I honestly don’t know man. I think focusing on the grid (and future of the grid) should be the priority as EV’s powered by coal aren’t really any better.
Just remember for every kW of fuel you aren’t burning, you have to build another kW worth of power plant.
Imagine the number of solar / wind farms you would need if 100% of vehicles were EV’s. Some countries would probably be more solar cells than land!
If you build new nuclear plants rather than solar / wind to pick up all the slack, you probably are right! But, at least here in Aus, the anti-nuclear peanuts are still rampant so we would most likely just build more and more coal and gas power plants which doesn’t really change anything.
This is very country dependent, I know Australia has a lot of coal on its grid. But it also has a lot of solar which can be used during the afternoon peak to charge cars.
The thing about EVs is they're reasonably agnostic to when they are charged. Mine charges predominantly at night but it's on an 'intelligent' tariff where the energy provider can shift the windows it charges in according to when excess wind power is available. In a country with a lot of solar, you might charge more often during the day. I work from home a fair bit, so my car is parked on my drive most of the day, all I say is "I want 70% battery by 6am, charge whenever you can".
In the UK at least, it's common to have times when there is excess wind, but due to curtailment on the grid from stability services (the minimum stable reserve of spinning generators) and nuclear power plants (which can't shut down quickly) the wind power just can't be used unless there's matching instantaneous demand. And due to the contracts with renewable energy providers, this energy
has to be bought (this part is the government subsidy called the CfD scheme). So this energy gets used, in part by EVs, and energy providers just want to almost give it away, because if it doesn't get used, they have to pay even more. Negative electricity pricing. It's a weird market phenomenon.
On a smaller scale some regions of the UK have capacity limits - there is renewable energy in one area and demand in another but the line capacity between the two can't meet that. So there are hyperlocal tariffs that encourage demand in the same region that generation is occurring in, reducing losses and maximising utilisation.
Until the UK has substantial grid level storage (hours to days worth), this situation isn't going to change, though other users of this cheap renewable energy might shift things around (for instance, electric arc furnaces for steel making have been in the news recently - these can switch on and off nearly instantly).
The intelligent tariff I have has minutely control of the car, last night's charging session is attached, it's interesting to think about what might be going on at the grid level to trigger these charging events. The car's charging is controlled over its 4G modem but I can charge it any time I like if I don't want the discount - the charger is just a dumb AC unit from Rolec that makes electrons available once the car's CP pin does its thing.