I’d like an electric vehicle to plug in at night and get to the park and ride each morning. There are a bunch of problems, even here in Virginia the car would be cold (I have no garage) and I’d have to plug in an electric heater each morning for a half hour before I left. Ideally I would heat it with wood like I heat my house, but like you said, I’d be better off with a steam vehicle.
I would love to build a steam turbine couple to an AC armature drive system, basically like a locomotive.
To fuel the high pressure turbine would be a fuel system from pellets, very easy to make an auger feed, and its even easy to make your own with a large commercial meat grinder. You just save anything that burns from newspaper to toilet paper, make a slurry out of it using a portable concrete mixer, add some used bacon grease for a binder and get it into a pastelike slurry, and then feed it into a meat grinder so it comes out in short pellets.
Allow to dry completely on racks much like a large dehydrator, keep in a hopper on your personal steamer vehicle, oh and yes you do need to dress for Steampunk.
I suspect Obama’s next strategic energy debacle will hinge upon all US employees installing Zip lines between their homes and place of work, which working half the time (can go downhill one way, but the round trip takes power to return), will still be over 3x as successful as the electric car industry sales he has promoted.
The laws of physics keep interfering with the dreams of government officials and story-book liberals.
Reading these figures of how many “Volts” have been sold, I keep wondering how many of those were bought by our goverment, whether state or federal. I recall some fed announcement of huge numbers being bought by the US, my recollection is on the order of 20,000, but that may not be accurate. I also recall that NYState announced it was purchasing some huge number, I believe in the thousand range. There is also a niggle in my brain about some cities joining the waste of taxpayer dollars...
All in all, I bet that at least half of the small number sold were bought by various governments. I have never seen one of these on the road.