There’s a number of drawbacks to electric vehicles, but people who will drive them do so either as a status symbol or virtue signal. It never ceases to amaze me that they don’t consider from where the electricity originates to charge said vehicle in the first place.
As a rural Floridian, electric cars are impractical and will serve no purpose in the event of a long term loss of power such as what happened back in 2017 when Hurricane Irma went right up the middle of the state and knocked out utilities for over a week in some areas. You’re not charging an electric car off of a gas powered generator, and even if you would, the irony would not be lost.
I’ll stick to my fossil fueled vehicles, thanks.
Electric cars can be fueled. With hydrogen fuel cells. Battery technology is a dead-end, an is limited in its application, to short distance and relative slow speeds. If long travel between recharges is the expectation, then battery powered vehicles meet all requirements.
Without on-board capability to recharge, be it Mr. Fusion, or an auxiliary power source to charge up the batteries while running, batteries have limited usefulness in so many applications.
Now, as to how to obtain the necessary hydrogen to charge up fuel cells. There are no hydrogen mines, but it is marginally practical to generate hydrogen from electrolysis of water, or using the coal gasification process to generate hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide, then separating the lighter hydrogen from the heavier carbon monoxide, which makes an excellent fuel when combusted with oxygen, yielding carbon dioxide, a plant food. The hydrogen is then compressed and put in storage units, probably some kind of tank that can be swapped out and recharged, rather than by refilling as at a gasoline station.
Now, as to a RELIABLE electric supply, not much of anything beats a nuclear power plant for 24/7/365 flat-out, full capacity running for years at a time.
Uranium-fueled Light-Water reactors are coming to the end of their useful lifetimes, and there is great resistance to beginning construction on any similar new plants. But while they were running, they emitted NO carbon dioxide. Of course, one of the great disadvantages is that when they WERE refueled, the “spent” uranium fuel rods were still highly radioactive, and would remain so for perhaps centuries. So there was the problem of storage of this radioactive “waste”, and who were going to be the custodians at it “cooled out”.
Enter Thorium-fueled Molten Salt reactors. For one thing, the element needed for fuel is some four times as abundant in the earth’s crust as uranium, but its radioactivity could only be activated in the presence of a small amount of the vast quantity of “spent” uranium fuel rods. More than 90% of its potential energy still remains in the “waste” fuel, which is used for “kindling” to get the thorium reaction going. So over time, the “spent” uranium fuel rods get used up, and the amount of radioactivity in the spent thorium reactor fuel is very small in comparison, and compromised of relatively short half-life isotopes.
But like the Light Water reactors, the Molten Salt reactors can be run 24/7/365 for years, and have the advantage of being able to be incrementally refueled “on the go”, so to speak. The real problem comes with the breakdown of the container and the components of the reactor, which tend to become brittle. But even if the mechanism should burst, the reaction stops almost immediately, as the molten salt cools, and there is no radioactivity release. Inherently much safer than Light Water reactors.