Just Good Enough
Recently, I went on a 400+ km trek with the family in an electric vehicle. While I share a lot online, I blur out many of the details. In this case, it was two large cities, and a leading electric car with a large network of chargers. While I had drive quite a bit in the city, driving long distances in an EV was a new experience and it taught me a few things:
- Don’t think about how much further until 0% charge, think about getting to the next charging station. This is a completely different mentality from driving with gas. With gas, I fill up at my departure and for the most part, I know I can make it the entire distance of the drive and then some without stopping to refuel. With an EV, there must be stops and these are similar to stops that I’d want to take after 90–120 minutes of driving in any case.
- It’s not about getting to 100% charge when charging, it’s about the most time-efficient charging. Going from 80% to 100% can be as long as 15% to 80%. Better to charge to 80% and plan another stop.
- Range anxiety is from a lack of planning. Planning is easy.
- On an open road with little engine noise, there isn’t much difference in the driving experience between 125 km/h and 150 km/h and it takes hardly any time to accelerate to break-neck speeds. It’s easy to overspeed if not paying attention.
- The charging network locations are not the same as the highway rest areas. The amenities are not as convenient or open at odd hours.
- Estimated range is 30–50% more optimistic than reality and doesn’t account for the drop in efficiency due to cold weather.
Despite all of the limitations experienced, my assessment as a first-time long-distance EV driver is that the technology is good enough. It’s not as good of an experience as a gas car for long distances, but it’s good enough for it not to be a disqualification. While there is much room for improvement, EVs have been mainstream for more than a decade. They were expensive but are price-competitive with gas-powered vehicles.
“Just good enough” is the point where technologies need to arrive to be able to jump from the “early adopters” to the “early majority” in Crossing the Chasm parlance. The new technology doesn’t need to necessarily outperform every aspect of the existing technology but needs to get past the major hurdles while offering a new experience.
In the EV scenario, the fact that I can charge my car at home, get access to so much more information and control from the car out-of-the-box, be in a cool futuristic vehicle, and get a warm and fuzzy feeling about not burning fossil fuels is enough to overcome not having as good of a range as an equivalent gas-powered option. The price was the same but the overall experience is much better.
Now’s the time to start planning for when early tech will hit the “just good enough” mark. There are many technologies about to hit this milestone.
