In the context of the question being posted electric cars don’t move the needle for productivity. I spent three glorious days with a Tesla performance M3 in Texas recently. The driving experience is, for me, unparalleled. But it was definitely not more productive by any metric I’d use.
Potential downsides entirely ruin the concept. Think of having to find charging spot every week, potential waiting for days if not weeks for one to open up. The continuous degradation of range. The charge time on longer trips, with the potential of having to wait the mentioned days or weeks on each charging session.
I own an electric car, and I know many, many others that own them as well. Everything you've written is ludicrous - I can assure you nobody is waiting days or weeks to charge. If anything the situation is much better than gas cars as 99% of the time I just charge at home.
That wasn’t my experience at all. I spent substantially more time and cognitive energy keeping it topped off than i ever have an ICE vehicle. I’m sure if I lived in the area I could have installed a charger of sufficient capacity to start off every morning at 80% but i needed to hit a supercharger for 20+ minutes per day to do that.
Not a big deal. And on long trips with an electric car, don't you have to plan around relatively extended stops at (currently) relatively rare charging stations?
Not really, no. Took a drive from Seattle to Oregon a bit ago (200 miles one way), never once have i planned around charging stations or even thought of them.
Took a quick look at the map of the superchargers exactly once before the trip, just to doubly make sure there are any at all on the way, and that was it. The car navigation system automatically added the needed one to the path and showed exactly the calculated amount of charge i should have left by the time i get to the charger and/or destination. There were at least 6 supercharger stations on the path to my destination (didnt even look at the regular chargers).
I didnt charge my car prior to the trip, it had about 40% charge before I headed out. A bit past halfway through to the destination, i stopped at a supercharger (that the car notified me about and added as a stop on the navigation as soon as i started the trip, because it calculated i won't have enough charge to make it to the destination). Charged the car to 90% in about 40 mins tops (was one of the older v2 145kW superchargers, the v3 ones that I've seen before are much faster), went to mcdonalds and stretched my legs in the meantime.
There was a tradeoff of stops vs charge time: i waited to 90% to avoid additional supercharger stops, but if i was ok with those, my stop time would have been even shorter, because the charge speed is faster the less charge you have, it is like a logarithmic curve. I.e., about 10 mins of wait for 100 miles of range on the lower end of the charge, but 40 mins if i want to reach the 90% (with the total range being about 330 miles total).
I went into a lot of detail to explain things here, but during that trip (around 400 miles total), at no point have i even thought of or planned for charging specifically, the navigation system handled it for me just fine with pretty much no detours. And i wasn't driving through dense city areas either. Once i got out of Seattle and nearby areas (about 30 mins into the trip), it was all rural areas through and through, but somehow they still had about 7 supercharger stations conveniently placed on the way.
It's very regional. There are 2 route variations for me to travel to a large city 300 miles away, with one of them having a clear disadvantage (a stop further from the highway by a meaningful amount).
Of course electric cars are a big improvement in many ways. But it’s not revolutionary in the same way as cars compared with horses. The usage pattern between ICE and electric cars are more or less he same, while a horse require care for significant time several times a day whether you use it or not. Not to talk about the space requirement, speed, range or power.
