Electric cars are a fine idea. Only, the tech isn't there yet. They cost too much. They weigh too much. The require rare earth elements to handle the needed current for their electric motors. Their batteries explode if they get damp, and require serious cooling or they stop working. There isn't enough lithium on earth to provide batteries, even with the best battery technology available, for everybody. There's a whole list of expensive flaws. The biggest one is that only the rich can have them. Stratified societies end up in revolutions. And cyclic violence is persistent.
To an electric car fan, these costs are trivial. I disagree. These are critical limitations.
The reason I go on and on about scooters and motorcycles is they are NOT limited in the same way electric cars are. A compromise vehicle takes advantage of the small motor and light weight, adding a wheel for stability. If you are willing to go SLOWER, you can exchange the crash cage weight for a lighter car for drastic fuel economy gain. Elio Motors is making an ultralight trailing delta wheel trike which uses this basic principle of lightness for fuel economy. It is not super comfortable, but neither are electric cars. Nothing is free, after all. But it does keep the rain off, and it's stable enough, even in snow, thanks to ABS and low center of gravity. It is, more importantly, cheap to make from standard materials, so you can make them anywhere in any number and the whole world can have them without fighting wars. Even Africans can have these. Internal Combustion engines made of steel are infinitely producible, not limited. There are no have-nots.
Another reason I reject expensive alt vehicle cars is the cost. If a vehicle costs too much, it is pointless. If only the rich can have it, it is a rich man's car. A rich man has money to spare. A rich man driving around poor people gets resented, and eventually that snob stops being a Who and becomes a What, and the What is a motive with dollar signs. A kidnapping victim. Rich people are not used to thinking like this, but in 58% unemployment in the USA today, they should be. Desperate people do desperate things.
This is why an alt vehicle should be efficient and either dumpy or slightly embarrassing looking. Nobody resents the weirdo in the slightly slow English 1956 MG Bugeye Sprite convertible on the side of the road. They don't know he gets 60 mpg because the electronics stop working during a mere 20 mile drive and he ends up having to pay for a tow every other trip. If it were reliable, it is still a little slow because it has a small engine and is to top out around 50 mph because that's how fast it was designed to go back then. Its for a ride in the English country roads, between hedgerows and through broad valleys. Nobody resents drivers behind the wheel of a Caterham 7, the modern incarnation of the Lotus Super 7. Open top, open wheel, useless in the rain, and fast because it is light.
I think people like the Tesla, despite its supercar cost, because they really don't care what owning one involves so long as they can keep the fiction that THEIR lives won't change while everyone else is giving up gasoline and suffering the transition from a cheap transportation economy to an expensive one. We have organized our lives over commuting to work. Over the fiction that we can afford to associate with whom we like, and do what we want for a living. That is false.
That the Tesla will be able to go fast, modern 90 mph freeway maniac speeds is silly. Asphalt is oil. Asphalt is not free. Going fast requires smooth, maintained roads. Those cost money that nobody has anymore. The economy is crap. Cuts are everywhere, and the Federal Govt already announced a willingness and desire to dump maintenance of freeways onto states or sell them to private toll road companies, meaning without sufficient users, those roads won't have the money for repairs. If everyone has to pay to get on the freeway, they can't spend that money on gasoline, which means hypermiling, or alt vehicles, which really just means SLOW. Everyone will be slowing down to a sensible 45 mph where air drag is drastically less, and getting 85 mpg in a car based on a motorcycle with no air conditioning, no radio, and the passenger seat behind you, Elio motors cars or something like it, like the VW 1L.
People are willing to KILL to keep their conveniences, right up until others start shooting back, changing laws, and otherwise ruining their parade of Ego with harsh reality. Slow is affordable. Fast is history. Sorry if that offends, but do the math on air drag.
It is pure delusion to believe that prices will fall enough to allow everyone to have a Tesla, even the upcoming bubblecar cheap one. Because like laptops, there is a bottom price, and the more they build, the less lithium available, the more the lithium costs, the more it boosts the car price. Eventually much of the Tesla (or Leaf) car cost is the battery.
And then you start trading range for affordability, and that becomes a losing scenario when range drops as the battery wears out. Maybe supercapacitors will make up the crucial difference, but how long do those last under the heavy loads of electric motors. I learned to weld. That's using high current to deliberately superheat metal and move it around. Welding machines still require maintenance, because those currents damage them over time. Heat is also a factor, and is bad for electronics. The fancy F1 car engines are suffering from serious overheating of their batteries, to the point that cars drop out of the race with only a few laps from the finish. How sad is that?
In electric cars the components will need replacement before they stop working, or more likely AFTER they stop working because people are reliably stupid. How many miles is that? 100? 1000? Do you need to replace those capacitors monthly? Every 3 months, like an oil change for $1000? Calling this a challenge is sort of like not admitting to bad engineering, which is created by bad engineers. Still think this is better than fossil/liquid fuel? At what point is a more reliable motorcycle using home made ethanol or biodiesel both more reliable and more economical? Or is it time to move into the city crime zone housing market? Or get a job locally with a big pay cut?
Tesla is offering an electric car dream. And people are investing in that dream believe they will not have to change their lifestyle with the world, when the world has to change as oil goes away.
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