I try to make this point all the time.

We have already built all of the charging infrastructure except the chargers.

You are probably no more than a block from a 440v line (that's what typically goes into the transformer, of which there is one on almost every block, at least). You are in a building that almost certainly has 220v power in it. You are probably less than 10 feet from a 15-20 amp 110v plug for almost your entire day. There are far more places to charge a car than there are people in most of North America.

If the incentives are correctly aligned, we have the infrastructure to make this happen VERY quickly.

Electricity generation is an issue, but not as much of one when you realize that not every car will be charging at the same time. Not every car will be fast charging. Hell, not every car will even need a full charge every week. I fill up my ICE car every 400km or so, which is about 2-4 weeks depending on weather. Right now AI growth is projected to increase the rate of power consumption far more than electric cars even under the most optimistic adoption curves. If generation is the problem, we need to kneecap chatGPT immediately.

Its amazing how many people think that our gasoline infrastructure is a given, and that electric car infrastructure is impossible.

A related tale: One of Rivian’s goals was to electrify National Parks and campgrounds as part of their branding as a “rugged” or “off-roading” brand and one of the maybe funniest things about that was how unsuccessful they were in parts of that branding effort, not because it was hugely expensive to get electricity out to such places but as much that it was hugely silly to take credit for all the electricity already there.

Any US park or campground with regular RV visits has tons of 240v “dryer plug” outlets, many of which with decades of battle testing of simultaneous high draw use. EVs look almost considerate next to most RVs, and those don’t even use any of that electricity to drive.

SAE J1772 (the ugly “gas pump” looking thing that CCS in Europe still resembles, but the US is fortunately moving to the relatively saner NACS instead) should have just been a “dryer plug” and we might have avoided some silliness in how few people realize how much existing EV infrastructure exists and/or what can be repurposed easily as EV infrastructure.