Electric Cars are All the Rage ... but can our infrastructure support them?

All of the car companies, along with the news and governments seem to be infatuated with electric cars. I'm not sure that we've thought out all the issues if we move to predominantly or exclusively Electric cars. Many of my friends want and love the sound of a U.S. V8 or a Honda V6. I know much of my Baby Boomer car people feel that way. Those that ride rip the standard exhaust right off our Harley-Davidsons, often before they come home, for more sound and performance.

I know that the generations after me feel the same, they also rip and replace the exhausts on their EVO's and Honda's. While it's not my treasured V8 sound, they want a car that stirs their emotion.

I know the sound of a car is trivial compared to the world wasting its limited supply of fossil fuels and clean air so let's get into the more important issues.

A 250 mile range simply isn't enough. I can regularly do a 300 mile or more round trip for business. My companies home office for years was 4 and 1/2 hours away in Virginia and I drove there regularly. Many will say "you can recharge when you get there", but my company was very cost conscious. We often moved between hotels based on the rate and I would have been very difficult to find a place to recharge my car for the trip home. Can you imagine my trying to get a ground floor room to try and loop an extension cord out the window to my Tesla? I often do day trips to central Connecticut which would stretch the limit on any electric car.

I have a friend who drives straight through to Florida to see family. This trip is 3 or 4 times the range of an electric car. It may be a bit of a humble brag but I have an ex that lives off a bluff in NYS. I have to leave my car down at the out building and take a 4WD up the windy dirt road to her home. The rickety outbuilding is not charger equiped. Electric is spotty and leaving it open to charge my car overnight is not an option. 

I'm not terribly impressed when people all get moving towards the newest thing without working out the details. Are you old enough to remember the dot com boom? People were buying companies at multiples of 1000 times revenue when 13 times a companies profit is the norm. Companies were trading at 1000 or 10,000 times what it was truly worth. The real estate bubble was similar. I recall Bank of America stating after it burst "we'll never again give a mortgage to a person for a house that they can't afford". There are many times in our past when "everyone's doing it" drove major personal, financial, government and corporate decisions. I  think we're doing some of  that with Electrics.

Electric power has to be delivered to us from numerous generation stations and a complex delivery grid. Electricity doesn't store or travel very well. As it moves along electric lines, resistance converts electricity into wasted heat. If electricity is not used immediately, it needs to be stored in expensive and inefficient batteries. Electric is like Milk, it doesn't last very long or travel very well. Every local area has a dairy, and a power station. 

We've all experienced black outs. During Super Storm Sandy, there was such damage done to the infrastructure that we lost electric for roughly a week. If we were all dependent on electric cars, we'd have virtually no ability to go for more than a few hundred miles before we ran out of range. Yes fuel and Gasoline have their own distribution problems during storms and electric outages. You need electricity to pump fuel out of the ground. But that’s relatively easily addressed by gas generators to pump fuel from gas station tanks, fuel trucks, or local fuel storage in above ground gravity fed tanks.

War is a fact of life. When a force lands in a country, they bring stores of fuel. Its heavy and difficult to move armies, in addition to their ammunition, food and fuel. I wonder how we'd protect  a country with electric fighting vehicles. Fuel stores its energy in liquid form making it possible to go thousands of miles across oceans and lands by bringing the needed fuel along. And fueld can be resupplied from the elsewhere. How could we go into a foreign country with a fleet of electric vehicles? The relatively quick refill cycle of gasoline replaced by the long recharge time of batteries could keep Jeeps and
Humvees out of battles for critical hours. You can fill any number of fuel vehicles any time anywhere out of jerry cans while each electric vehicles requires a distribution system and a dedicated outlet or charger. And don't forget the difficulty that electricity must be used or stored virtually immediately. Would our military fleets remain gas/fuel while the consumer fleet went electric? Would the vehicles on the front lines need to stay gas and diesel based?

Have we considered if we have enough electricity to move the majority of the US automotive fleet to electric? We currently have brown outs in the urban suburbs and cities during hot summers. There are about 300 million cars in the United States. While they won't all become electric overnight, do we have enough electricity to have half the cars produced in the next 10 years be electric? To have half or 3/ 4 of the miles travelled in the next 10 or 15 or 20 years be powered by electricity? Clearly this will require an increased reliance on Nuclear energy. Nuclear electric cars and energy wil clean up our air, but will we have a problem safely disposing of the increased nuclear materials? Can we transmit all the increased energy required? Or will we need to provide some multiples of our current infrastructure to move the electricity from gernerator to users?

I truly think that Hybrids make much more sense than pure electrics and the very fact that people are pushing right past them to full electrics makes me all the more curious. Hybrid cars have fuel engines designed to power the wheels and or act as an electric generator. They can power a car on their own, but  the engines recharge the electric batteries and work with the electric motors to power the wheels. Hybrids have two big advantages over full electrics. They don't have any real limits, to their range. They are easily and quickly refilled at any gas station and with both a fuel and electric motor they can be quite fast. The downsides to a Hybrid is that with the engine/generator and battery being onboard Hybrids can be heavy. The engine leaves less room for batteries than a full electric and the interaction between the engine and the motor can lead to complicated computers to make them work smoothly together.

One way to compare gas hybrids and electrics is MGPe. We estimate how far a gas, hybrid and electric would go on a gallon of gas. The best electrics go about the equivalent of 110-115 miles per gallon. Typical Hybrids like the Honda Accord get about 50MPG. Plug in Hybrids, a newer and more expensive breed of Hybrids have more batteries. With more time running via electric than fuel these Plug in Hybrids can produces MPGe over 100 miles per equivalent gallon.

Electric prices aren't high compared to 

Large battery capacity hybrids seem to make the most sense for most people. They include a large amount of time running on more efficient electric power. As batteries get more efficient, you'll be able to have excellent electric range with go anywhere gas engine range. 

Its important to point out that as Hybrids, Plug in Hybrids and Electric cars increase the demand for electricity, the pricing and availability of electric vs gasoline and diesel is likely to change.

In all fairness, with free markets, we are free to use whatever technologies are available. But that doesn't change that we typically rush into new technologies based on the whims of the market. We all want to own whats hot. Often it works out. As we're dumping millions or billions into electric technology to meet the needs of the next century and our dwindling oil resources, we need to address the detail issues, cost, our broader infrastructure, portability, emergeny use, etc. And perhaps leave a few fuel powered vehicles for Baby Boomers for everyone to remember the wonderful sound of a Chevy V8.