Plug-in electric cars are the future.

...and you'd be pretty silly to buy a new gas only car today.

A car is essentially an expensive hunk of metal with a subscription fee measured in dollars per mile. Some of the initial expense can be regained by selling the car after some years of use. The average life-span of a car is between 10 and 15 years.

Now, when electric cars start to take off big, as is already happening, you'll be hard pressed to manage to sell a gas-only car used. It is an investment with a rapidly closing window of second-hand value.

The reason is simple, and that is the subscription fee. What you pay in gas and maintenance per mile of use.

First is the energy used. Gas vs electricity. Per mile, electricity is upto 80% cheaper per mile than than gas/diesel. With todays prices for gas. And as oil-resources become scarcer, prices for gas will only increase compared to electricity.

Secondly is maintenance. A car with an internal combustion engine, have hundreds of moving parts, all requiring lubrication in order not to grind to a halt. Which means a lot of wear and tear, and lots of servicing needs. Changing oil, oil-filters, spark-plugs, air-filters, piston rings, seals, various rubber hoses, cooling fluids, belts, fans and so on and so forth.

An electric cars' engine have _ONE_ moving part, that require very little in the form of lubrication. Nothing is more reliable than an electric engine.

The basic maintenance requirement of an electric car, are changing the tires once in a while... You don't even need to change brakes that often, because most of the braking is done by the engine in order to regenerate forward momentum into electricity. Everytime you brake in a gas car, you are essentially throwing away money.

The only (new) car option that makes any economical sense, is buying a plug-in electric car.

Further benefits include, not having to waste time visiting a gas station to fill up. It's much more eco-friendly no matter how you twist and turn it. And you reduce the deficit by lowering the demand for imported oil.

Oil more often than not, are imported from countries that are not exactly friendly or democratic. So in effect, going electric is doing ones own little bit for national security by increasing ones energy independence from foreign powers

 

Not true. Current and coming electric cars easily do 100 miles plus (The Tesla cars utilizing the latest in battery technology, do well over 200 miles) when fully charged. And considering that near all car usage (daily commute both ways plus ferrying kids hither and dither) per day is around 30 miles, then on a nightly charge at home, which cost next to nothing, your daily requirement with regards to range is more than met.

I'll grant that at the moment, doing roadtrips with an all-electric car is not very practical, but that is a matter of infrastructure. Once service-stations start installing some major juice outlets (think 480v @ 80+ amps) you can recharge your electric car to 70% of capacity in 20 minutes or less. Or about the time it takes to take a piss, buy a hot dog and a soft drink, plus that all-important cup of java before motoring on.

With better battery technology, range will increase significantly. The best battery-pack out there, the premium edition of the Tesla S, will do an advertised 300 miles.

 

Most new electric cars current and in the pipeline are indistinguishable from "normal" cars, except they do not have a tailpipe. And they come in all shapes and forms.

The Teslas are a good example, and this year Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Toyota, Honda and those crazy french are all releasing plug-in electrics, based on current chassis and body-work, and ofcourse some new innovative designs. All metal.

Electric car do not equal pimped out golf-cart. That image is an unfortunate legacy of the last generation of EVs. Wouldn't be caught dead in one of those oversized plastic toy-cars

And there is no way a gas fueled car by any means can be more eco-friendly than an electrical car. Even if the electricity comes from a coal-powerplant, the electric car still comes out ahead in the eco-budget.

edit: oh, and nowhere on earth, with a functioning electrical grid, is it cheaper to run a car off petrol or diesel than off electricity. And in California if I am not much mistaken, rates are cheaper at night anyways, and that is when typically you'd recharge an EV.

 

A few things, first performance testing a car is not the same as everyday use. If you put the pedal to the metal so to speak, you will get shorter range. Running off batteries, it isn't that different from testing a laptop. If playing Crysis on it, with screen brightness on full, the battery will last only a fraction of the time it would if only web-browsing with screen brightness on low.

Your average motorist do not race around a racetrack, but is rather limited by such mundane things as speed limits and beeing stuck in the ever annoying rush-traffic. Which by the way is a contradiction in terms. Rush traffic is not quite rushing along is it?!

Then the recharge example was a bit off. 240v @ 13 Amps? Your average Microwave use at least 8 Amps (1500W), and an electrical stove 14-15 Amps (3000W). Ofcourse, 13 Amps is OK for overnight recharging, but for saturating the battery fast, you need 63 Amps ++ at much higher voltage.

And last, the first and second generation Tesla Roadsters was little else but limited edition "beta-test" vehicles. There was bound to be some problems with it, problems to be solved, and since the airing of that TG episode, have been ironed out.

Wait till you see what those German engineers at Mercedes is about to spring onto the EV market... They got the budget to get things right from the get-go, that Tesla could only fantasize about in some very wet dreams during their upstart period.

Though that said, the Tesla S model, do look very promising.

By the logic that due to some initial flaws, the entire project should be written off, we'd never have computers today...Afterall, the first electronic computers, that worked off radio-tubes, was notoriously prone to breakdown.