Will photons work? I think even the base model has something like a 17 inch screen built into the dash.
How far from home or an available electric plug are you, and what kind of battery technology does the car use? I’ve read accounts of old turn-of-the-20th century electrics where the driver would have the battery go completely dead, leave the car by the side of the road, and come back in in hour or so to limp it a short distance home on the small amount of recovered charge. This is very noticeable with lead-acid batteries - you may have had the experience of cranking a car starter until it was dead, and coming back an hour or two later able to get another few cranks out of it.
Are you near a downhill? Modern electric vehicles pick up a surprising amount of recharge from the regenerative breaking used in most of them. If I had an electric vehicle with a flat battery where it could be pushed a short distance to a long hill to coast down, I can imagine it might be worth a try. Somebody I hike with has a Leaf (75 mile range under optimum conditions). She has found that when she drives up into the hills with a full charge she will arrive at a trailhead with something like 15 miles left on the indicator. She gets back OK because the long downhill home puts a lot of miles back on the battery (personally, I wouldn’t regard her vehicle as suitable for these kind of trips, but that’s her business).
Hmm… 12 gallons x 30 mpg = 360 mile range.
GM and Tesla are reportedly working on $30,000 ev’s with a 200 mile range, to be introduced around 2017, article.
So we’ll get there… around 2022? Hard to guess, but it looks like it is coming.
I have no doubt, and I’ll be first in line if it happens. But not until it does. I can’t afford fantasy.
This is only a little bit related, but there’s also a cool hybrid EV/tricycle that you can now get for shorter commutes:
http://www.organictransit.com/
It’s basically a semi-enclosed electric bike with a solar panel attached. It has a 20-ish mile range, which might be enough if you live in the city or if you don’t mind also pedaling. Costs $5k.
In some areas you can also get street-legal golf carts or what’s called “neighborhood electric vehicles” or “low-speed electric vehicles”, usually meaning small carts that can go up to 20 or 25 MPH for around that same price point.
If you’re considering something like that, take a look at http://www.plugshare.com/ to find charging stations in your area.
I’m not breaking your chops or anything, but when it comes to cost we ought to factor in that evs will never be the cause of things like this.
That’s not completely fair, though. Electric vehicles can be cleaner, but they’re not perfect. They have significant environmental impacts of their own. All that power has to come from somewhere, and that usually means (in America, at least) we have to blow up mountains to mine for coal, destroy habitats for large hydro or solar installations, poison groundwater to frack for natural gas, or generate a lot of nuclear waste.
The potential exists for EVs to be much greener, but the reality isn’t usually as pretty (again, at least in this country, for various reasons). These dispersed effects might not be as obviously evil as an oil rig explosion, but they’re still very much there.
The vehicular greenwashing that started with the Prius continues to this day and it’ll keep going as long as consumers continue to believe they can simply buy their way out of pollution 
The bulk of most electrical production currently comes from two sources, coal and nukes. So if you are going to compare things like oil fires you leave yourself open to your opponents bringing up things like Fukushima.
Actually -
No interest in debating much here, but really at least keep some basic facts straight. And anyway, coal mining is the cause of more deaths and disasters than nuclear is anyway.
If you are to bring up Fukushima, one is obliged to point out Japan’s response, which includes a large increase in solar power generation. Globally, we are going to see a surge of solar (and to a lesser extent, wind) installations.
Anyway, ask our local experts: the Gulf spill was worse than the Fukushima disaster.
And for that matter, the oil infrastructure damage in that earthquake/tsunami was much greater than the nuclear infrastructure damage, too. I’m not sure why that gets completely ignored.
I was surprised Natural Gas electric generation was that high. Looking at Wikipedia, and at an old Wikipedia page, it’s been rising the past seven years, at least (although second after coal that whole time). Just because I have the figures handy:
2006 2009 2012
Coal 48.9% 44.9% 37%
Natural Gas 20.0% 23.4% 30%
Nuclear 19.3% 20.3% 19%
Hydro 7.1% 6.9% 7%
Fracking has made natural gas a lot cheaper than it used to be, and natural gas power plants are relatively easy to build, at a time when a lot of coal plants have been reaching retirement age and needing replacement.
Me too. I didn’t realize it had risen that much.
Here in northern states like Minnesota such vehicles have been available for decades. They are used by AAA & towing companies in winter, when you run your battery down to nothing when your car won’t start.
But you call one of these only when you don’t have a friend or just a helpful person nearby who can use jumper cables to start your car. (And nearly every other car in Minnesota carries a pair of jumper cables in winter.)
Such mobile charging vehicles for electric cars would probably need a larger generator than needed now just to recharge a lead-acid starting battery. and it would probably take longer – but presumably it will also command a higher fee, and so companies will provide the service.
That’s Tesla’s version of the story. It was a very cold day when the test drive occurred, and it’s no secret that EV batteries tend to handle cold weather rather poorly. The reporter couldn’t get the expected range out of the car because the cold weather was sapping the battery strength. Frankly, Tesla appears to have their head in the sand on this issue.
Cold weather defeats batteries. Can’t blame a company for the laws of nature. Maybe there’s a market for insulator kits, or external heaters. Lots of people in Colorado have a lightbulb on a long cord they use to keep engines warm on cold nights. Something like the blanket that goes on a hot water heater, but with an electric element you can plug in when home.
Or into the solar cell! Even on a cold day, the rooftop solar could be warming the battery! Hm…
If your goal is just to keep the battery warm, then the most cost-effective way to use solar power is to just paint the car black. Converting energy to heat is easier than falling off a log-- Don’t make it any more complicated than you need to.
Following that line of thought, wouldn’t it be better to have NG powered cars than Electric cars ? First you drop all that inefficiencies of producing and transporting power - and second you can refill the car in minutes than hours needed to recharge.