Recently, I bought a new (to me) vehicle. I wanted something bigger and higher off the ground than my Honda Civic, which was difficult for my aging parents and in-laws to get into and uncomfortable for them to ride in. It also didn’t handle blizzards very well. A last-generation Hyundai Santa Fe fit the bill quite nicely — bigger, more comfortable, loaded with tech, and with tons of space for transporting bikes and other cargo.

Where I live, ICE cars are still the default. In what I like to call “the square states in the middle bit of the country,” EVs are increasingly common, particularly among the affluent, but the adoption is far slower than on the coasts.

Now, with my ICE Santa Fe, I stop as a gas station two blocks from my apartment every couple weeks or so, spend about ten minutes there, and then go about my life, feeling a numb guilt for the pollution spewing out behind me.

Would I have preferred to buy an Ioniq 5? Absolutely! Most examples were stretching the budget a bit, but I would love to pass by gas stations with an idle chuckle.

However, as I mentioned, my apartment is two blocks from a gas station. I am extraordinarily fortunate to have a garage that my partner and I share. And that garage has a singular power outlet (for the opener) that I could probably trickle charge an EV with, but I suspect that landlord would not take kindly to the increased electric bill.

In my small city, there are a couple dozen charging stations. Most of the car dealerships have one or two for charging the small number of EVs on their lots. There are roughly a dozen Tesla Superchargers, eight of which are at a grocery store across town from my place and the rest reside at a Super 8 Motel. Chargers with CCS ports are dotted around the city, never more than two in one place, usually at condo buildings and a handful of businesses who have EV-loving executives.

Exactly one charger is anywhere near my daily life: a lone CCS-equipped station outside a luxury condo building about a block from where I work. That charger is almost always in use when I drive by.

My in-laws, who now comfortably ride in the cavernous back seat of my Santa Fe, live 460 miles away — a 7-hour drive that we make several times a year. That drive requires one 10-minute fuel stop if the wind isn’t too bad. Just like cold, wind is a very different story on the Great Plains than on the coasts.

The aforementioned road trip in an Ioniq 5 long-range AWD would require two charging stops of 30 and 45 minutes, adding more than an hour to an already long road trip, assuming the chargers work and are available. Form what I gather, small-town Electrify America stations are unreliable at best.

I would love nothing more than to own an EV, and if I owned a house or even simply had a reliable place to charge, I might make the other sacrifices required of me to do so. For folks who live in dense areas and have family close by, those sacrifices are likely pretty manageable.

There’s a gap when EVs are considered as the ultimate next-generation form of transportation that currently leaves out people like myself. Don’t get be wrong: EVs absolutely are the ultimate next-generation form of transportation, but it’s not a given that they work in every situation. They currently only work well in dense urban environments or in countries (and even states!) less short-sighted than my own.

The US needs to get its act together to support the inevitable proliferation of EVs. Sadly, that is on the long list of public goods that almost certainly won’t be happening anytime soon.