Thxs for responding.  Yeah, truckers are not worried about fast acceleration like a TESLA sports car owner.  But the high torque levels of an electric motor is IDEAL when you are hauling 80,000 lbs of cement, watermelon, lumber, beer, or whatever, in a big rig.  Regenerative braking could be a big safety PLUS when these monsters have a long, steep downgrade ahead of them too.  Much better than the current system of having your air-brakes fail, then the trucker hoping and praying that somehow he can control the rig until he can hit the offroad gravel safety runaway at the bottom of the hill.

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az  Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

Thxs for responding.  Truckers feel ripped off if the big-rig they purchased doesn't last a million miles with a reasonable amount of repairs/rebuilds.  They want reliability and max uptime to earn income; there is not a lot more to be gained in further aerodynamic improvements when hauling large, bulky loads.  If truck PHEVs have lower lifetime operating costs, improved safety and uptime improvements, and vastly lower emissions over present day diesel rigs--some manufacturer will get rich by being the first to market these vehicles.

Truckers are log-book limited by Fed law on how many hours they can drive in a day.  I think tagteam truckers would gladly welcome one driver working the quiet electric drive while the other got silent, peaceful shuteye in the cabin bunk.  Cooling the drivers' cab is nothing compared to the A/C required to keep a forty foot long trailer of ice cream cold.

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az  Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

This is why ICE's are so ridiculous in principle!  We have been driven to this point by oil interest and parts manufacturers.  Imagine how different the world would be today if we stuck with the EV instead of the ICE...peak oil would be a completel non-problem.

EV cars have a couple of weak spots i.e. batteries and power electronics. I know people who have blown inverters on EV cars after only 5 years which cost a fortune ($5000). Plus you will always have the possibility of cell failure espcially with high cell counts (its just the law of statistical averages).

EVs are indeed 4 times as efficient as ICEs when you consider the total heat content of the energy fed into them.

As Wikipedia says, an EV uses 0.3 to 0.5 kwh per mile, while an ICE uses about 1.6 kwh.  In fact, they say: "The US fleet average of 23 miles per gallon of gasoline is equivalent to 1.58 kilowatt-hours per mile."

The article also says: "Electric vehicles typically cost between two and four cents per mile to operate, while gasoline-powered ICE vehicles currently cost about four to six times as much."

Let's investigate that.  At current average US electricity prices of $0.10/kwh and an energy requirement of .3 to .5 kwh per mile the cost comes out to $.03 to 0.05 per mile.  Close enough.

On the other side of the equation, ICE powered vehicles consume on average 1/23 of a gallon per mile. At current gas prices of $2.30/gallon that's about $0.10 per mile for fuel.  That's more than the EV, though not the 4-6x advantage claimed by the Wikipedia authors.  The energy cost of an average ICE is actually 2 to 3.3 times more than an EV.

Now, the extra maintenance required for an ICE (excluding tires) adds about $0.045 per mile.  An EV will be less than that, let's say half of that since it doesn't need engine oil.  So from this back of the envelope calculation an ICE has an operating cost of $0.145/mile, while an EV has a cost of $0.05 to $0.075 per mile. That's still a differential of 2 or 3 times.

So, I'm prepared to believe that an EV will require 1/2 to 1/3 the operating cost of an ICE (without factoring in tires, insurance, licensing, financing costs etc, all of which could be expected to be roughly similar).

So, if the USA now spends about 1 billion dollars per day on gasoline, I'd expect the energy for an an electric fleet of the same size doing the same amount of driving to cost 330 to 500 million dollars per day. That amount of money pays for 3.3 to 5.0 billion kwh of electricity at $0.10/kwh.  That's 3,300 to 5,000 Gwh. per day  The same or even a bit more than I've been claiming all along.

Generating 3,300 to 5000 Gwh of electricity over 12 hours (the off-peak cycle) requires the generation of 275 to 400 GW.  Just as I've been saying.  Givedn this, we will probably never replace all our gassers with electrics.  At some point transportation will become too expensive and driving habits will change instead.

Don't get me wrong, I think that EVs are useful vehicles.  They are significantly more efficient than ICE vehicles.  But their energy supply will be expensive to implement.  How expensive?  Let's say the EVs are at the high end of the efficiency range (0.3 Kwh/mile), and you can get 50% efficiency out of your generation and distribution system.  The required additional capacity is (275*2)=550 GW.  At a capital cost of $550,000 per megawatt this represents a capital cost in today's dollars of $300 billion.

Now this does not count transmission line upgrades or fleet replacement costs.  Here's where it gets expensive.  Let's ignore the transmission line upgrades.  Just changing the fleet (200 million vehicles at $20,000 per vehicle) adds 4 trillion dollars to the cost of the project.  Now, it's not quite that bad.  If you make the change over 20 years, you will spend 15 billion per year building new generating capacity, and 200 billion dollars per year replacing your fleet.  Toward the end of that period the excess fleet replacement cost will decline because the gassers would need replacing anyway.  Let's say the average fleet replacement cost is 135 billion per year, for an average total cost (fleet+generating capacity) of 150 billion dollars per year.

Is it doable?  Financially, yes.  The American GDP is 78 times that, and that rate of spending amounts to only about  94 additional days of extra debt per year at today's rate of $1.6 billion of new debt per day.  However, can you get the raw materials to build the plants, the fuel to power the plants, the raw materials to build the cars, and the willingness on the part of consumers and politicians to spend the money?  There lies the rub, and why IMO it is ridiculous to expect a electrification of more than 10% to 20% of the fleet over that 20 year time period.

Given what we now suspect about oil depletion rates, and given what I expect from human nature (i.e. we don't make changes until we can see the need staring us right in the face), the private automobile is likely to be a museum peice before EVs have penetrated the global market far enough to do us much good at all.

Alan Drake's promotion of electric rail, which has many times the efficiency of electric cars, makes much more sense from a global point of view.  In fact ity's the only transportation shift that makes any sense at all.  Electric cars are cool toys, but in the face of what's actually needed that's really all they are.

It's kind of like the conundrum of what to do when the local homeless wino askes you for a buck. The "kind" person gives the money and might encourage them to spend it on food, not wine. The "correct" person doesn't give the money because it fosters dependcy and instead gives them the business card of job bank.

Its not that the second person is bad, but that they have a different value system that leads them to a different conclusion. Same eith "the people in charge" they so strongly believe that the best way to run the world is for them to be powerful and wealthy, that they are unable to see the damage they do. This might be corruption, as you call it. And certainly someone new to this world would go through a series of value changes that we might call corruption. But to my eyes the problem is deeper (and worse), it is that the value systems that are prevalent in the world are what is corrupt, that are the problem.

Still think we are very far apart?

I prefer to restrain from pointing fingers, here and there but just think about it: in most cases the problem is just said and left to hang up in the air. There is little will to discuss its solutions, it is just assumed it will be hard to impossible.

We've had the technical skills and technological ability to build space colonies and mine the asteroids since the 1970's

The truth is that here on Earth, nobody needed and very few really desired to do that, given the resources it will take. Simple economics - if you are not willing to pay for a Ferrari, then you don't buy a Ferrari and then probably FIAT will not produce one for you. In contrast everyone I know wants, needs and is willing to pay for transportation, heating etc. etc. So there is a will, we know the ways, we just need to do it.

So, at least from me, know that when you see skepticism about the value of some technology, it is not the tech per se, it is the social and economic system we have that I am questioning.

Well, this is somehow aside from what we were talking about, but I am willing to generally agree with it - we do have a system which sucks in many ways. But, first we don't have anything better at hand and starting from scratch is hardly an option. Second, just like technology societies also evolve and I don't see why it can not happen/will not happen or it should be seen as a negative thing.