Now that I’m retired, an EV would work for me
But 70k for a car doesn’t
True that. My wife's retired and I'm quasi-retired, working from home a lot. So I bought an EV last year when it was time to replace her car anyway. Since I was looking at spending $10K to buy her another used ICE crossover (used cars have gone up!!), and since the EV tax credit is $7,500 (assuming you have that much in tax liability), the EV vs ICE decision for us had $17,500 leaning towards EV. (Though in reality, the EV tax credit artificially inflates the price of the EV, so it doesn't help anyway, but that's another argument for getting rid of government subsidies in EV's as well as college tuition and medical costs.) But the tax credit is what it is, so I used that as part of my decision making.
One EV we were looking at was the Kia EV6, which we could have gotten for $50K (after taxes and fees). So a comparable new ICE car would have to be under $42,500, before getting into having to be even cheaper than that to offset the gas savings of an EV. Then that gets into how much you drive (you have to drive enough to have enough gas savings to warrant the cost). My wife and I put 26K miles on our EV, even though this month is the 1-year anniversary of owning it. About 23K miles of that is charging at home. (We drove it about 4K miles on trips, which means charging away from home, but with each trip the first 250 or so miles were charged at home, assuming driving 80 mph.) And with most of the new EV's (including the aforementioned Kia EV6 as well as the more expensive one my wife and I got since it'll be probably the only new car of our marriage), at the fast road-side chargers they take about 10-15 minutes to charge to 80%, which will get you 200 or so miles. That exactly corresponds to have often my wife wants to stop and walk around anyway even if we take the ICE pickup on trips (which we do if the trip involves pickup chores or if it's in a direction that has few roadside chargers). If I wasn't on a free charging plan for the first 2 years of owning the EV, each charging stop would average about $10 (call it 20 miles per dollar).
Even with all of that, don't get an EV unless you research other things. Like: how much your insurance would go up (for me it was $70/month, much of which is the difference between liability only coverage of the old used car vs full coverage of the new EV), exactly how much you pay for your power per kWh (it's probably more than your utility's stated rate, last month for me it was 15.79 cents/kWh even though Alabama Power says it's only 12.43 cents), do you need two cars anyway so that you'll have an ICE car for when the EV isn't good enough, etc.
And in my case, the EV is part of a larger project of going solar and being about 80% energy independent. For me, the EV's local driving and first 250 miles of each road trip is practically free. It's my way of giving my retirement financial planning a cushion against the Dims' stupid energy policies jacking up our energy costs. Future energy costs are one less variable I have to plan against with my wife and I retiring in our 50's and needing enough investment money to live on for decades.