In the same handful of days that an electric Ford set the pace up Pikes Peak and a Zeekr was being clocked at a McLaren-bothering 3.3 seconds, a 2016 Chevy Spark with barely 60 miles of range crawled 240 miles to North Carolina and ran out two miles short. Line those stories up and a pattern appears: electric performance is a solved problem. Electric convenience is not.
The speed is almost routine now. Romain Dumas's sixth Pikes Peak win came on a course that exposes any weakness in a battery's cooling, and he took it in an electric Mustang. Over on the Kilowatt Half Hour, the hosts rattle off a new BMW i3 that hits 62 mph in 4.7 seconds and a Zeekr GT quick enough to make a 1990s hypercar look slow, and treat both as unremarkable. When a sub-3.5-second EV is just another item on a podcast rundown, the performance race is effectively over. Almost nobody worries any more about whether their next EV will be quick enough.
What people still worry about is everything that happens between charges. The Chevy Spark road trip went smoothly until a closed exit ate a five-mile buffer, and it only worked at all because the route was built around the handful of chargers the car could actually use. The same theme runs through the Pipistrel electric glider, which flies beautifully but uses a proprietary charger, so its owner built a solar trailer just to refuel away from home. Even Rivian's R2, for all the excitement, answers the affordability question with a date in 2027 and the UK question with no date at all.
The next six months will not be settled by who is quickest. They will be settled by charging compatibility, by real-world range when it is cold, and by which affordable models actually ship on time. The brands winning the spec-sheet wars mostly have the easy part handled already, which is why the interesting fights are now about access and price rather than acceleration.
Bottom line: stop reading the 0 to 60 figure first. The EV that wins your driveway is the one that charges where you are and arrives at the price it promised, on the day it promised. Speed is the part the industry has already solved. Everything that happens after you switch it off is where the next year gets decided.