Sounds like a plug in hybrid would be right up your alley. Many of the benefits of an electric vehicle (regen braking and the ability to charge at home, foremost) while still being able to fill up instantly using gas. Unfortunately you lose out on the basically-no-maintenance-required part of a pure EV, but frequent road trips are basically the ideal use case for a PHEV.

As far as I know, the problem is that Lenovo doesn’t make the SOCs that actually implement the security features GrapheneOS requires; Qualcomm does (assuming this phone uses a Snapdragon chip - I didn’t check). And Qualcomm only puts these security features into the most powerful SOCs, which are themselves only appropriate for flagship phones.

I hope that some day more budget SOCs will get these security features too so that more people can reap the benefits, and I hope Graphene is pushing for this too, but I don’t think we’ll see it any time soon.

That being said, I’m just happy Graphene has any partnership at all. One step at a time; once these phones are done they can focus on expanding their offerings more.