That's desperately ignorant. The US government already does regulate essentially everything, and whatever it doesn't, the states or municipalities or your local fucking HOA does. The USA is massively authoritarian and has been for over a century.

It's less. Pay attention. Also, that is not a win. It means the poor are kept poor.

You want to make it illegal to give money to people? Congratulations, you just figured out how to make capitalism worse.

The $20M number was from an article circulated here. No clue how to find it today given how shit all the search engines are now.

Before Pocket existed I was using Scrapbook+ to store web pages as displayed. I am now using Singlefile because they destroyed the functionality Scrapbook+ used to access the filesystem. (It also gave a browser and a search for the stored pages.)

I got a perfectly serviceable ICEV used for $5k. It will do 80 mph all day and it gets 30 mpg. If you buy a used EV for $5k it won't work, and if it does, it will still need a new battery. I could spend $15k and get a really nice used ICEV and still have another $25k to spend on fuel before I got to the price of the EV. Someday when there are more used EVs around then maybe they will actually be cheaper for people for whom it matters.

You're literally wrong about everything.

Energy transport of liquid fuels is very expensive. It costs more than 5% while in the USA we lose less than 5% in transmission. Getting the potential energy to the wheels through an ICE means shit efficiency, under 25% and usually under 20% because peak efficiency is reached only in a very narrow range of speeds and loads. There is generally plenty of grid capacity available at night, and when you add a lot of vehicles you can do V2G for grid stabilization and it actually IMPROVES effective capacity. Batteries are highly recyclable and batteries are being recycled RIGHT NOW AS WE SPEAK.

You're a bat shit dipshit. If you actually have a Phd then I fucking weep for whatever school gave it to you.

"and picks your charging stops", I should have added. On long trips it optimizes to minimize charging time, which typically translates to 2-3 hours of driving, then a 20-minute stop, then 2-3 hours of driving, repeat. The charging stops tend to align pretty well with bio-break needs.

It's really not.

In practice what you do is you use the car's navigation system, and it tells you if you need to charge to get to your destination. About the only manual planning I do on road trips is to think about where we'll be for meals and override the automatic charger selection to pick chargers in those places, and check the icons on the charge station to make sure there's food nearby. This is a minor annoyance, far more than offset by the fact that when I'm not on a road trip I never have to go to gas stations at all, and pay no attention at all to my "fuel" level.

The best numbers I've been able to find put that number at about 25% of car owners. That is a large number of people, but it's not a good reason to hold up the EV transition. Such people will transition last, and only after public charging options are sufficient that they don't need charging at home (and after apartment complexes deploy charging infrastructure so more apartment-dwellers can charge at home).

Also, we need to help people understand all you really need for home charging is a standard 120V outlet from which you can safely run an extension cord to your car. L1 charging will add ~40 miles of range every night, so unless you drive more than ~280 miles per week (14,600 miles per year), L1 is enough. Access to some public charging is also required, to deal with exceptional circumstances, but it can be rare and used only for getting a 15-minute quick charge when the battery is low. L2 is nicer, of course, but it's not the minimum requirement most people think it is. L2 at home enables you to pretty much just forget about charging/fueling ever in your daily life. It's a significant improvement over having to deal with gas stations, so people want it... but it's not a necessity.

We need to avoid all-or-nothing thinking. It will likely be the case for quite some time that people with unusual requirements have to stick with fossil-fuel vehicles. If there are legal electrification requirements they need to have an exception process.

I actually don't think we need legal electrification requirements, myself. If we put a reasonable carbon tax on fossil fuels (calibrated based on our best assessment of the future cost of mitigating the warming that will be caused by burning the fuel) to internalize that externality and if we drop trade barriers that block the purchase of cheap EVs manufactured in China, the transition will happen on its own for purely economic reasons. It'll probably happen even without those steps, but they would make it happen a lot faster.

For that matter, I think we don't even need to impose the carbon taxes and tariffs, just pass them. Phase them in over a decade, so people know they're coming, and people will begin making the change even before they take effect.

So it's a plan with no drawbacks?

I do recognize that this is an issue for the disabled, but it's unsustainable for them as well, and I reject temporary solutions that aren't backed up by permanent ones. If the plan is only to kick the can and wish for a miracle, it's a bad plan.

That's not even wrong, it's just not how anything works. You're comparing a motor to an energy storage mechanism and also ignoring efficiency at the same time.

Monthly payments matter. Also when people are poor and can't afford big payments and the vehicles are very expensive then they wind up spending a lot in interest. TCO matters but so does monthly cost.

They have existed for decades. What did you actually mean to say?

No military of consequence is going to shift to purely electric vehicles any time soon because of refueling times alone, but in number of roles an EV has an advantage because it's quiet and reliable. If you can deliver a tanker truck, then you can deliver a generator.