Visiting family out of town every weekend is 104 trips a year. Commuting each work day is 520 trips. That’s 16% of all those trips that are long distance.
Once you add in the grocery getting; the drives to school (only 10% of children walk or ride bikes); the doctors appointments; the local leisure related trips; I can see how 90% of trips could be short range - and that’s still accounting for taking a long weekly trip, which I don’t think most people do.
From the way you wrote, “The car needs to be able to handle that, without being a huge pain to charge all the time,” gives me the impression you don’t like electric vehicles and might not be open to any of these conversations without it turning into an argument. I could be misinterpreting your tone, and if so I apologise, but I don’t think the content nor the conclusion of that study should be called moronic.
That’s another good point. I guess I assumed that A-B-A was a trip to the grocers and back, for example, but a trip out to the countryside to see the inlaws for the weekend would count as two trips, the A-B and the B-A. Counting the grocery trip as two trips doesn’t seem right to me, I don’t take hours in there.
For what it’s worth, the various electrification plans I’ve been involved with all assume that these ‘long stops’ being the employment location, the hotel, the theatre, the doctors offices, all have charging on site. If this were the case - even just at the workplace - it would be a big help for electric vehicles that have small capacity batteries.