I've never really understood the belief that we will just abandon suburbia entirely if there is any feasible alternative open to those who have their life savings sunk into it.

Electric cars are a feasible alternative, and thus their adoption seems inevitable to me.

In my day job I'm frequently in the position of proposing options for projects that aren't able to generate a good enough business case to get funded - and often have to settle for second-best alternatives that acknowledge dismal BAU reality.

That's life unfortunately - no one has an infinitely large amount of money and our starting point is what is out there today. Better place will make suburbia a better place if it succeeds - its not an enemy of Transport Oriented Development and the like - just an alternative which will be necessary for a lot of people - at least for the next couple of decades.

I expect that you are right Neil in that people won't abandon their homes in the suburbs. What they might junk is tripstothe mall, endless weekend sport trips for kids, road trip holidays, long commutes to far flung jobs, large scale home improvement projects, and generally all the other discretionary lifestyle car trips that can be avoided. Given that we are not going to run out of oil, there will still be fuel for ICE cars and probably plenty of them for the next 30-40 years. We can retain the existing vehicle fleet and use it much more efficiently for a lot less investment than this EV proposal. Doesn't it make much more sense to go down that road first? Getting traffic off the roads will assist with longevity of them and we may just find new ways to make suburbs more inhabitable so that people don't have to travel as much.

I don't know about you, but I live in a commuter suburb that is essentially abandoned on a daily basis and it's a weird palce to be on a weekday. I have developed a plan for my immediate neighbourhood which would transform the place into a workable self reliant village in a fairly short timeframe. I now believe that it won't be an oil shortage that kickstarts the plan but widespread unemployment in the next few years. The net effect will be the same. My neighbours and I will have a shortage of money to buy energy to transport us out of here each day so we going to be stuck here. In that situation nobody is going to have the money to even buy a bicycle let alone an EV. We do have plenty of cars though and there is still petrol to be bought and I expect that we will do a lot of car pooling for essential trips. We're going to have an awful lot of bloody good rolling stock that could be mothballed for decades and brought out one by one as we need them.

Not quite sure why think the market is going to just jump at EVs rather than evolve to less driving unless they are forced by some dictator? Thats the great thing about the free market: people are free to choose and once people realise that happy motoring is going to be increasingly expensive (or lame) they will make other choices in how they live. Even if EV's are an alternative, I still think that many people will start to rethink the whole commuter lifestyle.

I appreciate your right to advocate for this new and as yet unproven technology. But as Einstein said "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." I suggest that this fantasy of EV's is simply an extension of the thinking that has created the problems of a society completely dependent on cheap motoring. It is an attempt to treat the most obvious symptom of a much greater systemic disease and as such is doomed to ultimate failure.