This is more food for thought than anything else, but… I guess anyone outside of the electric car community has his or her own reasons for not having much interest… And this is more sports related than about practicality so… I hope you see where this is going.
For me, well… I have fun driving manual gas cars. And I don’t know much about EV’s so I’m not going to ramble on about what I can only guess at… but hypothetically, (with a lot of programming or whatnot) couldn’t you have an EV that could copy the power output and torque curves of other vehicles within its own?
Let’s say I’m a gas fan-boy who always dreamed of having a certain gas car. Hypothetical bullshark situation. Revolutionary battery technology became available (cheap, faster charging, and longer-lasting than gas) and gas emitting vehicles became outlawed. Maybe you want the drifting experience of a specific car that’s no longer available… or in order to do it you have to engine/electric swap?
Or maybe I want to be environmentally friendly but still want the same sort of experience. (Not to mention, with certain calculations maybe [for a stretch] you could emulate weight distribution and other things (artificial over/understeer and “experience” many cars with a download or something).
Tl;dr: I’d just like to be able to have/experience the aesthetic of a regular manual gas car with an EV. Instant torque is awesome but it’s just not the same experience. That’s why.
They have “Simulators” for that now. They are part of all major automotive/aircraft design facilities world wide. They design, engineer, and drive the vehicle before the first piece of hardware is ever produced.
That seems like using a using a racing simulator (those $30k seats/sim-rigs that tilt/whatnot) if that’s not already what you’re talking about. Many say that most sims are not comparable to the actual experience although they can help with training/skill development in some ways. (Unless you have a 100k+ state of the art rig meant just for realistic training purposes). Those are only simulators so it takes a lot more effort to create a certain experience. They seem pretty hard to come across, worth more than an actual experience, and less convenient. I’d rather pay 60k for an EV with customizable torque and power curves that I can experience for fun between actual destinations, than for a rig that is somewhat limited in some ways that I can only use when I actually decide to take out time for it. Assuming that an actual price could be around there (commercially, or even for a home build). That’s more or less the idea I’m getting at. Choosing an EV over a gas as a daily simply because it can do the same. Thanks though.