We got better results by moving a lot of coal burning to natural gas, but the increased production and movement of that natural gas means we're spitting out a lot more waste Methane, now. And it's a way bigger effect greenhouse gas than CO2. Luckily it doesn't last as long.

You at least used to be able to pay that kind of money (well, $30k) for a professional setup with new stuff.

But even the new stuff is cheaper now, it's well documented, anticipates DIY, and is just a lot easier to do now, and used panels are available for insanely cheap prices.

A much cheaper DIY system can get you blackout protection and will pay for itself in less years than you might think. (If you're unlucky enough to be using PG&E, that's something like a 3-year payoff.)

Owning a modern car? Yes. They all track you and sell your data.

Owning an EV? Complete 180 on reality. Can you make your own gas? Can you get gas at anyone you visit? Gas cars are a ball and chain. They break more often. They catch fire WAY more often. They keep you paying for maintenance that EVs do not need.

I see other responses here assuming you mean charging infrastructure. Download ABRP ("A Better Route Planner") tell it you own some EV which catches your fancy and plot out any trip you like. The infrastructure is there. And wherever you go, you can plug the car into a standard plug and get 30+ miles overnight (most cars get more than that overnight on a 120v socket).

You can drive cross country in an EV and sleep at a rest stop or campground with heat or AC all night (which deals with all your moisture) and that doesn't seriously degrade your range. Your gas car means you need a hotel or idle your car all night, which is dangerous, or you wake up sopping in exhalation moisture.

Your EV means you can camp and have electricity at the same time. You can keep your fridge running during an extended blackout. Your seldom more than a few miles from a 120v outlet, so you can be grossly inconvenienced, but never truly stuck.

The problem is that people search for justifications for fear of change.

You're being made to spend more to get less, on gas cars, and your tax money goes to clean up the mess they make -- health care for asthma, tax breaks to powerful oil companies (this WAY, WAY dwarfs EV and solar and wind subsidies combined), and all that money you've spent on wars for oil.

And EVs are CHEAP. Price a used one on Car Gurus. EVs last longer than gas cars, and 4 year-old ones are fine cars, often sold at 25% of their original value.

Gas cars are what's screwing your freedom. Wake up.

No, you would not. A hidden gem is HIDDEN.

These things kick ICE delivery vans' butts. When you're delivering one heavy object, driving a good distance on a highway, the benefits are small (aside from more ability to pass and to see traffic around you, and possibly a smaller crew since getting cumbersome things on and off these is easier than on ICE vans). But in a city, when you need to move into a stream of traffic, EV vans are massively better than ICE. They a low, and have a flat floor, so each and every delivery goes faster, with less injuries and damaged packages. Loading goes faster, too. They can deliver earlier in the morning without annoying people because they are almost silent. Each move from stopped to going to the next delivery goes faster, since they start up fast and get moving quickly -- so they more deliveries you make per day the more benefit you get from the vehicle. Each turn or merge goes faster (way more pickup than an ICE van), so your benefits go up when you're delivering in a complex traffic situation.

Hell, these things don't pollute at all, so they can theoretically drive deep into a poorly-ventilated warehouse to deliver to item to a row-end. And you can park and use them inside an air-tight, heated/air-conditioned building, so HVAC costs go way down, and people can work comfortably.

But did you see one commercial for it? Did you see it front and center at dealerships? Did you see influencers on Youtube talking about how much they improved their businesses? NO. Because they HID this gem.

(By the way, the Rivian van is also amazing. I recommend you look at the numerous videos made by Amazon workers on Youtube talking about how nice they are and why. I presume Amazon and/or Rivian paid them to make the videos. They are NOT hiding their gem.)

The guys at GM are, arguably, idiots. They are definitely good at making a part cost less -- removing fastener counts, reducing casting complexity -- they have massive talent there. But they're design for use has always been terrible, as have most of their marketing decisions.

The BrightDrop vans were odd, because they were a really nice design. They were more fit-for-purpose than any delivery van ever made by GM.

I completely agree with you that the guys at GM didn't want to do it. How do you shave costs off a fuel pump when it doesn't need one?
The folks at GM got good at making electric motors and the associated cooling for them cheaper, but there are so many fewer parts in an EV they had a lot less they could work their magic on. And the power-train was all new. New threatens jobs.

And then they didn't market it successfully. Of course. Because yeah, they probably wanted it to fail.

Aside from lower fuel costs,
    which do not completely justify the price difference,
and lower maintenance costs and lost downtime
    which actually probably tip the scales to making them more cost-effective,
you have the fact that these are designed from the ground up for deliveries.
    They speed up your workers. They reduce accidents and injuries. They save you lost time warming up, and seconds each and every time you start the vehicle moving. They have way more start-from-stop torque and thus get you moving into traffic rather than having to wait for a large hole between other vehicles, each time you're trying to merge or cross or turn. Your workers are happier because they are quiet, comfortable, require less straining, climbing, and lifting. They don't need to be left running and auto lock-unlock so you don't have the theft problems you have with older cargo vans. In a battle of inches, delivering package after package, moving around a city, these SMASH the ICE equivalents.

The real problem here is lack of imagination, lack of education, and pure laziness. Why change to something new which will improve productivity, employee health, your standing in the community, and profits when "meh, we're doing just fine."

I am an aware of them because I read. I have also seen videos of the inside of them. And I have seen them on the street, here in Chicago, because I look at things around me.

I think you're suggesting that the whole US has it's head firmly planted in the sand, just like you. I worry you are correct.

If you don't have a garage, or
If you need to drive on the highway to get groceries, or
If you live alone, nevermind, this is not for you.

But if you have multiple people in the house, and get the car out of the garage to drive a mile or three for groceries, you are throwing money away if you don't own a cheap, used EV.

You can get one for $5k, but it's probably wiser to pay more like $9 to $12k for one. You can charge it from a 120v outlet -- it draws the same current as a $30 Walmart space heater. You will be paying less than 1/4 of what you pay per mile for a gas sedan, or 1/8th what you pay per mile for a truck. You can get that down even more if you charge at the right time, at least in some places. You'll never pay for oil changes or brake jobs, and you're ICE car/truck will last longer because you won't be doing short trips in it.

You are almost certainly going to like the EV. But if you don't you'll be able to say "yep, I have one, and here's why they suck." And even while you hate it, it's going to save you a lot of money.

There are no hidden costs here. Cheap used EVs get about 4 miles per KWH in neighborhood driving. They draw about 1.5kw into them on a 120v plug. So overnight, they're going to get a good 50+ miles, which is a lot more than a grocery store trip, or a couple of trips to school to pick up or drop off your kid. You don't need any special wiring, so long as your garage has remotely decent, purely residential electrical. Old cheap EVs all come with a 120v charger, so there's really nothing to buy. (If the previous owner LOST it, it's gonna cost you about $120 to buy a replacement.) Generally speaking, it's buy the car, get it some plates and liability insurance, and you're done.

Go cheap. In the low end, old EVs lose value very slowly. So there's very little risk here.

Everyone looks out their window and thinks that's "most of the planet."

Most of the planet thinks EVs are amazing, because they're cheap, require almost no maintenance, charge with solar panels, and take them the very short distances they currently travel more comfortably than the bus, motorbike, auto-rickshaw, or their feet. Most of the world doesn't drive right now. EVs are way more practical for them than gas cars.

And China is going to eat that whole market, because we're not in a position to compete at all. The closest the West has to competing with China is some EU automakers -- France and eastern Europe.

They have a lot to protect: GM, Ford, Exxon, Shell, and a bunch of military suppliers, and the money those folks contribute, so protecting them protects politicians jobs.

But I'd buy one or more of the cars you're talking about, too.

Yep. You can last some time doing that. You know best whether you want to store enough for 100 miles or 100,000.

But with solar panels, you can drive around for a lifetime. And they don't burn your house down or take up space in your bunker.

I have written a few comments here with multiple paragraphs, and included numbers, explained how things actually work, etc.

You summed it up in 3 (4? one's hypenated) words.

Nicely done.

"So getting a large user base in Japan is not going to happen." -- correct.

"The number of public chargers in Japan is fairly limited compared to the US." -- this is completely irrelevant. All you need for an EV is a 120v plug. With a 240v plug, you're completely set. People with EVs rarely use public chargers. People in Japan, who don't drive city to city (they have a great train network) and wouldn't need public chargers, ever.

Do you realize in the US the markup on electricity at public fast charger is like you paying between $30 and $60 per gallon of gas? (Based on Chicago electricity and gas pricing -- the range is wide because you can pay a fixed kwh cost, or go on a charge at night lower-cost plan.)

There's not going to be a big market for EVs because Japan doesn't have a huge number of personal garages. If you don't have a garage (or at least a parking area where you can run a power cord to your car) buying an EV is STUPID. It's brilliant for suburban people with garages. If you're in an apartment building where the owner either doesn't provide a plug, or provides one but puts a markup on the kilowatts, you're better off with a gas car. (Unless your workplace offers free charging, which thankfully is getting more common.)

The big area for EVs in Japan is delivery vehicles. Businesses will demand them, as they watch other businesses pay pennies on the dollar both per mile and on maintenance.

EVs are magic in places where people have single family homes (and thus garages or predictable parking by the house). They're amazing for farms. They're fantastic for fleets, where there's a central parking hub. They're perfect for last mile delivery. They can be OK f the government is somewhat socialist and mandates rules about electricity provision and cost. In dense urban settings with highly capitalist societies, they don't work and won't be seen much, until gas cars are considered dirty, expensive, archaic, and unsafe by society. There's a tipping point there. We're definitely not there yet.

It's possible they wouldn't be able to make money on EVs. It strikes me as a classic entrenched, old, calcified business problem. They say they can't make a profitable EV people want because they don't really want the market to change: they don't care what the customer wants, they want to make the same stuff they've been making because the executives are comfortable with that.

But whether that's true or not, they have slit their own throats. The US will be protectionist, at least for a while. Japan will be protectionist. But those are small markets compared to the rest of the world put together, and will seem incredibly small as wealth expands in all those areas of the world where China can sell cheap EVs which cost so much less per mile. Wealth will increase for the society, and the number of vehicles bought will increase in a snowball effect. The only place using gas cars will be the US and Japan, and both nations consumers are going to get really pissed that they're forced to spend way more on EVs which are crap compared to other countries' EVs, and forced to spend so much per mile because they're only really being sold gas cars, when the rest of the world drives for practically free in EVs.

Small EVs get more than 5 miles per kwh now. That's getting down to a penny per mile. And as renewables take over electrical production, the cost of a kwh is going to drop drastically after the initial capital expenditures -- Solar, once bought, just makes essentially free electricity, and that's happening everywhere.

Companies not working to make EVs cheaper and better will find they cannot sell gas cars, and yet will own a bunch of factories aimed at making gas cars which nobody wants to buy from them. They will have nothing of value. They'll go bust, and be laughed at for their shortsightedness, like we laugh about how Detroit could have bought Toyota out of their petty-cash budget, but just ignored them and continued to make huge, unreliable cars.

This is just the opposite of correct. When things break down, gas is hard to get. Solar means you can charge your car no matter what. You can always charge an EV with a gas generator, but you can't make gas when it's not being shipped around.