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or the few times an EV isn't a good fit for a particular drive). So I'm not anti-EV. And I'm certainly not like the Dims being all about nothing-but-EV. But I probably wouldn't get one if I lived north of about Kentucky (too cold for normal use) or if I lived in a place where power rates were much higher than we have here in Alabama (unless you generate a lot of your power with solar). Or if I lived in a 3rd world area like Commiefornia where power isn't dependable.
Iow, with ICE you don't have to pick and choose or alter your lifestyle.

ICE is always the dependable choice...Which is why you haven't replaced yours with a second EV.

BTW, EV sockpuppet fake news parrot.. I'm 76, lived in "commiefornia" my entire life and never suffered a brownout or power outage.

If 1 million people in California lose power we still have 6 times (600%) the population of Alabama WITH power.

You and I are in agreement on ICE's being better than EV's for most scenarios. The way we use it doesn't require us to "alter" our "lifestyle". We still drive as much as we want wherever we want. Now we have two different arrows in our quiver so that we have the best of both worlds to choose from. In fact we drive more than we used to because there are times an EV is better than the ICE car (just like there are times the ICE car is better than the EV). Basically, in our situation having one car as EV and one car as ICE makes the two work together for us better than the sum of their parts.

Us conservatives should be about free markets. When the Dims try to make every political decision about forcing us all into one bucket (in this case everybody ditching ICE cars for EV's), us conservatives shouldn't knee-jerkingly respond with: "No, force everybody into the other bucket!" (in this case ban EV's so that ICE cars are the only option). Always and forever our response should be for the government to remove the regulations and incentives and let people decide in the free market what they want on a case-by-case basis (i.e. ICE or EV or both).

The main reason I got an EV is because I fear the Dims' stupid war on energy will keep getting worse. So I installed a lot of solar and converted my two natural gas appliances to electric and did other energy efficiency upgrades to the house. It worked as well as I anticipated (I predicted it'd provide 50% to 60% of all our power needs, and it provided 58%). So I implemented the Phase II upgrade I had originally planned (but was waiting to make sure Phase I worked well) and added to my solar and inverter capacity and battery storage and bought an EV (since my wife's car needed replacing anyway). We now buy 20% of our power from the grid because the other 80% of the power we use comes from our solar. The EV is part of that 80% energy independence by extending use of that homemade power out onto the road (for local driving, or the first 250-ish miles on a weekend trip). No natural gas bill. Little cost for gas at the pump (only for what little we drive the pickup and filling up the gas can for the lawn mower) and a small power bill.

EV's and solar wouldn't work for everybody. There are many variables that have to be in your favor for it to be worth it. (Again, the Dims are always wrong with their one-size-fits-all philosophy.) But the combination of solar and one EV and one ICE has worked well for us in Alabama since we bought the EV (June 2022) and upgraded the solar (end of August 2022). And that's with fall and winter weather (worst part of the year for solar). It'll be interesting to see the full year's results when we reach the 1-year anniversary of the solar upgrade at the end of August and see how well it all works over the spring and summer.

If I had my way, though, this project would be a bad idea because we'd soon win back control of government and energy would go back to being dependable and cheap. I did this energy project as a hedge against possible Dim forever control or in case future Republican control is either too weak or too temporary to make meaningful advances in energy.