Why would anyone want one of these new fangled horseless carriages? Gasoline is hard to find and my horse can eat grass anywhere?--some guy in the 1890s.

Right now I think most EVs are playthings or status buys, but an EV that got 40-50 miles on a charge at a competitive price would get my notice. I'm an urban not suburban guy, so my needs are different.

You're guilty of the same overgeneralization that the enviros make, just in a different direction.

Umm, no. Electric cars have had over a century of research, and 40-50 mile range (and multi-hour recharge) is best they can do. It's a dead end.

let's use my travel to Dallas as an example. My hotel is 17 miles from work. Say I rented an EV. Riddle me this:

How do I charge it at the hotel when I return from work?

How do I drive it to my sister's house, which is another 30 mile round trip?

I really don't need the complexity of pondering a short tether on every trip I take.

the problems are manyfold:

electrical energy does not "come out of the wall" but needs to be produced (that's why the power plant operators and its supporting industry and their dependents are pushing EVs so much)

the power production creates pollution, greenhouse gas etc., the net balance is IMO questionable

yet there is the need to save oil as fuel today and replace it by something reasonable, whatever "soemthing reasonable" may mean. For me the most promising technologies are BTL (Bio-to-Liquid) and hydrogen. Any bio-fuek under the precondition that is not competing for resources (real estate, water, etc) for food production. The advantage of both hydrogen and BTL is that the investment in new technology and infrastructure would be much less than with EVs. Motors stay combustion motors and the gas stations stay gas stations.

Electricity may be an option if we switch to green production (no nuclear, no fossil fuel).

To make EVs an alternatvie we need batteries with more capacity and shorter loading cycles. There are people who claim they have this.

Plus an ubiquitious infrastructure to replace and load batteries. so you would load your battery wherever you park. If loading cycles cannot be reduced batteries would rather be replaced and reloaded in the "electrical gas station" than reloaded in the car.

The prices of all the batteries and the cars themselves will drop as soon as the production numbers increase.

The decrease the price companies like Nissan do not sell but rent the battery.

In short: we are in a transition phase where the old is clearly more powerfull but doomed to go. the replacement will probaly be drastically different and we will learn to live with it.

Apple Computer makes one. Seriously.

If you want "no nuclear, no fossil", then you want no power. Nothing else scales at the moment.