The same factors which make wind and solar power so difficult to cost-effectively utilize make electric cars make sense.
With wind, solar and nuclear, you aren’t paying for raw materials; you’re paying for facilities construction and maintenance. The problem is that wind and solar production doesn’t necessarily coincide with demand. (Solar production peaks 3 hours before demand, and God knows when wind production will peak.) You need some sort of battery or battery analog to store the produced energy until it’s needed. But no battery or battery analog has been economically feasible.
On the other hand, mobile power sources are very expensive. So expensive, that we continue to rely on obscenely expensive petroleum combustion for most mobile power sources.
What electric cars essentially do is use the fact that petroleum combustion is so expensive to make it economically feasible to use a mobile power source (your car) as a battery for poorly utilized energy produced during off-peak demand hours.
Totally agree.
And Musk has his hands on both Tesla and Solar City. The guy is smart and shrewed.
For the interim I still like the Chevy Volt concept. It gives you most of the benefits of an electric car without the anxiety of running out of juice. If they would double their electric range it would be great.