What sort of range would you consider to be the minimum acceptable for your main car? And what figure (if it's different) would mean that you would consider the range to effectively be unlimited?
Thanks for starting this discussion!
As we've already seen, answers will be widely varied, depending on the lifestyle, needs and wants of individual drivers.
...a car with a range of about 150 to 200 miles would be pretty sufficient for most of my driving needs, so long as charging was fast and convenient!
Well, the "...so long as charging was fast and convenient" factor is a very important part of the question. If it was as fast and convenient to recharge a PEV as it is to fill up a gasmobile's tank, then probably most people would be quite happy to get long with only 100 miles of real-world range, altho if you add in a safety margin for range reduction due to for cold weather, running the A/C or heater, and a bit more for loss of capacity due to aging, you could get that up to 140-150 miles quite easily.
Unfortunately, recharging a PEV en-route is not fast, and quite often it's not convenient, because public EV charging stations are quite rare in most areas, and the incidence of finding one which is out of order is unfortunately fairly common, other than for Tesla Superchargers, which are well-maintained.
What we ought to consider is that for gasmobiles, it's pretty much a rule of thumb that they all have gas tanks which give them at least a 300 mile range. So it seems pretty obvious that as prices for batteries gradually come down, average PEV range will gradually climb toward that 300 mile ideal. 300 miles may well be more than most people actually
need, but it seems pretty clear that this is what the average person
wants in range for his primary car. But of course, that's only the average; some will want more, some will be entirely happy to settle for less. As we've already seen in comments to this thread, some will happily settle for a
lot less.
I think needed range really comes down to whether it is a 1 or 2 car household.
Right. One solution popular among PEV owners is to have what is called a "hybrid garage", with one BEV and one gasmobile or PHEV.
And that opens up another subject for discussion, or can of worms, depending on how you look at it. Some people will aim for getting a BEV that is strictly to be used as a commuter vehicle, with rather limited range; this is often called a "city car".
But then, we've seen many reports from BEV drivers on InsideEVs who say that once they get their BEV, they enjoy driving it so much that they drive it whenever possible, and the gasmobile winds up not getting used much.
So again, answers to this question -- "For 'hybrid garage' owners, what percentage of your daily trips use the BEV, and what percentage use the other car?" -- are going to be all over the map, based on individual choices. And this is another case where the inevitable increase over time of average BEV range is going to cause a gradual increase in how often the BEV gets used.
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Speaking to my own individual needs, if I was still driving myself and owned only a single car, then I'd want a PHEV with at least 60 miles range. That would allow me to do almost all my local trips using electricity only, while having the convenience of a fast and convenient gas station refill for longer trips.
Sadly, there are zero PHEVs which currently match what I'd want.
If I was part of a two-car "hybrid garage" family, then I'd want a BEV with as much range as I could afford. I understand that there are a lot of advantages to a higher battery capacity pack. It's not just about the range. The larger capacity means fewer cycles, which means the pack last longer, degrades slower, has the ability to fast-charge faster (in terms of added miles per minute), and will have a higher resale value. So while I might be able to squeak by with a Leaf and its ~75 mile range, I'd much rather have a 200+ mile BEV such as the Tesla Model 3 or the Chevy Bolt EV.
