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Originally Posted by Oubaas
I don't think electric cars are going to make it. They're expensive.
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If you follow the thought "electric car = Tesla" then you are right.
They are unreasonable expensive, and with Musk at the helm Tesla is never going to make it.
Still here? Right, so you might want to read my experiences of driving a relatively small electric car for eight years now (and still going). My Renault ZOE with a 41 kWh accumulator (usually called battery) gives me a summer range of about 300 km (that's about 185 miles, for our friends with imperial measurements). In winter the range drops considerably, to about 220km (about 140 miles).
At a typical charging station charging from 0% to 80% takes a little more an hour, after that the charge is gradually reduced to protect the accumulator, just like in your mobile phone.
The range more than enough for my every day driving, by quite a margin. Longer trips are not much of a problem if there's just one charging stop necessary, in which case I have a break after two hours of driving, and going for a half hour walk is quite relaxing. It'll be worse with trips that require more than one charging stop - but I have yet to do one of those.
Of course I have to admit: even though I live in the least densely populated area of (former) West Germany driving distances here are much shorter than in the US, and I know that the ranges I mentioned are too short to cover the typical distances in the US, especially in the rural areas.
The limiting factors of the electric grids usually are not the local grids. It's either on the larger scale (the national grid, which the Bavarians stubbornly refuse to modernize) or on the smaller scale (the grid at your home, which might be too old to carry the loads).
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Why not pair a mini-reactor with the Cyclone Engine in automoobiles? Zero carbon cars.
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Well, Ford actually developed the concept of a nuclear powered car:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon
Didn't go far in the crazy 1950s
