That’s the issue that needs to be pounded home by people who want to end this silliness: The leap in battery technology needed to make these vehicles pencil out just isn’t on the horizon. It isn’t over the horizon, either. It’s not available, period, until we come up with a radically new chemistry or physics in batteries.
This is the point I keep hammering home to these dreamers of electric cars: The leap forward in battery technology required here means that some blue-sky scientists need to get going on the problem of “how to store energy?” and a subset of that “How to store energy as electric power?” There’s no battery technology extant that will make the leap required. No matter how good the battery engineering is, the salient point is that the fundamental chemical processes happening in batteries simply do not permit a dense enough energy storage for the application, the chemistry extant won’t take a charge fast enough so that you can “fill up” the battery in the time it could take a person to fill a conventional fuel tank - no matter the money available to throw at the problem.
It’s sort of like dreaming about a “warp drive” when all we have are sub-lightspeed propulsion for spacecraft. We would need to work on the physics of faster-than-light *anything* before we could worry about making a drive which, when commanded by a shameless over-actor and lovingly pampered by a Scottish engineer, will allow humans to zip through space at “warp 7.”
I’d like to see continued monies poured into green battery technology like there’s no tomorrow. Just get government out of it and let all the investors be billionaire liberals.
If they waste their fortunes on green boondoggles we can spend ours on regaining our liberties. No?