"Range anxiety" is a condescending industry term. People are anxious about the range of their EV because the range sucks, not because of some mental barrier.
I don't think it's the range sucking as much as it is a question of what you do when you run out. Gas stations are far more common, and far quicker to use, than charging stations.
I don't own a car at all currently (bus+bike+lyft/uber for me). I've been thinking about buying one, but the longest ride I'd like to do is to get to Washington DC to see friends and family. The DC metro area (and to be real, my preference would be to park somewhere and take transit once I got to the region) is 235 miles away, which is right about the top rated distance for this bolt - but when you read that the observed range for highway driving is 190 miles, and add in unexpected detours and the like, it makes me think I'd need to plan to recharge along the way. Thinking about where I could do that reasonably - and I would totally be down to stop for an hour for a meal and the like - and looking at map of the supercharging stations, leaves me with not a lot of redundant options. Charging station full or out of service? Odds are good that the whole trip will lose its competitive advantage over taking the bus or train rather quickly.
To me that's the source of range anxiety. If I knew I had decent charging options all over the place, I'd want one of these pretty badly.
I get that the EV market is seeking people who make small trips and commuting and the like because that's the easy end of the market to capture, and that's how a lot of people use their cars. But as a society I wish we could just better address those needs via investment in things like urban mass transit and the like.
No, that's the silly all-or-nothing thinking I'm talking about. What if you only want to go further once a year?
What's the cost of a one-time 30m wait to refuel instead of a 5m wait? I think it'd be far less than the benefit of no refueling wait the other 364 days of the year.
Also, the cost isn't infinite. If you were, for instance, totally unable to drive the electric car to the ski hill for your vacation you could rent another car, so worst-case you're out like $200 which is far less than you'd save in fuel the rest of the year.
Most people simply get stuck on the costs instead of being able to amortize them across the whole period and weigh them against the benefits.
