Yeah but I think range anxiety is a great name because a lot of anxiety can't just be "explained" away. I've tried for years with certain friends.
People don't like the _idea_ that they could one day be stranded without a nearby charger, or (even though this has literally never happened to me in 6 years), being _forced_ to wait 3 hours to charge your car.
I think NACS will help with this since the Tesla Supercharger network is quite amazing in its coverage and speed of charging. So as other cars get access to it, it'll make owning an EV more palatable.
It's fun to remind people that "range anxiety" was a term in literature a century ago referring to how hard it was to find gasoline (in certain city Pharmacies with certain old fashioned medicines they made in house, in certain city Blacksmiths that used gasoline as a forge starter, and that was about it). Every person that has ever driven a car has some version or another of the range anxiety of making it to the next gas station or not knowing how long of a stretch it will be between gas stations on some interstate. The earliest versions of that were a lot worse when gas stations were a (full service) novelty.
The fun part of the original uses of "range anxiety" was that it was also used in contrast to EVs at the time. You might not know where the next gas station might be, but electricity is easy to spot and you could charge an EV at any friendly house or business you stopped at with an exterior outlet to pick up a few miles to get back to where you needed to be. EVs were the cars where "fuel" was everywhere and plentiful and there were few worries about if you needed to make an extra stop somewhere that you could find a plug.
At some point we're going to see things flip back to that. When gas gets expensive enough, when gas pumps start to close fast enough, when more people have practical experience with EVs and home charging and even Level 1 charging as cheap and ubiquitous (if not the best charging experience; this is where Edison bites us by pushing the main US electrical outlets to be half the voltage of other continents out of losing the AC/DC war) things will flip back to that original "range anxiety" perspective. Gas is the weird, flammable thing that should be hard to find. Electricity is almost "everywhere the (LED) light touches".
But yes, "anxiety" isn't always rational and you can explain that to a lot of individuals, and they may get it rationally, but it will take a lot more momentum to sway the more emotional parts of their brain, especially those tuned to the zeitgeist and feeling a shared "cultural anxiety" here.
(I also think NACS is going to help. It was dumb for us to have two competing plug standards for quite as long as we did. The latest model of the Hyundai Ioniq 5 is the first non-Tesla NACS "native" car available to purchase and early reviews are quite favorable about that.)
People don't like the _idea_ that they could one day be stranded without a nearby charger, or (even though this has literally never happened to me in 6 years), being _forced_ to wait 3 hours to charge your car.
I think NACS will help with this since the Tesla Supercharger network is quite amazing in its coverage and speed of charging. So as other cars get access to it, it'll make owning an EV more palatable.