Goes to show, that electric cars still have problems which traditional gas powered cars don’t .
Cities like San Francisco still have a lot of trolleybus routes. If e-cars got popular there, they’d be begging to use the trolley wires if they had a cold spell.
You also can only convert solar into electric, on average, about 10 hours per day in the US - it’s too dark at night. Not enough sunlight.
You are simply swapping one problem for another. I will guarantee you that none of the battery-car makers have tested their cars in Tucson, in mid-summer. With maximum AC on, I’ll bet you lose a quarter of your capability on each charge.
That is true, and is of course true in the other direction as well...
Better batteries are needed. Personally I'm rooting for the new Goodenough (not a joke) battery. In addition to the things mentioned below (sodium!) it can be recharged something like hundreds of times more than LiON batteries, and they work much better in cold temperatures.
Over 80 companies are evaluating this battery for production. Any licensing of the patents will be non-exclusive.
A very good overall description from here:
Goodenough, who had moved to the University of Texas at Austin in 1986, when he was 64, made two important advancements in the mid-nineties. Still, a battery’s life cycle remains limited, and to deliver the range that electric car drivers want, they must be linked together. A Tesla, for example, has some seven thousand battery cells, which allow the car to travel as far as 265 miles without recharging. Stringing so many batteries together gets pricey: in a typical electric car, the batteries can account for more than $20,000 of the cost.BTW, John Goodenough is the inventor of the lithium ion battery, and is currently 96 years old...and that's the rest of the story.To resolve these issues, most researchers focused on building better anodes and cathodes. All of them, though, assumed they needed liquid electrolytes, as all batteries have. Several years ago, Goodenough began to question that prevailing wisdom. “I’ve always believed you have to challenge assumptions,” he says.
In 2015, he heard about the research of Maria Braga, a Portuguese physicist who had developed a type of glass that could be infused with lithium, replacing the need for liquid electrolytes. (Braga has since joined his team at UT, and she was the lead author of the research published in December.) “Most people who criticized us said, ‘Goodenough’s gone mad,’ ” he says. The glass gives the battery greater storage capacity, and it charges in minutes rather than hours. And by eliminating the liquid electrolytes, Goodenough dodged the pesky “explosions and fires” problem.
Since the glass can be made of sodium, the cost of the battery is reduced, and the increased storage capacity means the same amount of energy can be stored in fewer batteries. As a result, these batteries could enable electric cars to go farther, last longer, and cost less than they do today.
The technologically illiterate are get flim-flammed. Was this not predictable?
Seriously, anybody who has tried to start a conventional auto on a 20 degree morning knows that the battery has less energy to start the car. Also, heat & A/C are not ‘optional’ things as this article seems to imply.