Nobody tells you about this part. You buy the car, feel good about your decision for about two days and then it slowly starts happening. You become that person. If any of these sound familiar just know you’re not alone.
1. You explain your commute in kilowatt hours now. Your coworkers stopped asking.
2. You scope out the charging situation in every parking lot before you even think about what you came to buy. Target has a Level 2? That’s your Target now.
3. You’ve done range math at a red light. Completely voluntarily. Nobody asked you to.
4. You feel a small personal victory every time you drive past a gas station. You didn’t need that. You just kept going.
5. You’ve had the range anxiety conversation with at least ten different people this month. Each one thought they were bringing it up for the first time. Each one said “but what about road trips.” You have a whole response ready now.
6. You now feel slightly anxious when your phone battery gets low. The habit transferred.
7. You’ve brought up your electricity bill in a conversation where it had absolutely no business coming up.
8. You’ve rerouted a road trip not because of traffic but because one charging station had better reviews than another. You read the reviews. Multiple.
9. Going downhill feels like winning something. Free miles. You made those.
10. You’ve beaten something off the line at a light without even trying and just kept driving like nothing happened. The silence makes it better somehow.
11. You’ve googled whether it’s safe to charge in the rain. Late at night. Just to double check. For the second time.
12. You get unreasonably annoyed when someone parks in a charging spot without charging. You don’t say anything. But you think about it for the rest of the day.
13. The first thing you look at in the morning is your charge percentage. Your phone comes second.
14. You’ve told someone the maintenance costs are significantly lower when nobody mentioned maintenance.
15. You have a mild emotional attachment to your home charger. Don’t make it weird.
16. Someone says EVs are slow and fifteen minutes later you’re showing them performance specs for cars you don’t own.
17. You’ve said “it’s really more about the driving experience than anything else” and immediately wondered if that was true.
18. You’ve had a full conversation, eaten a snack and checked your phone while the car drove itself and then immediately felt like you should tell someone about it. You told someone about it.