Re: Will it.....
Disrupt what my current vehicle does: Go over 350 miles on a single tank of gas (petrol). I can drive nonstop for over 5 hours (at speed!) in my big ugly SUV, going from the Pasadena, CA area to the San Francisco bay area (look on a map, ZIP code 91017 to 94040) with a single tank of fuel.
While those are good points, there are several electric vehicles on the market today that come close on each of those - or at least, "close enough".
Many people won't care if the range is "only" 200 miles rather than 350.
They won't care if they can't drive at 70mph for 5 hours non-stop - 3 hours (or less) would be "good enough", and anyway, how often on today's congested roads do you get the chance to drive at full chat for long periods?
The kicker that you omitted: refuel / recharge time. Your SUV can do all of the above, and then when its fuel tank is empty, it's maybe 5-10 minutes at most to fully refuel it. At any one of tens of thousands of gas stations nationwide.
In contrast, the most advanced EV charging system that I'm aware of right now is Tesla's Supercharger network. They take approx. 75 minutes to deliver a full charge; even an 80% "usable" charge takes 40 minutes. And there's only about 750 Supercharger locations world-wide. (h/t Wikipedia)
I suggest that every other aspect of EVs - range, appearance, cost, performance - is now a solved problem, or at least (that phrase again...) "close enough" for mass appeal. It's the speed of charging that is the issue now. There's some pretty fundamental physics problems that limit how quickly you can dump energy into a chemical power cell.
On the positive side, before everyone thinks I'm anti-EV... speed of recharging is only a concern if you're doing long-distance road trips. For Joe Average who commutes 50-100 miles a day, it's not a problem; plug in overnight.
While writing this I found myself taking a step back and realizing how far we've come in just a handful of years - it really wasn't long ago that electric cars were a laughing stock... "milk floats", "golf buggies", and so on. And now we're arguing about recharge time. Progress!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
