O/T Frack me

[John2]

Whichever battery type, they still had to be charged up and a considerable amount (somewhere around 25% I believe) of that charging would achieve nothing more than lugging the battery around as they weighed over half a tonne. That's a lot of fossil fuel to be burned so that the drivers could feel worthy. That's the significance of the power to weight ratio.

Doesn't quite work like that, once you've got the momentum adding extra weight doesn't have as big an impact on the fuel economy as you might imagine, this is something I learned converting a campervan. A person who understands the physics explained it to me in more detail, but I can say that not far from doubling the weight of the van probably took the fuel economy from 39mpg to 33mpg.

It's hardly surprising that the car could only carry two people with no luggage. It's also no surprise that GM decided to, ahem, pull the plug on what could never have been a commercial success.

You ignore the fact that while the EV1 was a first generation experiment (with 270L of boot space as it happens), Toyota deemed it succesful enough to create a NIMH battery powered RAV4... and the only thing that stopped them selling it was getting sued by the oil company that owned the patents to NIMH battery technology. There was a waiting list of disappointed buyers.

There was nothing straw man in my post. I was making the point that electric vehicle technology doesn't meet the needs of anyone other than for a local commutes. Do electric car fetishists think we should all have two cars - one for short jaunts and one for longer trips? That would be good for the environment...

Since the majority of trips are local commutes, that's an incredibly huge market you casually dismiss. The rise of the electric car now there is a viable battery that hasn't been patent encumbered demonstrates this.

You've ironically managed to throw a straw man into that paragraph, I doubt electric car advocates are promoting 2 car households. These days car sharing clubs are growing hugely, I'd personally think a far better and probably cost effective solution would be renting a car for long journeys, though this is more accessible in cities where I'd guess many people are within 10 mins walk of a club car. Though batteries can be charged quickly enough (30 mins) and the infrastructure is widespread enough these days that long trips increasingly shouldn't be an issue.