But how? It’ll cost $25,000-33,000 and has a range of 100 miles. Here in southern California, for example, that’s just not enough. You can do 100 miles in a day running errands. This has always been a problem with EVs. The range is too short and the recharge time too long. While I hope we get lots of EVs on the road, somehow, some way, they will have to increase the range, or have parking lot recharging stations everywhere.
As with the Volt, they’re selling [impractical] expectations.
Great example of the problem being bigger than just the car.
The new Volt, at least, extends its range with a gasoline-powered generator. A 300 mile range begins to compete with a small sedan– my Saturn SL1 will go 400 miles on a (11 gal) tank of gas. At least the Volt will get you to your errands and home again! Throw some second-generation solar panels on for daytime driving, and you could probably drive it across the West without stopping.
The other side of the issue is that electricity today is not clean energy– it comes mostly from fossil fuel, especially coal. I haven’t seen efficiency statistics yet, but it’s hard to imagine that converting fossil fuel to heat, then to steam, then to motion, then to electricity, then back to motion, is any more effcient than turning fossil fuel directly into motion.
Charitably assuming both methods are about 20% efficient, electric cars are as clean as our renewable electric generating capacity, currently around 13%. That’s still pretty dirty.