy sources to make various kinds of energy more expensive and perhaps even at some point hard to come by. The fact of that matter is that I can't drill and refine my own oil to provide gas for my ICE pickup. But I can use solar to provide power for the EV (and the house). Shortly after getting the EV 15 months ago I added on to our solar system (a year ago end of August 2022). Since then it's provided 81% of our power in our all-electric home, including charging the EV (by my estimate about 23K of the annual miles are charged at home).
Don't get me wrong. EV's can't do everything. I probably wouldn't have one if I wasn't married and needed 2 cars anyway (one EV car and one ICE pickup). Nor would I have one if I lived up north where cold weather was a problem. Nor would I have one if I couldn't charge at home (i.e. lived in an apartment). Nor would I have one if I didn't drive enough miles to have enough gas and oil change savings to warrant the extra costs of having an EV. But since we meet all those situations for owning an EV, there's a real peace of mind in knowing that the energy for our local driving is self-provided and can't be stopped by stupid Dim energy policies limiting energy to us plebes.
So yes, there are reasons to get an EV without HOV lanes.
***Sounds like EVs are absolute pains in the a55.***
Every generation has to learn it’s lessons on it’s own. Remember these monstrosities from 1975? I saw car lots full of them for sale. Never saw one on the road.
https://cdn.carbuzz.com/gallery-images/original/80000/0/80002.jpg
it is accomplishing Schwab, Gates and Soros abjective of limiting our ability to move around the country to around the block.
