My point was that the number of people for whom the ~600 km range of modern electric cars is going to be rather small, and probably live very far away from New York, San Francisco or Kansas City.

Basically, in the Midwest (yes, even out here in flyover country) more people live in metropolitan areas than outside them. 

The rest is just my Midwestern rage at people who assume that there’s nothing interesting happening out here and nothing but vast stretches of cows. 

Your comment history suggests you judge everything on a “my team .vs. your team” philosophy, and you don’t do any research.  That’s not the best way to evaluate fracking, or mountain top removal, or the Centralia coal fire.  Go there, look at it, start from a non-biased perspective and think.

If you invest the money needed to frack for 300 years in sustainable natural gas production, you can power the country for ten thousand years instead of 300, and stop the vicious cycle that has resulted in fewer and fewer petroleum tycoons exerting greater and greater political and social influence.  Unlike nuclear power, sustainable natural gas from fermentation can be done by anyone, nearly anywhere, without creating militarized exclusion zones that are natural targets for enemy action.  Methane from sustainable sources is the future, fracking is an expensive boondoggle.

That a car isn’t a good fit for the latter doesn’t mean it isn’t for the far more numerous former.

All that having been said, some people are just horsepower people and others are torque people.  There’s no right and wrong about it, it’s a personal preference.

DON”T WORRY JOEL SOME PEOPLE ARE HUMOR BLIND. ;)

43mpg never felt better, with three kids and a wagon full of their gear!

Laptops could help manage this better by having chargers that turned themselves off at about the 95% charge mark, and laptops that insisted on shutting down at about 10% charge, but then they’d have to make more expensive chargers and as there would be less usable battery capacity, the initial battery life would be lower. Electric and hybrid cars on the other hand have much better systems to get a long shelf life out of the batteries. It’s worth noting that the vast majority of Toyota Prius batteries are still fine, even on the models now more than 10 years old.

Consumer reports road tested a 10 year old Prius and found it performed nearly identically as it did when they tested the same model 10 years ago. 

I have owned a Nissan Leaf since August and put over 5,000 mile on it. Before I bought it, I kept track of my driving habits and found that I rarely drive over fifty miles in a day. As I ususally charge the battery to 80% capacity, as recommended by Nissan to maximize battery life, I assume that my range is about 50 miles. My round trip commute is 34 miles. An 80% charge gives me enough range to commute and run some errands. If I know I am going to drive more than that, I can either charge to 100% (which I do rarely) or charge at work, for $1.50/hour. In the five months I have owned the Leaf, the closest I came to running out of charge was when the meter showed five miles remaining and I was about a mile from home. It is unusual for me to show less than 20 miles remaining and very rare to show less than 10.

I live in Portland, Oregon, which has a much milder climate than Minneapolis. The three things that will drain the Leaf’s battery quickly are running the heater, high speeds and hills. The air conditioning has much less impact on range than the heater. I am not sure what range you could expect when it’s twenty below outside.

I do not buy cars very often. The Leaf replaced a thoroughly beat up 1990 Subaru that I bought new. The Subaru had over 280,000 miles on it when I got the Leaf. The Leaf has very little scheduled maintenance. There is no reason that it shouldn’t last twenty years with the only major repair being battery replacement

The complaints about charging time miss the point. When asked how long it takes to charge my car, I tell people about thirty seconds. When I get home and park in the garage, I plug in the charging cable and the car’s built in timer starts charging late at night when electric rates are about 30% lower than during the day. When I am ready to leave in the morning, the car is charged to 80%. If I charge at work, it takes a little more time as I have to swipe my charging card and plug the car in. Either way is a lot better than waiting in line at a gas station. Since Oregon prohibits self service gas, people driving gas vehicles don’t have to worry about weather, but I don’t relish the thought of pumping gas when it’s twenty below as you do in Minneapolis.

I would not have bought my Leaf with the substantial tax subsidies. Oregon gives a $3,000 tax credit on top of the federal $7,500 credit. In addition, I got a “free” charging station (worth about $2,000) and quick charge port ($700) through the federal EV project. At about $25,000 after subsidies, the Leaf was in the ballpark of what a typical new car costs. If electric cars are going to succeed in the long term, they will need to get the costs down. As the drive train should be much cheaper to manufacture than a conventional drive train, so that means that they need to get battery costs down and range up.

My Subaru cost me about $.18/mile for gas. The Leaf costs about $.02/mile for electricity. As far as environmental impact, our local electric utility (Portland General Electric) gets 25% of its power from coal, 28% from natural gas, 33% from hydro and other renewable sources and the rest from unspecified “other” sources. I would expect that the mix late at night would have a much larger percentage from renewable sources as natural gas is used to meet peak demand.

According to some mainstream sites, the total cost of ownership for such cars is approaching gasoline vehicles. This is mainly thanks to the ever increasing price of crude oil. 

I grew up in Germany, and worked at BMW at one point. Believe me, I can empathize with your gearhead reference, but in this context, perhaps it’s worth recalling that your fuel economy can be ridiculously low when driving in anger on a closed course.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmxUsGiGp3w 

May I suggest that we reserved these beautiful cars for weekends driving? Preferably on a race track. There are more sensible and economical alternatives for everyday use.

Oh, and one  more thing. Last time I looked at the overall efficiency of bio-diesel, I believe that it only delivered about 1% of sun power to the wheels. I could be wrong, but it appears to be more wasteful than solar arrays that can be put on rooftops. However, when picking between traditional diesel and bio-diesel, the choice is abundantly clear, and I’m glad this alternative exists.