The problem is that the battery degrades, so it’s a good idea to keep it charges to 60-80% so that it last way longer. If you have 600 miles of max range then that means you can easily have 360-480 miles for your driving. This is overkill as well right ? Wrong, if you live in a cold climate it practically gets halved so now you have 180-240 miles of driving.
Let’s say it’s summer though, now you want to drive 600 miles to your nearest ocean/sea and want to sightsee along the way. With a battery that big you might have to charge once and not even fully to have enough confidence driving to places where charging might be limited.
That’s why smaller batteries make sense only if you use the car for daily commuting, now you need to rent or buy a proper long range gas car or ev car - which now costs you quite a bit more or adds inconvenience. With tesla the problem is almost solved, but they have problematic political views and minimalistic interiors and a max battery of 402 miles. So yeah I think it’s worth it to make a car that costs 3x what VW are pushing, but is useful to everybody.
You are correct on many of those points. But lets look for edge cases - people living in apartments, they can’t charge their cars when there are no garages, so they need to do what normal people do with gas cars - go to the gas station to charge. So if you have a 600 miles car and drive 35 miles per day that’s enough to supercharge once per week for 30+ minutes and be good for the rest of the week - good for the battery, good for wait times, good for not pissing off the person buying the car as they don’t have to waste multiple hours per week.
If your point is that it’s inneficient to carry heavy batteries around I would agree, but isn’t it less efficient to use gas, to have 2 cars instead of 1, to have to rent a car, etc. I think it balances out and with new battery technology you’ll see that they’ll start competing more fiercely with range, but there is a sweet spot and I think it’s 600 miles, if the battery drain is not affected by cold/hot weather 360 miles would be a good sweetspot.
I hope the market appreciates this new model, but highly doubt it - most of the other things I suggested in the original post also affect if the buyer would decide to spend their money on the car. I don’t think it’s unrealistic for VW/Audi to make something like this at a competitive price of $120k - same as the starting price for a BMW M5.