Not in the US...

London does it. Every single cab in London is wheelchair accessible, which also makes them convenient for people with strollers and luggage. It doesn't raise the cost of the car by much at all and it is a lot cheaper than having a separate "Access-A-Ride" service to shuttle disabled people around at taxpayer expense.

Please be specific.

> Recharging in the same time as a gas refill is unlikely to ever happen.

Agreed, but only because it is unnecessary, not because it is impossible. A 15 minute recharge every 4 hours (250 miles) is about as good as anyone really needs.

> To go NY to Florida in an electric car will take on the order of 1MWh.

Tesla Model S goes 265 miles on 85 Kwh for 3 miles/kwh, so the trip from Orlando to NYC (~1000 miles) would take about 333kwh which is about $40 worth of power (nothing unsustainable about that for the occasional long trip). Break this up into one 15 minute recharge every 4 hours of driving (250 miles) leads us to a recharge power of 333 kW (with a battery sized ~85kWh). The existing Tesla superchargers are already outputting 90 kW, so we are not that far off from the "plenty good enough" point. No laws of physics need to be broken to output 4x that current.

> Now think of how many people are fuelling up at a gas station at any given moment, and think about it if they are all drawing a power of 12 megawatts.

The instantaneous draw is irrelevant because there are energy storage elements in the grid and at the charger (batteries, capacitors, etc) to smooth everything out to the average demand. The average demand is less than 40 miles per car per day, which is 15 kwH per car per day; and overwhelmingly people will choose to charge low and slow from their home outlets at night. There really aren't enough people driving 1000 miles in a day to generate a gigantic continuous supercharge demand on the grid. Pretty much every study that has been done on this has shown that the existing grid and generating facilities can easily keep up with increasing power demand from electric vehicles.

Computers still haven't supplanted books and computers have been around for a while--should we give up on those?

Are you suggesting that there should be a time limit on the maturation of a technology? beyond which we just give up? Doesn't that sound kinda stupid to you?

Qualified professional investors are limited in their ability to tackle big problems because they don't have enough money, they don't have enough time, or there is no way to hoard the results of a particular investment. Governments have lots of money, lots of time, and they don't care as much about hoarding the resulting benefit because their entire goal is to benefit society. Private investment gets trapped into local minimums and incrementalism.

I'll give you a few examples:

1. The railroad system (Pacific Railroad Act)
2. Morrill land-grant act for universities (Purdue, MIT, Cornell, etc.)
3. GI Bill of rights
4. Interstate highway system
5. The internet
6. NASA
etc., etc.

There are more examples here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-lazonick/nine-government-investmen_b_954185.html

Soon to be added to this list, 'Electric cars'.

I call bullshit on this: "open source software (Mach, BSD, GNU compiler) created by others, which he then promptly attempted to make proprietary and whose licenses he attempted to violate."

North Korea, really?

If you were in North Korea now you wouldn't have access to the internet or the ability to vote out the "totalitarian" regime every four years. You don't like the TSA, then get a bunch of people to agree with you and change the law. A democracy allows you to do that--you fucking idiot. It doesn't allow you to do that with absolutely no effort other than whining on an internet forum.

The superchargers are just for the occasional long trip or whatever. It's a very different world than with gas cars, where you don't have the option to "top off at home" each night.

Then shut up.

reviewed the car and verified the range, as has the EPA and the NY Times (a previous NY Times review got 300 miles). Motor Trend named it car of the year as did a number of other companies.

self-worth from their belief that "electric cars suck".

1. I can't feed my horseless carriage grass, it needs some special fuel that I can only get a special stations?
2. I can't breed my horseless carriage to make more horseless carriages.
3. It costs how much?!?!?

Why would anyone ever buy one of these things?!?

can fuel them with grass and they can procreate.

By the way:

Half an hour of supercharge gets you 150 miles. An hour would normally get you about 260 miles.

They are selling them faster than they can make them and it has received spectacular reviews from the automotive press--or at least any automotive press that hadn't already made up their minds that "electric cars suck". This is a car which is more than competitive within its segment (luxury sports sedan). It's just a matter of time until the technology becomes more affordable and trickles down into mass market segments.

It's absurd to claim that electric cars won't be practical until we have fusion reactors when they are clearly practical in some segments today.

You sound like the sad, pathetic curmudgeons who crap on any trans-formative new technology--I'm sure some jackass said the same things about "horseless carriages" at the time. Someday soon you will be just as wrong and just as irrelevant.