No one is, because no one needs to. Four big EV denier myths:

More electricity needed - debunked. Here's the link to the original Oak Ridge Nation Laboratory Report (currently down).

More global warming - not true. DOE estimates average of 1.3 lbs CO2 per kWh. Coal (the worst CO2 emitter) emits 2.1 lbs CO2 per kWh. Electric cars get between 4 and 10 miles per kWh. Worst case, that means 0.5 pounds of CO2 per mile. 1 gallon = 19.4 lbs of CO2. So, that's around 38 mpg CO2 emissions equivalent in the absolute worst case scenario. In the average case, we are looking at around 59.7 MPG. Diesel emits more CO2 than gasoline, by a factor of about 1.15. So, worst case is 43.7 MPG diesel, and average is 68.7 MPG diesel. These numbers are EPA testing of Tesla roadster and Rav4EV.

Rare lithium - peak lithium is a Li.

Toxic batteries - lithium-ion is largely non-toxic. Tesla was working on recycling before the cars even hit the streets. Lead acid (which is toxic) is 97% recycled.

I just got out of my 1987 hydrogen car. The hydrogen just got shipped from the far away middle east. How? By combining it with carbon and pumping the resulting liquid in to tanks in ships.

More like the "don't be evil bit".

It also depends on the emissions. SULEV standards reflect only Hydrocarbons, Nitrogen oxides, and Carbon monoxide. They don't reflect CO2, I.E. energy. There's no theoretical reason a gas Hummer could not be an SULEV or PZEV. I was talking about CO2 in this case. With wind you're cleaner than all of the above, obviously.

I agree with your post, but I have to warn you about Ultracaps. They are just too darned heavy (10X as heavy as lead acid) and there doesn't appear to be much room from progress.

Most electricity comes from stuff other than coal power, and none from oil. Electric cars, even on a coal grid, emit less than gas cars.

Actually, at least in Europe, most mining equipment is electric. But the costs of mining and manufacturing are much lower that the vehicle will save over its life.

This is not true, even with nasty old lead-acid. All those chemicals get recycled. 97% of lead acid batteries get recycled (the DIY EV builders are probably approaching 100% recycling rate). Tesla has already set up a system to recycle dead lithiums. There is not a lithium shortage, but all let others argue that one.

80% of all road transport could be electric powered if the cars are charged at night - no new powerplants required. The cynic in me expects electric companies to use cars as an excuse to raise rates even further.

Natural gas is good, but it still emits CO2.

Hydrogen has to be produced using natural gas, biofuels or electricity. In the case of natural gas and biofuels, this might make things more efficient overall by swapping engines for fuel cells. In the case of electric hydrogen production, this is worse than electric cars. Hydrogen cars in such a scenario would consume 3-4 times as much electricity per mile as electric cars, because fuel cells aren't very efficient. Biofuel production would have all the same problems as normal biofuel production - water, huge land area, etc. Hydrogen cars are also even more expensive - to build a hydrogen geo metro would cost about $100,000 right now. For that same price you could get a Tesla roadster, or build a high performance electric conversion

Mass transit is worse than electric cars. Right now, a japanese train consumes about 0.35 MJ/passenger-km = 156 watt-hours/passenger mile. A modded plugin prius from Google consumes 131.5 watt-hours/mile in city driving. A Tesla or Rav-4 consumes 250 watt-hours/mile down the highway. You should actually divide those numbers by 1.54, to produce passenger mile figures. In both cases, they are equal to or better than a train.

Two choices, pick one or both:
This experimental setup was so simple, even the president could understand it.
This experimental setup was so simple, even the former president could understand it.


Fixed that for em'.

BZZZT. Depends on the power source of the transit and the car. Gas/Diesel is virtually the same. Electric is always better than gas and diesel. But an electric car is better than an electric train.

In Soviet Russia, you fight a cyber war. In Corporate America, cyber war fights you!!!

No it isn't. It's really important, especially in a cheap package like this.

Who cares about detecting people? That's already been done. There's already some Kinect 3D model stuff. What I care about is SLAM and other robotics applications. We just went from $3000 dollar cameras to $150 dollar cameras.

False. The Kinect has hardware (ASIC's, IIRC) to do stereo vision, as well as an infrared textured light projector. This hardware does textured-light stereo, which is very computationally intensive task. You're getting RGB+D images for the computational price of reading from a webcam, instead the cost setting up a textured light projecter, reading two webcams and running stereo software. You also get a stable, well calibrated system, instead of what you'd get with building your own. It also costs $150 instead of $200, BTW.

The bottom of the oceans? Rich in seafood, unobtainium, nuclear fuels, and wave current power.

You also have to consider the number of people who take each system. Many, many, many more people are driving cars. What matters is fatalities per unit of transportation provided. That's what the chart compares. If we switched to trains, that fatality rate would arguably scale up to the same one death per day.

The closed tracks system is way better, but it remains to be seen if transit planners will choose it over light rail (which is sort of trendy right now).

However, I think cities are going to be abandoned - in fact passenger transportation in general is going to be dead. Why? Because of telepresence - starting with simply being there via a robot, and ending with being able to manipulate objects. First, we'll start to see telepresence for executives. Then for office workers (think about how many people drive 40 miles to shuffle paper). Eventually we'll have officeless companies. We'll also be performing "bail-outs" for robots. If we can make a robot that is say, 99% reliable but needs human help the other 1% percent of the time, then we could imagine a system where a human is called (via the internet) to help the robot out of its trap.

Under this scheme, I think many people will leave cities. We'll have people in middle of nowhere, Kansas living in mansions for half the price of rent in the cities. They might drive to Yellowstone on the weekends, but for the most part, they won't be going anywhere.

Check out this upgrade: wood power!

If you saw, in the GP, I linked to an article that pretty exhaustively calculated the excess cost of a car. It did not include the time or traffic jam problems, but those aren't really external to the car. Those are paid for by car drivers, apparently willingly, because they aren't up and leaving for New York or other transit dependent places.

We're doing apples to apples comparisons here. The way the energy consumption of these electric vehicles are rated is by measuring how much electricity flows out of the outlets and into the system, and dividing it by the total number of passenger miles provided by the system. The losses of batteries, chargers, centenary wires, etc. Now, electric cars won't work because of the range, but electric cars with short range and small generators (like the Chevy Volt or those Google Priuses) will work. This is really comparable to a transit system of 80% electric trains, 20% buses. The result is that the cars end up more efficient, even though they have to cope with chargers, battery packs, engines, and emissions control equipment.

Because the cars use less energy, it follows that the costs of wars and pollution are lower for the cars. They'll end up being zero when the modders finish up with all the alternative fuel conversions.

Safety, however. That's one that's real close. However, at least in US urban driving, the result is that trains end up more dangerous.

While it is unclear (to me at least) whether public transport or cars are better, one thing is heard loud and clear: the Japanese do transit best. The Japanese have the lowest car use in the G8, at 50% of passenger miles in cars (USA - 98%, UK - 85%). However, the Japanese don't pay all that much for gas. They pay around $4.24/gallon, which is a bit more, but not all that much more. When you take into account their greater energy efficiency, they probably end up paying the same. Why do they take transit, then? Because it doesn't suck.