Whether electric vehicles work is no longer a serious question. They work, they are pleasant to drive, and the maintenance burden is genuinely lower. What determines how fast they spread is everything around them.
Charging is the constraint
For anyone with a driveway, home charging makes an electric car more convenient than petrol – you never visit a station. For anyone parking on a street, it is meaningfully less convenient.
That divide maps onto housing, which maps onto income, which is why adoption curves look different between suburbs and dense cities.
Solving it requires kerbside infrastructure at a scale nobody has delivered. Lamp-post charging and similar approaches exist in pilots and remain far from sufficient.
Price is converging
Battery costs have fallen far enough that price parity with equivalent petrol models has arrived in some segments and is close in others.
The remaining gap is at the cheap end, where the battery is a larger share of total cost. Genuinely affordable electric cars exist mostly from manufacturers with scale advantages in cells.
The second-hand question
Most people buy used. A used market requires confidence in battery condition, and that confidence is still forming.
Standardised battery health reporting would resolve most of it. It is arriving slowly and inconsistently, which suppresses residual values more than the actual degradation warrants.
What the grid needs
Less than the alarming headlines suggest, if charging happens overnight. Considerably more if everyone charges at six in the evening.
The technical answer is time-of-use pricing and smart charging that shifts demand automatically. Both are being deployed and neither is universal.
The realistic picture
Steady growth, uneven by geography, with the constraint being infrastructure and access rather than the vehicles themselves.