Thanks for those stats, Brickwalls, I always enjoy your devotion to facts, a welcome but rare aberration in so much public discussion.
The elephant in the room concerning electric vehicles (EVs), is not so much the availability of charging stations (the point that semi has made both previously and in his reply to your latest), but the depth of available power. It is always useful to consider prior adoption of new technology, so let's consider the rise of the internal combustion engine (ICE).
Mass production at an affordable price - that was the Model T Ford. Power? A burgeoning oil industry, with convenient energy bundled in liquid form that could be transported readily and comparatively safely, and therefore almost immediately available to the ICE. Had Henry slipped on a banana skin, had the oil supply been inadequate . . . all those components in the rise of the automobile had to be there.
Today, we have the new Model T (some call it the Tesla). We do not yet have that convenient electrical energy universally available, and in these posts we frequently extol the potential for AnteoTech's solutions. In all the exuberance about renewable energy, in all the hype that it is "free" when in fact the source is but one part of the total cost of its capture and dissemination, in those discussions the sheer amount of energy required to power an EV society is ignored. I have friends with EVs who happily plug in their car at home. If we were to wave a magic wand and swap all the city residents' ICE cars for EVs, not only the distribution infrastructure would fail, but so would the raw supply.
It is ironic that my friends plug into the clean green electricity supply, much of which is still powered by that "good old oil (and gas) industry". But that doesn't stop them being reassured they are doing something for the environment. And they are - don't get me wrong, I'm all for reducing the emissions of noxious gases and particulates, particularly in crowded cities. But my friends are still dependent on fossil fuels. Out of sight, out of mind. Meanwhile, some European countries are finding they have to restore coal-fired generation - ironic that Germany cut back its nuclear generation capability. The panic of Chicken Littles!
My point is that the brave new world of EVs has a few hurdles yet to overcome, and a fundamental one is providing the very substantial amount of power that is required for a society that replaces the ICE vehicle with the EV. Batteries are part of that mix, a critical part, but so is total supply.
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