Range anxiety is still an issue, but it is a known issue and not the focus of the discussion.
A bigger concern is will electric cars save us oil? I recently spoke with a friend who objected to electric cars because they do not save us oil or fossil fuel. When you take manufacturing, distribution and electric generation into account. Driving gasoline cars is still better deal.
Maybe today, but cars did not alway get 20 miles or more to the gallon. There are some exceptions of course. The modern automobile was refined over many decades. Electric vehicles will be no different. We are constantly reminded that there is no silver bullet for solving our transportation needs. Never mind the fact that making cars is fossil fuel intensive anyway. The argument against electric car is we expend to much fossil fuels to create and operate than a conventional gasoline car.
Even if the premise is true, electric cars have 2 main advantages overs conventional gasoline.
- Less moving parts — The whole paradigm of driving an electric car changes how we interact with transportation
- Home grown energy to power our transportation infrastructure.
The act of doing something makes us better at doing that endeavor. Today solar panels, nuclear power, wind energy, coal burn which we made great strides, and natural gas burning power generation will get better. The economics of generating power will demand it.
One example has been the energy efficiency gain from the Enphase solar panel micro inverter. The documented 21% increase in efficiency came from changing the inverter and no the solar panel. Panel’s will improve, but similar to any engineering project, the cost must be paid. The Roosevelt Administration used the TVA to help reduce the cost of electricity to the home. First adopters alway pay the high cost to get products to market. The first VCR was $!500 in 1979 dollars. By the end of there run, you could pick one up for $50.00. People say computers have gotten cheaper. Actually a top end computer cost the same today as it did 5-10 years ago. What has changed is what we call top end. !995 would have been Intel 486. Today it Dell workstation with Intel Xeon processor, SSD Drive, lots of RAM, high end graphics card, etc.