Before people get all excited...especially Germans under the law drafted that requires no new gas or diesel cars sold after 2030...one might want to ask if the public will have finally bought off on the battery-car concept. The simple answer in 2017 from Germans? No.
By the fall of 2016, there were roughly 68k battery cars registered in Germany. Over the past year, I’d take a guess that no more than 20,000 were added. It’s not drawing a lot of interest like the environmentalists and political folks think.
At the present pace, unless a game-changer design occurs, the Germans won’t cross the 500k car point until the end of 2023.
The speed-bump? Range. The Tesla S will give you 335 miles. The bulk of the rest of the cars give you around 150 to 250 miles. Toss in charging time, which gets up to around an hour minimum.
I noticed a new German car coming out in the spring of 2018...E-Go. Basic model is two person...around $17,000 in cost, with 100 miles of range. Recharge time off a regular home connection is near six hours. Cheap on price but no one is going buy a car that takes that much time to recharge.
If you ask me...the hybrid is the better way to go, and the battery technology is probably twenty to thirty years from some real range.
What makes you think that in 20-30 years - or, for that matter, in 20 000 -30 000 years - the laws of thermodynamics will be repealed?
There's a reason they don't have the batteries needed, and the reason is chemistry and physics.
If you must turn your wheels with electric motors, generating the electricity on board is always going to get you better performance than generating it somewhere else and storing it on board in batteries.
“and the battery technology is probably twenty to thirty years from some real range.”
battery technology has ALWAYS been 20-30 years away ever since Alessandro Volta invented the first true battery ...
I think the point is not yo simply to migrate people to electric cars, as you pointed out, to create an electric vehicle at a price point that is acceptable to consumers will only result in a vehicle that is for all intensive purposes.... impractical.
Since the market will invariably be driven my government mandate, this means that the government will leverage this intended design flaw to push for my public forms of transportation thereby creating a defacto dependency on another yet government program.
Force all the rural and suburban population to coalesce to urban centers... This is nothing ore than a ploy for pure government control over the populace.
I’m told by friends and family in Florida, they expect to be without power for 2 weeks or more, depending. How long to charge one of these POS with a generator? The longer it takes the more gas you have to feed to the gen.!