There are a lot of naysayers that show up here just to talk **********, who have never driven an EV let alone owned one. It's the inter webs, go figure. Rivian is the real deal, saw the truck at OEX in Flagstaff a couple years ago. It's slightly smaller than an F150 and a a bit bigger than a Tacoma, in my opinion the perfect size. They are a legit company and the production line is going in as we speak. It's not going to happen tomorrow for sure, but its coming. I've been driving EVs as daily drivers for six years now, my current car can take me anywhere in North America on a paved road.
I'm a naysayer who has driven several full EV's, my sister owns one, I've owned a hybrid.
But also I own a calculator and my occupation has me using Ohm's law every single day for close to two decades which doesn't make me an EV expert but it's at least reasonable to say I have some comfort in the realm of how electricity works.
Can you daily drive an EV in the city? Yeah of course people do it all the time there's infrastructure for that and roadgoing EV's have a ton of efficiency advantages like aero and lightweight tires.
Can you make an electric that can drive off road? Yeah no sweat, you could literally just bolt an electric motor to the bellhousing of a manual transmission XJ and load the engine bay up with lead acid batteries and there you go.
Those are the easy parts.
Can you drive from Phoenix to Douglas AZ to Morgan MT the whole length of Highway 191 and back to Phoenix with a pure focus on recreation, off-road adventure and exploration without any concerns at all about when and where you refuel, inside of a single week off work?
I know that's a really specific trip but it's a really specific trip I took last summer and we saw
exactly two obviously electric vehicles outside of major cities the whole trip, one of those vehicles was parked on an offramp gore apparently with some kind of mechanical problem or flat battery 30 miles north of las vegas on our return leg.
As a novelty you can drive an electric anywhere. With enough planning you can drive a moped across the Sahara too but then it becomes a stunt where you're wholly focused on carrying out the stunt not on enjoying the journey. Maybe we all travel for different reasons but I don't get any pleasure out of babysitting my vehicle's needs, the fewer needs it has the better.
And in some ways EV's have fewer needs like you don't need to change the oil every 5-10k miles and your brakes last forever which is cool. With PHEV's it becomes more like one oil change per year and you still get all the other EV benefits but you also don't get the EV drawback of energy storage and transfer limitations.
So one could handwave "naysayers" but you can't handwave the laws of physics and the realities of the supply chain. We'll probably see a lot of those PHEV Wranglers out in the wild places because they actually stand a good chance of functioning at all.