I think you fail to realize where electric cars are on its technological trajectory. They're still in its infancy, and it's not like there's no more innovation to be had in battery technology etc.
Ofcourse it might get a success some day. Maybe we won't have to charge them because they all will have a small nuclear reactor.
My point is: a lot of people are still thinking 300 miles on one battery charge is not enough. And maybe this is true when you go on holiday or something. But most of the time people are fine driving an electric car from home to work and back.
They purchase the car for status, just like every other luxury product.
300 miles become irrelevant when you can recharge your car in 5-10 minutes, and that is where the technology is going.
The model S uses 85kWh to go 300 miles (at 55 mph, remember which is way slower than you'll go on the freeway in California). 10 minutes is 1/6 of an hour so:
85kWh * 6/h = 510kW. Do you really think we are going to have 1/2 MW charging cables? Obviously this is not going to happen with home charging. Can you think of a way of even getting 1/2MW to a commercial charging station in a populated area? What about on e.g. labor day when large numbers of people want demand. If 10 people want to do a 10 minute charge in the same city at the same time, thats 10MW, which is a lot of coal we are burning to supply that (or if you want green power, about 100 acres of photovoltaics)[1].
I'm all for electrics, but I know the power grid is going to need an overhaul if more than about 1/8 the population adopts them, and on top of that current trends indicate that most of the new capacity is going to come from coal plants, which largely negates the environmental advantages of electrics.
Cables are rated by the current they support, not by the power of the devices connected to it. A cable up to 10 Ampères supports 1100 watts on a 110V mains, or 2200W on a 220V mains. Quick charging on electric vehicles probably is done at high voltages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampacity
EDIT: you are right about home charging not possible. And to the sibling, the best storage systems for fast charging are http://en.wikipedia.org/w/Supercapacitor and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage
Now, everyone is perfectly happy with carrying their chargers around. Maybe in a few years, people would get used to the idea of planning for charging their cars.
that's because new mobile phones with crappy battery lives offer a lot more functionality than old mobile phones with much greater battery life. if this was the case with the electric car, then maybe yes, but i don't really see any significant benefits.
Of course the cars could hardly be any cheaper since they are built with new technology etc., but this still is just a prototype of sorts, electric cars won't become really commercial until either the recharge and price problems are solved or when the price of gas is so high that no one can afford it.
If you want a mass market car, you can get a Nissan Leaf for half the price. I agree that it's not for everyone, especially since the battery warranty is not as good as it should be.
You just change the service/self-service oil option with the self-service electric vehicle battery switching option.
tintin, what is the difference in the logic behind 'afraid of not getting home' with regards to combustion and electric motors? Both run out of juice at some stage, you just make sure it doesn't run out right.
Also I doubt our electrical infrastructure will support large-scale EV recharging. We have brown-outs and black-outs now in many urban areas during peak demand times. So we'd at least need "intelligent grid" capability to throttle or disable vehicle charging during peak demand hours.
Finally the whole issue of road tax is never discussed. This is a significant portion of the retail cost of gasoline. If/when large numbers of people switch to EV cars, we'll need a way to meter and tax the electricity for road maintenance, or find another way to fund that.
It's pretty clear that a large scale switch to electric would require us to upgrade the grid, make available metering solutions and add tax the electricity. It's not going to be easy, but it's not going to be impossible either. And the transition is likely to happen very gradually. 150 years ago people likely told the first auto makers the same thing: How are people going to buy your product when there it's so difficult to get fuel? The problem was solved piece by piece as the market demanded cars.
b) The batteries are shaped to the car[1]; standardizing batteries would require sacrificing car design (aka: goodbye back seat).
[1] From http://www.teslamotors.com/models/features#/battery "...integrating with the vehicle in the same way, providing structural, aerodynamic, and handling advantages."
[edit] Wikipedia claims this, but their reference no longer exists on Tesla Motor's website. Searching everywhere in the OP yields nothing about this.
Almost all of my car journeys are from Edinburgh to various random locations in the Scottish Highlands to go skiing/cycling/walking - usually from 200 to 400 miles for the round trip - often parking in fairly remote spots. I just don't see an electric car being a sensible choice for our family any time soon.
Right now that market is upper-class commuters, who mostly go < 50 miles round trip and would likely use it as a second (or third) car.
I could see a decent market for these things from people who live in the US in VA/MD and commute into and out of DC, for instance. It's not a long distance, but it's a very slow trip because of traffic, and there's a culture of status-symbol cars.
EDIT- Israel, Denmark, Australia and some US testing. Why is this downvoted? My point was a solution exists and is being implemented on a large scale.