The Pros and Cons of Electric Vehicles: What Every EV-Curious Buyer Should Know

Road fatigue is real, and a primary reason drivers feel tired after a long trip has as much to do with hours of focus as it does with what automotive engineers call NVH—noise, vibration, and harshness. Automakers use sound-deadening material, active noise-cancelling, and other methods to combat NVH, but EVs are inherently quieter since they don’t have a gas engine under the hood creating hundreds of micro-explosions every second and thousands of noisy moving parts as well as an exhaust system that’s routed beneath the car and has to be muffled. The biggest NVH issues with EVs revolve around wind, road, and tire noise, but these create a quiet storm compared to even the most subtle ICE vehicles.

Imagine never needing an oil change or having to replace a fan belt, timing chain, radiator, or many of the other parts that regularly wear out on an ICE vehicle. Whereas a typical turbocharged four-cylinder engine and eight-speed automatic powertrain can have up to 1,500 moving parts, a typical electric motor and single-speed drive has maybe 50. While EVs still need to have such things as tires and brakes replaced, battery coolant and transmission fluid changed, and the propulsion battery and cables inspected, routine maintenance is simpler and much less costly than with an ICE vehicle.

While most new vehicles come with sophisticated driver assistance systems and connected in-car infotainment, the coolest features are usually found on EVs, which typically feature more software-defined technology. Examples include Tesla’s Summon feature that can autonomously park the vehicle and then come to you afterwards, Rivian’s Camp mode that provides lighting and levels the vehicle for better night’s rest, and technology that allows some EVs to potentially power homes via its onboard battery.

The quickness and convenience of filling a gas tank combined with a ubiquitous fueling infrastructure is a huge hurdle for EVs to clear. If you own an EV and have home charging, you can wake up to a full battery each morning. But for a third of the people in the U.S. who live in multi-unit dwellings, home charging is more complicated. They need to rely on public charging, and topping off a battery—even at DC fast chargers—takes time and planning. And frequently inoperable chargers, long lines of EVs waiting to charge, and even something as simple as failed payment processing can all add to the frustration of being an EV owner.

Even with home charging, all EV owners still need to rely on publicly available chargers on long road trips. Except in very few places in the U.S. (we’re looking at you, West Texas), gas stations are plentiful and drivers can usually just spot several from the highway, pull in, fill up, and be on their way. Road-tripping EV drivers often must carefully plan their route to ensure chargers are available and factor in charging time as part of their overall journey.

EVs in general cost more than the equivalent gas-powered vehicle. For example, at present, the 2026 Chevy Blazer EV starts at $46,495, while the gas-powered 2026 Chevy Blazer starts at $36,295. While Chevy Blazer EV owners save money on gas, a Vincentric 2024 US EV Cost of Ownership Analysis calculated factors such as depreciation, fuel, maintenance, and other operating costs and found that over five years the 2024 Chevy Blazer EV 2LT AWD costs $11,296 more to own over five years than the Chevy Blazer 2LT AWD. And on average, the value of EVs depreciate faster than ICE vehicles.

When shopping for a petrol-powered vehicle, the choices are wide and varied, with everything from low-priced compact cars to large luxury SUVs available. When shopping for an EV, although the offerings are slowly growing in number, the choices remain much more limited. GM, Ford, and Toyota were the top-selling car brands in the U.S. in 2025 and combined they offer less than 20 EVs to date, with a dozen of those coming from General Motors (Cadillac accounted for half of that number). Tesla is by far the most popular EV-only brand, selling more than 1.6 million vehicles in the U. S. in 2025, with 1.5 million of those being the Model 3 and Model Y. Recent EV startups including Rivian and Lucid have yet to fully flesh out their lineups, offering only very limited, higher-priced offerings.

If you plan to tow a trailer or boat with an EV for any significant distance, expect to make frequent charging stops. MotorTrend testing has found that even with the largest available battery pack, a fully charged 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning electric truck provided less onboard towing energy than a regular F-150 with 4 gallons of gas in its tank. On an 80-mile route following the same methodology used to determine an EV’s MotorTrend Road-Trip Range, we towed three different camping trailers with the ’22 Ford F-150 Lightning: a 34-foot, 7,218-pound Grand Design Imagine 2910BH, a 28-foot, 5,260-pound Coachmen Freedom Express 246RKS, and a 17-foot, 3,140-pound Forest River R Pod RP-153. Using the energy consumption from these real-world tests we found that when towing the smallest trailer, the F-150 Lightning range was just 115 miles. Range fell to 100 miles with the middleweight camper and dropped to 90 miles with the largest trailer.