The Oil Drum

I suspect that if one were to rank order the number of trips - from shortest to longest, clustered in 5 or 10 mile increments - the average person (or the total motoring public in aggregate - it doesn't really make much difference which way you look at it) takes in a given time period (a year, say), you will very likely find that they take far more short trips than long trips.

Therefore, I think we need to just approach the whole problem differently. Instead of coming up with an EV that will work for both long and short trips, we need to be thinking in terms of providing people with small, inexpensive EVs that will just work for those short trips. Not everyone can walk or bike everywhere around their locality, all the time, and not everyone will be well served by mass transit for a long time to come, so we do need to at least be weaning them off of the habit of hopping into an SUV for a quick trip down to the post office or grocery store. For longer trips, unless someone is making such trips very often, it is going to have to make more sense for them to just rent a vehicle with the capacity to go long distances when they need it.

Now here's the thing. If we are talking about most people having small, inexpensive EVs with limited speed (maybe a little higher than the 25-35 mph that NEVs are limited to now, but certainly not much more than 55 mph) and limited range (maybe 25 miles or so), then that is less of a challenge than is coming up with EVs for everyone that can go several hundred miles at highway speeds. We just might be able to come up with enough materials for enough batteries for that.

As for the long-distance cars, I don't think that electric is the way to go with those at all. Probably some form of fueled, combustion-based engine is the better solution. Whether the fuel should be ethanol or biodiesel or methanol or methane or hydrogen is something we can debate, and probably will endlessly. But if you are only talking about a small fraction of the total vehicle population now on the road (with further decreases as more intercity passenger rail comes on line), then each of these options looks a lot better than they do when talking about using them for the entire motor car population.