It’s been said in this thread before, but I want to make it a little more clear.
The range of an electric car doesn’t matter much once it gets above 50 miles or so.
Let’s look at two drivers. One is a salesman who drives between several towns to make pitches, deliver products, etc. He drives a couple of hundred miles several times a week.
The other driver is someone who lives not far from work, and drives to get groceries, go out to eat, or make a trip to the mall. She drives about 10-30 miles per day.
Driver #1 will not buy an electric car. He isn’t going to pull into a roadside charging area and get his batteries changed or sit there plugging in. He’ll just buy a car that runs on gasoline, or whatever refueling system he likes.
Driver #2 might be better off electric. She can recharge at night, paying very low costs/mile, and she doesn’t need to worry about recharging the car during her trip to McDonalds. For her, the cost of taking Amtrak or renting a car is less than the savings of electric.
If we were planning on saying that only one type of power would be allowed for vehicles, then electric would be a poor choice. But we’ve never done this. you can buy electric cars now, you can get diesel, you can get gasoline, and you can get a host of other fuels, like propane and methanol.
In fact the ONLY question that needs to be considered as a policy matter is how many people are driver #2, and how many are driver #1. If there are enough driver #2s in the world, we are done. We can sell cars to those people and ignore the first driver.
For each driver, there are economic considerations, but they get to make those decisions on their own. Is the cost of gasoline worth the convenience? Is the performance adequate? Note that we already do this, which is why some people drive econoboxes and others drive Caddies.
Demanding that a single design makes sense for everyone is a false dichotomy; we don’t do that now, and haven’t ever done it. Gasoline cars can be a poor choice for a short range driver (I sold my cars and now use the bus). It’s just that gasoline is the only model we know so far.
The upshot of this is that we don’t need a big electric recharging infrastructure. No one (sane) is suggesting we replace all gasoline cars with electric. We already have a good power grid which will do fine for daily drivers charging at off-peak times. The same thing applies to e85 (but not hydrogen!). There’s absolutely no reason why we have to pick a single “best” technology now, when we never have before. There are at least 4 posters in this thread alone who would consider buying an electric car – it’s not as if they are relegated to some tiny niche that will never be profitable and it’s not as if we’re going to come take your Suburban away and force you to drive an electric eggbeater.
shrug